[arin-discuss] x-small IPv4 ISPs going to IPv6

[John Curran]

On May 4, 2010, at 5:36 AM, Gary Giesen wrote:

> ARIN's been asking for them back for years, hence the creation of the Legacy
> RSA. But with the murky legal status with regards to ARIN having
> jurisdiction over those IPs (those legacy holders had their allocations
> before ARIN even existed, and have no contractual relationship with ARIN),
> it's a difficult road ARIN faces.

To be clear, those holding legacy resources have no contractual relationship
with anyone, ARIN included. If there had been a contractual relationship then 
it would have been transferred at the time of ARIN's formation along with the 
records, staff, and systems which were transferred when ARIN was formed as the 
industry-based successor registry to the InterNIC.  

> The fee structure is meant to reflect the cost of services for those block
> sizes. ARIN works on a cost-recovery model (being a non-profit
> organization). Obviously economies of scale come into play here, the larger
> the allocation, the cheaper per IP it is to manage. 

Simply put, some aspects of ARIN costs are proportional to the count of 
allocations, whereas other costs are proportional to the size of the 
address space.  Performing additional allocations to ISP's requires 
validation of the utilization of past blocks, and this can take very 
significant effort for larger blocks.  On the other hand, once allocated, 
the effective maintenance costs of a single ISP allocation versus an
end-user user IPv4 assignment are nearly identical, both taking an entry 
in WHOIS and in-addr services.  Legacy address holders also take such
entries.

One of the items that the ARIN Board has been considering is the appropriate 
fee model for cost-recovery long-term, particularly once IPv6 is gaining 
adoption and the IPv4 free pool is depleted.  The functions that still need
to be performed at that point include maintenance of WHOIS & in-addr services,
a limited amount of registration services, a limited amount of new policy 
development, and potentially less outreach in the area of IPv6 advocacy. 
In the absence of any additional demands by the community, this would result
in a slightly slimmer ARIN.  The question that will arise is how to best
recovery these costs from the (ISP/hosting, end-user, and legacy) community.

/John

John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN