Nigel, thanks for your words, espacially for your point 2. However, your point 1 should be refined <div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"> 1. As far as I can see there are no fiscal issues here apart from the usual issue of more PI's meaning more NCC work meaning more staff (potentially) and hence more costs. </blockquote><div> The potential cost of applying more staff at the RIRs like RIPE NCC is just one issue. The more important issue is that� all the line cards of the core routers should be replaced if we can not limit the grows of the forwarding tables (FIB)s. AND IPv4 address space trading allready might create problems concerning the grows. A total upgrade beed a couple of billon dollars. Unfortunately even if this many could be spent, the slow down provoked by the bigger table size could not be avoided. Therefore if we want to avoid total collaps or total up-grade and slow down in the very near future then all the FIBs grows should be minimised. Any proposal that might provoke a sudden grows of the FIBs should be postponed until the technology would evolve enough and allow to handle fast enough tha definitely larger FIBs. </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> 2. Speaking as an engineer, if you are too small to want PA space then you are small enough to renumber if you move provider. It's not really an issue these days (at least compared with the old days when /etc/hosts had to be updated on every machine in your network). And consuming a fib slot just to save yourself a bit of pain should you want to move provider strikes me as selfish. However, I'm an official old fart, and am probably harking back to an internet that no longer exists. I leave it up to the community to decide whether this is a constructive contribution or not. Nigel PS And thanks, David, for your very kind comments on the board. </blockquote><div> Best, G�za </div> </div>