AS Numbers unused/sitting for long periods of time

Tue Jan 2 23:31:38 UTC 2018

I think the real issue here will be this :

1. If you are paying an RIR to maintain the registration it is yours to use unless the terms change to require you to justify usage on a recurring basis.

2.  If it is pre-RIR I am not sure how you could change the rules at this point to reclaim an AS number.  For example, I am sure the government hold hundreds that they are not using.  I am also sure that they were given to them in block form.  How would you undo that?

I have a little bit of a problem with the "not visible to the Internet as a whole" test.  There are a number of valid engineering reasons why an AS might not be visible today but may need to be tomorrow or be dynamically routing or not routing.  Maybe you were dual homed and now you temporarily are not.  Maybe you are transitioning your architecture to your shiny new IPv6 address space instead of your service provider's space.  It would have to be a case by case justification which would hardly be worth the effort.  If it was pre-RIR I am not sure how you would establish definitive contacts for old AS numbers.  Please don't tell me WHOIS because that is completely inadequate for reclaiming something this significant.

I suppose I would not have a problem with you contacting an entity and asking them voluntarily to give up an unused AS number but you better make sure you have the right guy on the phone and I would think there would need to be some kind of incentive for them to do so otherwise your default answer will be no.  All in all it is much easier to support larger AS space than to reclaim the oldest foggiest AS numbers.

Steven Naslund
Chicago IL

>-----Original Message-----
>From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces at nanog.org] On Behalf Of Steve Noble
>Sent: Tuesday, January 02, 2018 5:12 PM
>To: nanog at nanog.org
>Subject: Re: AS Numbers unused/sitting for long periods of time
>
>Inaccurate whois data from ARIN is not a good way to tell anything as ARIN is terrible to deal with when you need to update an address or phone number or anything.  I know personally as I had to fight for years to update the data on >an ASN that ARIN was billing me to manage the data for.