Simplify assignment of first ASN

Summary of proposal:

32-bit AS Numbers are now supported across the Internet.

The needs based assignment policy, published in 1996 and deployed following RFC 1930, can now be rethought. If accepted, this proposed policy would alter the balance slightly in favour of administrative ease. It does this by removing the needs assessment for the first AS Number assigned to an IP prefix holder.

The current needs assessment policy would continue to apply to any additional AS Numbers a prefix holder requests. They would need to demonstrate a new, unique routing policy.

Policy text:

a. Current policy text

In order to help decrease global routing complexity, a new AS Number should be used only if a new external routing policy is required, see RFC1930.

A network must be multihomed in order to qualify for an AS Number.

When requesting an AS Number, the routing policy of the Autonomous System must be provided. The new unique routing policy should be defined in RPSL language, as used in the RIPE Database.

b. New policy text

Legitimate holders of an IP address prefix assigned or allocated directly by the RIPE NCC, may be assigned their first AS Number without providing a needs justification.

Additional AS Numbers may only be assigned when a new external routing policy is required for a multihomed network.

When requesting an additional AS Number, the Autonomous System routing policy must be provided and the requester’s already held AS Numbers must be in use. The new unique routing policy should be defined in RPSL language, as used in the RIPE Database.

Rationale:

The balance between the complexity of inter-domain routing (see RFC 1930) and the complexity of administration slightly favours lower administrative complexity. The ready availability of AS Numbers does not mean that they should be made available to significantly increase the complexity of inter-domain routing.

It is reasonable to reduce the administrative overhead to both requesters and the RIPE NCC for the first AS Number a network requests.

Over the last 20 years, the RIPE NCC has assigned under 25,000 AS Numbers from the 32-bit part of the IANA Autonomous System (AS) Numbers registry. If the future is similar to the past, and all RIRs are assigned AS Numbers at a similar rate, consuming the pool would take over 30,000 years.

a. Arguments supporting the proposal

This policy proposal would not make AS Numbers available to anyone without space which is intended to be independently routed. It won’t add to deaggregation.

Removing the needs assessment reduces the likelihood that people will lie to the RIPE NCC. This is a good thing.

Removing the needs assessment reduces the time required to request and assign resources. This small efficiency gain is a good thing.

Removing the needs assessment from initial ASN assignments is likely to make new BGP based products available to single-homed customers. This would benefit the customers and the providers.

This proposal does not change the policy for an additional AS Number request by a prefix holder. A single entity could only get multiple AS Numbers if they qualify under the existing policy.

b. Arguments opposing the proposal

Making AS Numbers available to single-homed networks would probably mean an increase in AS Numbers in the global routing table. This could speed up the equipment replacement cycle for networks that maintain a view of all other networks.