Summary

  • At ARIN 50, Kerrie Richards presented ARIN-2022-2 with Chris Tacit as her co-shepherd. Its central move was simple: one Autonomous System Number for an organization on request; a separate proof requirement for additional ASNs.
  • The policy record shows Board adoption on 18 July 2023. ARIN's implementation notice dates the change to 13 September 2023, and current NRPM section 5 retains the two-stage rule.

A novice operator trying to bring up BGP already has an impressive list of ways to ruin a morning. Under ARIN's old ASN rule, the application added another: write down the unique routing policy you planned to run before you could receive your first public number. The prescribed examples included originating routes under your own ASN, multihoming and interconnecting with other autonomous systems. For a team still assembling its first configuration, the form wanted an answer from the future.

Kerrie Richards stood up at ARIN 50 to present a rewrite. She identified Chris Tacit as her co-shepherd and described how an earlier staff review had sent them back to clarify the wording. The resulting ARIN-2022-2 text gives an organization one ASN upon request. An organization with space issued under Multiple Discrete Networks policy may request one for each discrete network. When it asks for additional ASNs, it must show a unique routing policy or another technical reason for needing more than one.

That division places the paperwork at the point where scarcity of explanation becomes useful. A first number lets an operator establish its own routing identity. A fifth number can deserve a conversation about architecture. The old policy told applicants to prefer private ASNs when a unique public number was unnecessary; the proposal argued that widespread four-octet ASN support had outgrown the austerity of the old 16-bit era. ARIN staff described the new text as clear and implementable, with training and documentation updates rather than a significant registry-system change.

The meeting supplied a little live comedy. Richards first had to find the green clicker button. A participant then mistook the slide showing old language for the proposal; after the slide moved, he praised the cleanup. Another speaker worried aloud that removing the first-number needs test could give transferable ASNs value. Those exchanges show exactly where the rule's friction sat: at the entrance, before a network had even advertised its own routes.

ARIN's Board adopted the policy on 18 July 2023 and implemented it on 13 September. The current manual keeps Richards's practical hinge: ask for the first, explain the next. ARIN later reported that initial ASN requests had become considerably easier. The clicker was a minor obstacle; the old application was the one she helped remove.