Hi,
There was a small ruckus on this mailing list about the 1000 ASN limit
during the holidays. The whole disagreement is centred around the fact
that ASNs are free now. I've read a lot of messages that seem to suggest
that there should be some charge related to them that prevents amassing
them in the billions. I sort of agree with that, but...
Is there someone in this community that feels they should be completely
free, no matter how many you have?
I'd like to offer some more food for thought. These are not realistic
suggestions, but I hope they will close the gap between the two debating
sides:
How many ASNs can a LIR get using one email or one click on the RIPE
portal? My understanding is that even after 2014-03 is implemented, the
answer will be one(1).
After that email/click, the LIR will go through the Process. I don't
think any amount of policy simplification will reduce the work required
per Process Instance at both the LIR and the RIR below two minutes.
In the crypto(slash)security community this is called the proof-of-work
system.
So, for a thousand ASNs this would mean about 33 hours. As we want to
turn that into money, working at ten Euros per hour the cost would be
330 Euros. You can twist the numbers every which way, but it's hard to
twist them so far that the result would be much smaller than Nick's
example of setting up another company for 10 Euros (+work.)
If we want to make sure that a LIR doesn't automate their email
responses to the Process, we can include another random proof-of-work
such as "what is the sum of the digits in today's date?", "how much is
this ticket number divided by the number of ASNs you already have?" or
"when do the cows come home to roost?" Or just a plain old CAPTCHA.
Someone suggested that if the ASNs were free and someone got four
billion of them, we can fix that post-fact by raising the ASN fee above
zero. The same person, in the same sentence, also hinted that this
special someone would be based at some tax haven sort of place, where
exacting this fee won't really be possible, should the someone refuse to
pay the new fee.
The resulting reclamation process would leave us without ASNs for a
couple of years. Then again, according to my above thesis of ASN
acquisition speed, it would take thousands of years for the bad guy to
finish all the Processes to get all the ASNs in the first place.
There, a couple of cents worth...
--
Aleksi Suhonen / Let bogons be bogons.
