Dear Urban and Leo, Thanks for the informative response. On 7/8/2026 11:37 AM, Leo Vegoda wrote: [...]>
There are two drivers for this proposal. One is to reduce administration and the other is to encourage honesty. The first driver meant we agreed to limit the scope to addresses issued by the RIPE NCC as they have to check that the legitimacy of addresses issued by other registries anyway and at that point you're already in a manual process. And while we're not personally aware of many ASN requests being rejected by the RIPE NCC, we want to remove a policy requirement that might have encouraged some organisations to lie. We believe that there's real value in reinforcing the expectation of honesty.
If first assignments are not actually being rejected for new LIRs or End-Users, then the problem this proposal is trying to solve might not even exist. A human will still process the request even if no multihoming is required; I don't think the RIPE NCC is going full auto on dispensing integers. And if the goal is simply to end the fake-multihoming that several people have welcomed the end of, that can be achieved by removing one sentence from the current policy: "A network must be multihomed in order to qualify for an AS Number." That would be a considerably smaller change than the proposed rewrite, and I would +1 that. Applying only that small change would also keep the RIPE NCC region from diverging unnecessarily from the other RIRs, which is more in line with the coordinated registry system the NRO (of which the RIPE NCC is a member) exists to promote: "Providing and promoting a coordinated Internet number registry system." The RIPE NCC already has the most relaxed integer dispensing among the RIRs. Per the averages in my previous email, RIPE NCC hands out roughly twice as many ASNs as ARIN, with some of that coming from other regions that prefer our online shop for integers for its simplicity and fewest questions asked. As of today the out-of-region ASN registrations are: ripencc=1776, apnic=209, arin=96, lacnic=2, afrinic=0, so it is already a fairly successful cross-region online shop for integers, and I am not convinced it needs more simplification. [...]
We're not trying to tell product and business managers what offers they should develop. But we recognise that fewer constraints on innovation are likely to unleash new products.
So these new BGP based products do not exist yet, and will either be invented or not, independently of whether this policy passes. By the same reasoning, another paragraph could be added to the supporting arguments stating that both providers and customers could win the lottery in countries within the RIPE NCC service region, followed by "this is a good thing" to authoritatively qualify it as good. Both statements are equally speculative and neither belongs in the rationale. Radu