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Comment by tialaramex | Hacker News Reader

> Records are useful for running operations and debugging issues

I don't buy that for a moment. My ISP collects a lot of low-level information, but they don't need and don't collect the sort of information we're discussing here.

The individual users have actual hard links (or very rarely, some sort of radio) to somewhere and for that I agree you want diagnostics. "Sorry Ma'am I see your fibre went dark 18 minutes and 47 seconds ago, we'll have a technician out to investigate tomorrow morning". But the IP stuff is just bits, "You use Netflix a lot" isn't "useful for running operations" it's marketable information, it's collected because you can make money.

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Even if a municipal ISP isn't trying to make money, deciding what infrastructure to run and how much of it needs data. "30% of all traffic is coming from Netflix" (which I think was true for a short while) is an input to the decision to install a Netflix CDN cache box closer to the end users.

ASN/IP block level based aggregation will provide the information needed without requiring traffic data on a ip/site level. Moreover, there's no reason to keep any of this information on a per-customer basis.

In the era of virtual servers, cloud infrastructure, CDNs, etc., ASNs and IP blocks are not necessarily that helpful. Which is kind of back to my original point: it's not 2005 anymore.

Start with a problem you actually have, rather than beginning with the destination "We're going to snoop on all the customers" and then trying to think of a reason why that's a good idea.

Maybe you'll get to the same destination but I very much doubt it. Of course, if your starting goal was to snoop on the customers and you were just looking for an excuse...

> In the era of virtual servers, cloud infrastructure, CDNs, etc., ASNs and IP blocks are not necessarily that helpful.

The above statement makes no sense at all. The whole Internet is built on connections between autonomous systems and all traffic is IP based. There is nothing but ASNs and IPs and information about them and the flows between them is extremely helpful in operating an ISP.

Taken out of context, sure. An ASN identifies an autonomous system and is used for routing in the core of the Internet. But if you have the ASN of an AWS data center, knowing it tells you nothing about the client of AWS that the traffic you're routing belongs to (though AWS recently added BYOASN). Ditto, by and large, CIDR blocks of publicly allocated address space. Individual IPs are more informative, and domain names even more informative than that.

I also don't disagree about the usefulness of this kind of information, my argument is that ISPs can't always get by on coarsely aggregated data alone.

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