[arin-ppml] ARIN-2018-1: Allow Inter-regional ASN Transfers

[Scott Leibrand]

If you operate a network with peering sessions, and you are forced to
renumber your ASN, you either need to convince all of your peers to set up
new sessions (which can be a lot of work, and usually means at least some
of them will refuse/fail to do so), or you need to local-as prepend the old
ASN onto your new one, resulting in a longer AS path over that session.
Both outcomes are disruptive to a network's ability to maintain peering.

Given that there are valid technical and business justifications for
needing to keep the same ASN on a network whose locus of control switches
continents, I believe it is appropriate to allow organizations who need to
do so to transfer administrative control of their ASN between RIRs, and
therefore support this draft policy.

While it is certainly possible for some networks to easily renumber their
ASN, that is not true of all networks, for valid technical reasons.  I
therefore do not find arguments of the "I've never needed to do that" or "I
can't imagine why someone would need to do that" informative or
convincing.  To my mind, the only argument that would justify opposing ASN
transfers would be one that details how such transfers would be burdensome
to the RIRs or to the Internet community more generally, and would further
show that such burden is greater than the benefit to those organizations it
would help.  As I, Job, and others have detailed the kind of organization
that would be benefited by this proposal, it's not sufficient to assert
that such organization do not (or should not) exist.

-Scott

On Mon, Aug 13, 2018 at 3:36 PM Job Snijders <job at ntt.net> wrote:

> On Tue, 14 Aug 2018 at 01:23, Larry Ash <lar at mwtcorp.net> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 13 Aug 2018 14:47:09 -0700
>>   Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
>> >> On Aug 13, 2018, at 14:42 , Job Snijders <job at ntt.net> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> I agree with the proposal.
>> >>
>> >> I think this proposal is needed and addresses practical concerns: the
>> alternative to transfers is “renumbering”, and renumbering
>> >>ASNs is a very costly and operationally risky proposition. There is no
>> upside to restricting or forbidding this type of resource
>> >>transfer.
>> >>
>> >> A question that remains: if you don’t want to transfer your ASN in or
>> out of ARIN, then don’t, but why forbid others from doing
>> >>it? All resources should be transferable.
>> >
>> > We can agree to disagree.
>>
>> I agree with Owen, I just can't see a burning need. Renumbering seems to
>> be a bugaboo that is just not that difficult.
>
>
> Even if you don’t see a need, would you want to preclude others from
> transferring their resource if they concluded it is a requirement for their
> business operation?
>
>
> I would think the transfer of the ASN would as costly, difficult and risky
>> as migrating the resources onto a new ASN.
>
>
>
> I’m puzzled by your statement. Renumbering an ASN may involve operations
> on hundreds of routers and tens of thousands of BGP sessions - such
> renumbering clearly is costly and operationally risky.
>
> Transferring a resource from one RIR to another RIR is paperwork between
> RIRs - no router changes. A transfer and a renumbering don’t seem
> comparable at all. Do you consider IPv4 transfers costly and risky too?
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Job
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