Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes

A couple of fun facts about this guy:

His little ISP is AS267, which is a SHOCKINGLY low number. That's like.. the ISP equiv of a 4 digit slashdot id, or owning something like sodapop.com.

He's also one of the authors of RFC 5575, which is a pretty big deal in the DDoS world.

I don't know (or care) about how he got that ASN but ARIN does occasionally recycle returned 3 or 4 digit ASN's, including very recently:

  20220607|arin|US|asn|888|1|assigned|66e25d155d3f3d57ff208733b59f8cc8
  20220607|arin|US|asn|889|1|assigned|5b048aafff56a02f895e68ac5188853b
  20220607|arin|US|asn|890|1|assigned|708d3f11915973323c76a5f95fa2d775
  20220607|arin|US|asn|891|1|assigned|ab9bfca0becd32b7fe44c7ea0ba1aac3
  20220607|arin|US|asn|892|1|assigned|0b9118a23862aab1647fd26939f7b219
  20220607|arin|US|asn|893|1|assigned|57d59e6dfd1cd07523724f9cf5fc572b
  20220607|arin|US|asn|894|1|assigned|0a932835b90a81bffeb1539b4bc93040

The first time ARIN did this with a lot of 4-digit ASN's was 2009 and was how Netflix was able to get AS2906.

There is also a market for reselling ASN's that aren't needed anymore: https://auctions.ipv4.global (filter by ASN)

He's been a backbone guy since the the mid-1990s.