Karl Denninger wrote:
The Federal Government has set up a corporation for "E-Rate" connections. These are the "libraries and schools" program you keep hearing about.
To bid on these, you must have a SPIN, or service provider ID number.
[...]
Total cost to the ISP to get a SPIN: $0.00
[...]
What is going on here? ASNs didn't used to cost money until ARIN got its claws into them.
The cost of administering SPINs is paid for by the U.S. government (and therefore by the U.S. taxpayers), just like the U.S. government used to pay for the administration of ASNs, IP address allocations, and domain names. What has changed is that the U.S. government no longer pays for the administration of ASNs. It still costs money to do the administration so the money has to come from somewhere. In fact, knowing the way the U.S. government works, it probably costs the taxpayers more than $500 to allocate a SPIN. Jeff