This is of course also not to mention the potential chaos that could be triggered by the fact that a lot of these providers are not actively charging their customers a yearly fee so far and have only been charging a setup fee to create a new ASN.

I suspect the chaos of setting up yearly billing after the fact is going to be pretty hardcore on some of these “hobby net” providers. I suspect a lot of ASNs are going to disappear because people cannot be bothered to continue paying, or cannot be easily contacted.

@mingwei Right, ARIN has a pretty good deal for operating small and cheap "LIR"'s (I know that's not what ARIN calls it)

But the step up from €0 to €50 is sometimes more complex then €50 to €500.

Also ouch, I assume you have no v4 space with that, nor any chance to obtain some at that price point?

I think one of the only reasons I really got into the BGP networking industry was because of my free ASN (ignoring a cheap one off setup cost). It's a real shame to see that go away as an easy route (pun intended) to for people to get into the internet routing world.

ASNs are a finite resource, and I do believe that there is probably precedent for RIPE to charge to set up an asn (As there is a non-trivial amount of KYC required to do this) and potentially having a yearly charge for a 16-bit asns (as those are far more scarce and questionably are not required anymore)

But in my opinion, a yearly fee for a 32-bit asn is not justifiable to the harm that it will do to the future of the networking industry.

@erincandescent 32bit ASNs are only really practically finite if we begin mass allocating them to things that do not need ASNs.

For example if we started allocating a ASN to every house then we may have a problem, but we can revisit yearly fee's for 32bit ASNs if that somehow becomes becomes a reality. A few hobby nets are not gonna cause this much of a problem

@neirbowj I don't genuinely believe that there is any serious wasteful consumption right now on asns with the exception of potentially 16-bit asns (but I covered that in the upper parts of this thread).

One of the things is is that RIPE only has around 38,000 ASNs to actually charge for so they only really stand to gain around 2 million euros a year from this change, and that is assuming that a large percentage of these ASNs are not immediately dropped due to the extra cost of keeping them around (or issues as mentioned above).

32 bits is a lot of space! Already RIPE contacts account owners who have not used their ASN in the public internet for a sufficient amount of time. So things are already "cleaned up" to some degree.

@jimthewhyguy Yeah the networking world is extremely acronym dense.

You know, the IP packet gets a FIB lookup (that was likely programmed by OSPF, IS-IS or BGP, or god forbid RIP), and then gets a MPLS header shoved onto it, then MACSEC'd and then goes out of the SERDES to a SFP/QSFP, then that laser light hits some kind of ROADM and transmitted some distance to the next router. And that is of course assuming that the original IP was the original one, it's common these days to have VXLAN on top of these things, not only because it helps build VLAN-like infrastructure for hosting providers, but also because it sometimes helps the ECMP efficacy, but you know, the older setups are often using LAGs rather than ECMP!

@stucchimax @Oskar456 Right, but a lot of the providers that will issue you a ASN for cheap/free will also help you out by assigning you a /44 or something to get started with.

bgp.tools keeps track of these kinds of networks on https://bgp.tools/tags/perso (though this does not cover all of them, since a recent trend has been to start a LTD/LLC and issue the ASN in the company name, meaning that bgp.tools often does not consider that a hobby net)

@jtk I mean, sure. There will always be some people who get stuff they don't understand. I know contract clients I've worked for obtain resources and not really have a reason on why... they just did?

I'm not sure LowEndTalk is true reflection on most of the people trying to get started, and sure, some will drop off, but a decent amount of the professional peers my age (not routing ones to be clear) got started with these cheap/free sponsored ASNs.

As previously said, I don't buy the wastage argument (apart from 16bit ASNs), and simply adding cost to it will cause a extra hurdle that will be counter productive to have a new generation of network engineers that are interested in the BGP/Internet ecosystem.

@HopelessDemigod Running a regional internet registry is definitely not cheap and RIPEs KYC costs and general administration staff costs should be considered, but I do agree that regional internet registries should not be run as a "for maximum profit" purpose.

The thing that RIPE is trying to solve here is that there is going to be a large amount of LIR accounts that will be merged and closed into other accounts now that there are no more reasons to start new LIR accounts (no more IPv4 space).

Until now they have been benefiting from these extra membership fees... that they will no longer have. That combined with a rapidly inflating currency means that something has to be increased.

I don't think I would like to go and see RIPE running austerity mode in the same way that a government running in austerity mode is not particularly great to see.