That is physically impossible.
While the international laws and conventions have lapsed, they can easily be brought back, and one of the principles of settling is that you can't claim something you can't defend. The principles will need to be tweaked a bit since the way in which "defense" is used here isn't 100% applicable, but you could easily say that you have to be occupying it, for instance. There is no way to squat on the million best asteroids.
By the time that's not true, our great-grandchildren will have worked out the principles of solving that problem. It may be fun to speculate on their answers, but it's nothing more.
You should see the problems we have with illegal fishing about 10 miles off our coast.
I don't disagree with you, I just think the practicalities of monitoring and enforcement would be almost impossible.
You can't sweep space mining under the rug.
We're a long way off freebooters with fusion drives. And when we have those, AI will see you from 5 AUs out
I think that's where things get interesting and earth politics get involved. Who should have a say? Spacefaring nations or all of earth? [I think this is your point, just being explicit I guess].
- Time they have access to asteroid
- Type of resource they want to extract
- Quantity of resource they want to extract
Time cost is paid upfront and distributed evenly amongst worlds countries.
Type/Qty is paid for on return to Earth in either cash or using resource itself.
But I also see the need for regulations so that one company can't claim all plantes to mine while still having an advantage because they were the first to start mining. How could territories be distributed fairly so that innovation is possible (and encourage by financial gains) and that there are no monopolies (so that only one country or only one space agency from one country, which would be pretty counterproductive).