- either to further delegate the creation of Internet handles to local registries, in particular to national registries (registry of last resort is the actual name?) To what purpose? What advantage would there be in having to go to a "regional" registry instead of the central RIPE registry? It would probably only add delay. Note that the object we're talking about (Person entries) is linked to several objects (networks, domains, whatever) that are all in the RIPE database. So whereas e.g. a domain or a network number can be registered/assigned uniquely by a "regional" registry, a "binding tag" (which the RIPE handle in fact is) should be assigned by the central body, i.e. RIPE. Otherwise the registration of handles would have to be split up even further, with domain registrars, networks registrars, AS registrars, etc. all assigning their own unique handle, which within seconds would lead to conflicts. - or to differentiate the database management software when it treats actual RIPE database or local registry database. What is "actual RIPE database"? Lots of the info therein is coming from local registries, in whatever format the latter maintain their info/database. This is needed because local registries often use the RIPE-NCC database software package. I fail to see what this has to do with the case. And I don't even know whether your statement is correct: some registries may maintain their database in a "RIPE-like" format without using the RIPE-NCC database software package. Otherwise local registries have two choises: 1- use (develop?) another database software 2- define some trick to postpone the actual registration of a person entry in their local database after they have received the new RIPE handle from RIPE-NCC True, but this looks inevitable to me and it won't be solved by delegating the handle registration to "regional" registries, given the correlation with other objects, as mentioned above. I think it would be easier and better to define other suffixes which could be used (and accepted by the software). The local registry then simply send person entries which already contain unique handles to the NCC. See above: a local registry may generate unique handles, but they don't serve the purpose of uniqueness in the context where that uniqueness is required. Piet