[address-policy-wg] late conciliatory response to 2014-03

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.