Well, the 'significant additional functionality' is your opinion. Customers seem to think otherwise, and an ISP has to contiuously make decisions balancing both RIPE's needs as the customers needs. And not always does the balance work in RIPE's favour (most of the time it does :). Although im totally in favour of trying to preserve ip space, in this case I really believe it is not as significant as it is portrayed to be. Not as long as it stays within 1 or 2 Class C nets.
I would put it even more stongly. RIPE is there to do a jobs, which is being a registry. Please will a RIPE rep. show me where it says that they have legal and/or moral responsibility to dictate how a company does business ? These virtual web sites are one IP address per company. Should we be asking the RIPE to give a class C to each of these comanies and then use one for the WWW server ? This is as an alternative to allowing companies that sell the virtual space to using their address space much more efficiently. Regards, -- Peter Galbavy peter@demon.net @ Demon Internet phone://44/181/371_3700 http://www.wonderland.org/~peter/ snail://UK/N3_1TT/London/42_Hendon_Lane/Demon_Internet_Ltd/