Nick,
Last time I looked, the RIPE NCC service region contained about a billion people, and there were 28000 PI blocks. This doesn't scale. Let's automate it and get a cheaper RIPE NCC which isn't spending money answering stupid questions which can just as easily be answered by a computer.
I certainly hope that not all 28k end-users forget who sponsored their PI... Anyway, I accept your argument but the price of setting up the LIR as an easy, automatic target for attacks against the end-user is too high for me and so I still oppose the proposal.
Knowing which organisation you're going to be dealing with in advance will cut down significantly on time and general overhead when dealing with transfers. I.e. you can make prior contact with the remote LIR and have stuff arranged in advance and things will go smoothly.
That's almost another argument against the proposal, as another unintended consequence could be the poisoning of relations between LIRs in such cases... (FWIW, I myself don't care if a PI user moves away, the 50 Euro are really not worth the hassle, in fact if this proposal passes I'm going to recommend the cancellation of all PI contracts. YMMV, though)
Again: this proposal is about making life easy and better and more consistent with the existing policies which we use. Manual intervention is a pain and inconsistent with this improvement.
It will make life easier for a variety of good and evil entities, I can't see what advantage a LIR could have out of it, though. rgds, Sascha