Jon,
So ARIN can spend about one /19 registration fee on a server to send over to one of the other registries, and can run a mirror server at that remote location.
Why put it at a another registry? Why not put it off an exchange? Or why not allow ARIN members to mirror the database? I'm sure NSI would love to sell the software... (:-)).
Maybe I'm missing something...it just doesn't seem like rocket science to me.
I guess it is a question of usability (as Randy pointed out). I personally think the fact that people have to know what prefixes have been allocated to whom before they can find out what prefixes have been allocated to whom is _really_ broken. It used to not matter too much (other than the aesthetic unpleasantness of it all), but given the increase of spam and the use of the registry database "system" to figure out who to scream at, the fact that the registry database "system" sucks is beginning to matter more and more. Yes, this is a different issue than merely mirroring a single registry's database. Regards, -drc