an important part of the rirs' job is information/education. trying to pretend that nats don't exist is not realistic. trying to explain the trade-off would be useful. the hard part would be doing so usefully without getting into a document mire.
I disagree. The RIRs jobs (certainly in the case of RIPE) should be the (fair) management of those resources they are responsible for - IPs and ASes etc.
Information / Education should be functions iff they do not impact on the primary function and are acheived at close to zero cost - i.e. self funding.
an amazingly naive view of what actually happens at a rir. if that was anything like the case, all that would be needed would be a web form or two. the fact is that each of the N thousand applicants had to be walked through it all. and then, when a new employee came in at the LIR, it had to all happen again. there is a reason hostmasters burn out, and it ain't from pushing "accept the web form" buttons. randy