[arin-discuss] fee waivers

[John Curran]

On Jun 23, 2010, at 9:01 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:

> Frankly I've never understood how ARIN arrived at the fee AMOUNTS in
> the first place,and the fact that those fees have NOT increased along
> with inflation pretty much points to the notion that they are, to put
> it bluntly, arbitrary. 

Ted - 
 
 For reference, the fee structure was put in place back at ARIN's 
 origin in order to provide a scaled distribution of costs across
 a wide variety of different sized service providers and end user
 organizations.  We've tried to keep the fees relatively "fair", 
 i.e. the fee schedule increases with size of resource usage but
 not linearly, as ARIN's costs are greater for larger resource 
 applications but do not increase in a linear fashion.

 With respect to the lack of increases in the fees, we've managed
 to successfully lower fees numerous times as the total number of
 members has increased, as the additional members are far greater 
 factor than inflation in the overall budget. (I'd also like to 
 note that this was reducing fees while also developing a 1 to 2
 year operating reserve as is prudent to organization like ARIN).

 So, the fees are not directly tied to the underlying cost of 
 specific services, but instead reflect an attempt to provide
 for proportional contribution from the community as a whole.
 Given the underlying reasoning of the fee schedule, I myself
 would not characterize it as arbitrary.

/John

John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN