Peter, Erik, The main reason for this policy proposal is to ensure transparency throughout the RIR-LIR-End User chain - one of the core principles of the RIPE community. It's a core principle because transparency creates the conditions where trust can arise, and the RIPE community requires trust to function. Conversely, lack of transparency creates an environment where people are left wondering, and this engenders mistrust. We need trust because we are asking a bureaucracy (the RIPE NCC) to manage a monopoly (number resources), and we know from overwhelming third party experience that enforcement of transparency is one of the only ways to ensure that a bureaucracy a) maintains the trust of its constituents and b) is forced and is seen to act in a way which is consistent with its own principals. We have very good transparency on what address space is assigned or allocated to whom (all of which provides information on existing contractual relationships) and the RIPE community agrees that this is a good thing. Not only do we have it, but we also agree as a community that this is valuable enough that we ask the RIPE NCC to conduct periodic audits to ensure that the data is accurate - without which the transparency would be useless. We already have the precedent to tell us that transparency is the right thing to do as a policy objective because we implicitly have this information for every other resource allocation type. This policy is an acknowledgement of this position. Nick