Hi Leo,

Good to hear from you, and a fair challenge.

You are right that for many holders IPAM-to-RIPE synchronisation is the right answer, and nothing in this proposal takes that path away. The referral is for the cases where sync stops working well, and I think those cases are becoming more common:

1. Update rate. Our assignments are created and retired programmatically, some of them living minutes. Syncing that into the central database means a high-frequency stream of writes for objects that may be gone before the next consumer ever reads them, and there is always a staleness window between what the IPAM knows and what the database serves. A referral serves the live answer at read time instead of pushing state at write time.

2. Community cost. Every synced assignment is an object the NCC stores, indexes and serves for everyone. AGGREGATED-BY-LIR exists precisely because the community preferred not to carry every assignment centrally. The referral keeps that lean default and adds only a pointer to where the detail lives.

3. Expressiveness. The holder's RDAP can carry per-assignment detail that does not map cleanly onto inetnum attributes (richer entities, operational metadata, extensions). Central sync caps the published data at what the central schema can express.

On the cost point, I agree nobody should build infrastructure just for this. A holder operating at this scale already runs the authoritative source, and an RDAP view over an IPAM is a thin read-only front end. Once regext standardises the redirect I would expect IPAM products to grow it as a feature, rather than each holder building something bespoke. And because it is opt-in on both sides, holders for whom sync is cheaper simply keep syncing; nothing is taken away from them.

So: sync where it fits, referral where the data moves faster than sync can follow. The proposal only adds the second option.

All the best,
Kaveh