Dear colleagues, as you certainly know the amount of class B Internet numbers available for allocation has run quite low. Before this had become a concern European organisations have been allocated substantial blocks of class B network numbers by "the" NIC either for their own use or for reassignment to other organisations. In the meantime the RIPE NCC has taken up the role of European regional Internet registry. In the first half year of operation we have allocated 61 class B networks to European organisations that meet the criteria established by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). In order to ensure fair distribution of the unused class B address space to the Internet community we ask any organisation in Europe holding unused class B numbers to return them to us. We have consulted IANA on this and it has been agreed that all numbers returned in this manner will be retained by the RIPE NCC for re-assignemt to European organisations. Thus Europe as a whole will not "loose" any address space. The NCC will publish a list of all organisations returning numbers each quarter. Also we encourage all organisations currently using class B network numbers for networks with a few 10s of hosts to consider exchanging their class B number for a class C number as a service to the community. Even before this announcement we have already received 7 class B addresses from Deutsches Forschungsnetz (DFN) and one from an individual organisation. We thank them and hope that many of you will follow their example. Daniel Karrenberg RIPE NCC Manager