Hi,

Time to drop something which is only used by 4 people

It is not only used by 4 people, it's used by 4 *services*. Basically the proxy service is the feature that a few services (those 4) can add a field to the request that specifies that they query the database on behalf of an end-user and they provide that end-user's IP address in the request so that the RIPE Whois server can apply rate limits to that end-user. To give an example: one of them is at http://www.geektools.com/whois.php.

some of whom aren't even members

The RIPE NCC has a responsibility for all internet users, not only its own members...

It's already bad enough with a-n-other-supplier going down your ripe AS membership list trying to flog cr@p to your clients, when said supplier is an LIR, having every nut on the planet doing so is going to get very very very tiresome and simply lead to people not putting anything in the RIPE-DB in the first place (as most have already decided)

The whole point of providing the on-behalf-of parameter in the query is to be able to avoid people harvesting the RIPE DB by applying rate limits... The only 'risk' is that the service providers would send in queries with fake client addresses to bypass the rate limits. That is the reason why people suggest letting them sign a contract. And since there are only a few users it's easy to kick them off when they would abuse the proxy feature. So removing the proxy feature (remember: just one query option to facilitate rate limiting) doesn't make any difference for what you describe... Cheers, Sander