Would there be any real value in registering private users in Whois? How likely is it that the end user could provide assistance to whoever contacted them?

Finally we are getting to the heart of the question which is about administrative procedure, i.e. policies, not about technology. The technology specifies that a "network" should be assigned a /64 but this thing called a "network" may not be an Ethernet broadcast domain. Different people will do different things with devices and this will lead them to use different address allocation strategies. For instance, consider an RS-232 cable daisychained through a factory with modems to handle the signal strength amplification when the signal gets too strong. Imagine 10 devices attached to this daisy chained RS 232 cable which use IPv6 to communicate. One might consider this a network or one might not. Is this decision a public policy decision or not? It really depends on where one puts the boundary between the public domain of the RIR and the private domain of the end user. Where should this boundary be? Is the current definition of the boundary too fuzzy? Does the RIR database contain more detail than it should because of the fuzziness of this boundary? Is the current definition of the boundary too tightly aligned with the 1990's world of ISPs and end users where ISPs use PDH and SDH networks while end users use Ethernet? What should go in the RIR database? What should stay out of the database because it is nobody else's business? --Michael Dillon