On Thu, 23 Oct 2003, Brian Densmore wrote:

> > with a whois address@whois.ripe.net. I think there's
> > one for Asia as well, but I can't remember it.
> Asia-Pacific whois
> whois.apnic.net

There is also LACNIC (Latin America).  IANA is responsible for
distributing IPv4 and v6 address blocks to each of the four regional
registries :APNIC (Asia/Pacific), ARIN (North America, Southern Africa),
LACNIC (Latin America) and RIPE (Europe, Middle East, Northern Africa,
Central Asia):

    http://www.iana.org/ipaddress/ip-addresses.htm

The regional registries then distribute address blocks to large ISPs and
smaller registries, which eventually make their way to you.  

BTW, for anyone that still believes there's an IPv4 address shortage,
check out how many /8s are still marked reserved:

    http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space

This doesn't count the blocks that the regional registries, large ISPs,
etc. are keeping in reserve.