Dear Mark, as you know the RIPE community has a long standing concern about the consistency of the information available from the InterNIC whois service and the RIPE NCC whois service. The information describing European entities in the RIPE database is consistently found to be more up-to-date than data registered at the InterNIC. Both the InterNIC and the RIPE NCC have been trying to get the exchange of information to work for more than three years with little success due to lack of resources on both sides. At the same time we observe an increasing number of instances where data about European entities obtained to the InterNIC whois service is causing confusion and delays in Internet trouble shooting. Some of this is due to new and relatively unexperienced NOC staff in many places. Today it becomes extremely important that people are referred to the correct information. The RIPE local-IR working group has discussed this problem at its recent meeting in Berlin. Since making our databases consistent has not worked despite our long standing intentions, the RIPE community now asks you to remove data describing European entities from the InterNIC database as soon as possible. The InterNIC whois server should not return data and contact info about these. Most importantly this concerns address space information of 192.162.0.0 - 192.162.255.255 192.164.0.0 - 192.168.255.255 193.0.0.0 - 195.255.255.255 and AS number information of 1877 - 1901 2043 2047 2107 - 2136 2585 - 2614 2773 - 2822 2830 - 2879 3154 - 3353 5377 - 5631 If possible the InterNIC whois server should return a text pointing to whois.ripe.net if these objects are queried. It should never return more specific data. Could you please inform us when this will be implemented. We hope that you understand the importance of this to the smooth operation of the Internet as a whole. This request is not intended as a critique on the InterNIC's services or staff. It is just a logical consequence of the existence of multiple regional Internet registries and the difficulties in creating a globally synchronised database. I hope that after all we will succeed in achieveing such a global database, but until then we have to take measures to prevent confusion. Thank you in advance for your help with this issue. Daniel