Documenting rules for the Private Enterprise Numbers registry: draft-liang-iana-pen-00

Hi,
Benoit suggested that I post this email message here.

draft-liang-iana-pen is trying to formalize and document rules for the 
Private Enterprise Numbers registry 
<http://www.iana.org/assignments/enterprise-numbers>. In particular the 
purpose of this document is to document
a) what is allowed to be registered (what characters should be allowed 
in an Enterprise name, what is an Enterprise)
b) under what conditions an entry can be changed and what kind of 
documentation is required.

The document is being worked on by IANA (Pearl with some help from 
Michelle), I was asked to help out. While the document is mostly 
documenting existing practice, it is also trying to specify some rules 
about how the registry is to be operated, because certain (most?) things 
were never written down.

Pearl and I will appreciate reviews and feedback on the document. One of 
the major issues is currently outstanding is "what is considered to be 
an Enterprise?". While Universities and non profit organizations are 
considered Enterprises, it is not very clear whether different 
departments of a University, or subsidiaries of the same bank in 
different countries are considered to be different enterprises or not. A 
more difficult case is whether to allow different products from the same 
vendor to be allocated different PENs.
Yet another example is allocation of special PENs for RFCs (e.g. RFC 
5103.html, section  6.1). Is this Ok?
(All of these are examples of what people asked to register.) As 
currently there is no guidelines, there is no way for IANA to say "no".

Somewhat related to this: another position might be that there are 
enough PENs for everyone and that there is really no need to be 
restrictive in the case of this registry.

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Thank you,
Alexey