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> 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.

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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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