Dear working group, The RIPE databse provides a mntner object which can be used to create route objects for IP ranges which are not allocated or assigned through the RIPE NCC. http://www.ripe.net/data-tools/db/faq/faq-db/how-to-create-a-route-object-wh... I did some digging to understand how the RIPE-NCC-RPSL-MNT mntner object is used in practise. You can fetch the dataset through this command: $ whois -h whois.ripe.net -- '-K -i mnt-by RIPE-NCC-RPSL-MNT' Usage exceeded my expectations: (object type: occurances) route: 12195 route6: 77 And much to my suprise I found that there are all kinds of objects which reference RIPE-NCC-RPSL-MNT with an "mnt-by:" attribute: aut-num: 341 mntner: 51 as-set: 37 person: 40 route-set: 33 organisation: 5 rtr-set: 1 inet-rtr: 1 key-cert: 1 Would it be an idea to prevent objects from being updated/created when they carry a "mnt-by: RIPE-NCC-RPSL-MNT" attribute? Secondly, should RIPE NCC proactively remove all "mnt-by: RIPE-NCC-RPSL-MNT" references from the database? Kind regards, Job