After some discussion with the InterNIC we have concluded that a worldwide handle space is not realistic. In fact Australia has already started with their own space.
As has Japan and I believe Korea. APNIC will most likely be allocating handles as well in the relatively near future.
Therefore we propose to start issuing RIPE handles as soon as technically feasible. Person handles will then be of the form
XYZ123-INIC ABC457-RIPE ....
While I agree that some method needs to be devised to avoid NIC handle collisions, I really don't like the implicit knowledge required in using names in this format. As an example, given DC001JP-JPNIC where would you go to find information about DC001JP if you didn't know JPNIC's whois server was at nic.ad.jp? As the number of registries that are allocating NIC handles increases, I feel adding another magic string isn't going to scale very well. Instead of using a magic string, why not simply put the domain name of the issuing registry or add a 'nic-hdl-source' field to the database?
Each physical person will eventually have one such handle only in order to facilitate database exchanges between NICs and database maintenance.
This is sort of off the subject, but the above sentence implies some strong global coordination between all NICs that issue NIC handles. What efforts are underway to involve NICs other than RIPE and InterNIC is this coordination? Thanks, -drc