[db-wg] WHOIS Referrals for transferred number resources

I have been writing a modest little software tool recently that seeks to
ferret out the identity of the "top level" registrant organization for
any given assigned IPv4 address.  In this context by "top level" I mean
the entity that obtained the relevant IP address assignment directly,
either from one of the five regional Internet registries or else from
some subserviant national Internet registry.

This softare tool always starts by querying whois.iana.org in order to
obtain a first-order referral to one of the WHOIS servers belonging to
of the five regional Internet registries... usually and often the correct
one that actually holds the desired information.

Due to various inter-region transfers that have taken place over time
however, the first-order referral given by whois.iana.org is often simply
wrong, and it is really some other WHOIS server of some other one of
the five regional Internet registries that actually contains the
information sought.

Conveniently, in the case of the ARIN WHOIS server and the APNIC WHOIS
server, even in those cases where these respective WHOIS servers do not
contain the data sought, e.g. due to some inter-region transfer, these
WHOIS servers are at least helpful enough to provide in their responses
explict referrals to the proper regional Internet registry WHOIS server
where the desired data can in fact be obtained.

I would like to request that NCC staff administering the RIPE WHOIS data
base likewise incoroprate some such helpful explicit referral text into
the WHOIS responses for all number resources where whois.iana.org believes
that the resources are under the administration of RIPE, but where in fact
the number resources in question have been transferred to some different
region.

During the early testing of my small software tool I have already encountered
a number of such cases.  In each of these cases I had to sort out the problem
by hand -- I had to ferret out the correct RIR WHOIS server by other means,
the responses from whois.ripe.net being of no help whatsoever in this regard,
and I then had to program in some "manual overide" work-arounds in my code
in order to deal with these cases:

51.79.0.0/16
51.81.0.0/16
51.161.0.0/16
51.162.0.0/17
51.222.0.0/16
151.101.0.0/16
151.139.0.0/16
151.164.0.0/16
151.190.0.0/16
185.105.7.0/24
185.150.189.0/24
185.150.190.0/23
185.171.208.0/22
194.204.192.0/18

I have some faith and hope that the community, the members, and the staff
of the RIPE region will wish to be at least as helpful with repect to
this WHOIS referral issue as their North American and Asia/Pacific
counterparts.

Given the expected increases in inter-regional transfers it seems that the
time is... well... ripe, to address this small but consequential issue
within the data base.


Regards,
rfg