To be clear: IANA and RIRs allocate or assign address space today, they don't control any routing on the Internet (and their own internal ASNs and IPs don't count).
And that gets to the heart of the issue that I raised. Since the RIRs allocate ASnums and IP address blocks, they are in a position to validate who has the right to use the numbers. And if you want to validate who has the right to announce a specific address prefix, you really want to start by determining who owns the prefix, and then go to them and find out what rights they have delegated. This puts the RIRs at the root of the validation chain. Although you could attempt to build the rest of the system, without formal validation by the RIRs, you still have holes that you can drive a truck through. That is the experience of projects like IRR/RADB etc. Rather than rushing off and hacking up some code, is it possible for a group of network operators to meet formally, in some venue or other, and set out the requirements for such a system and the architecture of such a system? --Michael Dillon