Hi, On 4/18/23 14:35, Gert Doering wrote:
On Thu, Apr 13, 2023 at 05:05:09PM +0200, Maximilian Wilhelm wrote:
These models still introduce charges for ASNs, the questions on the "why?" has been raised multiple times and I haven't seen any explanation for that. Did I miss it?
This might all be my fault :-) - so let me explain. We currently do not have a good reclaim mechanism for ASN, and I am absolutely convinced we do want one - while there is no shortage of ASNs, we have a responsibility on properly keeping track on "where are those?", and the effort for that grows with the number of ASNs handed out, especially if they become unused and nobody really knows anymore.
So option 1, the NCC regularily comes asking ("does anyone in your company know if AS196631 is still in use?"). Option 2, you find a financial incentive to make people return ASNs that are no longer needed, because they find the yearly monetary transfer annoying.
I am convinced that a charge around 50 EUR is a reasonable thing to add - it's low enough that it is not really noticeable for someone who really need a public ASN, as in "takes part of global BGP, has infrastructure, etc", while at the same time annoying enough so you want to get rid of it if you do no longer need the ASN.
If that's the argument here, than we should also introduce a charge for IPv6 resources because all of the above applies there too. It's not a scarce resource but we should keep track of it, and if it's not used it should be returned, no? It could even be argued that the charge for IPv6 resources should be much higher as the RIPE NCC needs to check much more information including assignments made to end sites (e.g. as part of ARC). To be clear: I do *not* suggest we do that, I rather suggest we do not reintroduce this for ASNs.
I've never done the math on "how does this influence the NCC budget?" - but assuming some 20.000 "RIPE" ASNs out there, and also assuming 50 EUR/year, this would be a million EUR/year, which otherwise would have to be part of the member fees. So, while this was explicitly never my intention ("lower our member fees by making other people pay for their ASN"), it does have an effect - ASN fees and PI fees can be billed "onwards" toward the customer, while the regular LIR fee is "mine to keep"...
Well the financial bit is another conversation. I've seen a lot of push back here on increasing the fees and it seems a lot of folks would rather like to see where spending could be reduced. But let's keep those conversations separate. Cheers, Max