What this leads to is a registry system (one or more) for the 32-bit
suffixes in which you form "colloquial" memberships, ensuring uniqueness
among competing ASNs *as long as both ASNs subscribe to the same registry*.But membership is VOLUNTARY; you give up nothing except possibly the ability
to allow people to join your ASN without renumbering if you don't belong.Right now membership in these registries is MANDATORY; the network breaks if
you choose random 32-bit integers and masks and announce them. We can fix
this if we think for more than 2 nanoseconds before doing something stupid
(again).If you want to connect to an ASN which is *NOT* part of your colloquial
group, that's fine too -- but you might need to renumber in that case (or
perhaps not - 32 bits is still quite large).
draft-odell-8+8-00.txt (expired) suggests something not so different from
this.
-Phil