[arin-discuss] [arin-announce] Community Consultation: Future Direction for the ARIN Fee Schedule

[Owen DeLong]

Many of us who signed LRSA agreements were induced to do so on the following basis:

1. You'll be paying a single fee for all your resources and since you're getting non-legacy
   resources at the same time, bringing these under LRSA won't cost you any more than
   you will be paying anyway.

2.  The amount of money charged under LRSA is intended to be a token amount to maintain
    a contractual state and an annual touch-point to ensure that the entity using the resources
    is still reachable and operating and using the resources.

The restructuring of the fees from an annual maintenance fee per end-user organization to an annual fee per resource block violated the first provision for virtually every LRSA signatory and trampled on the second provision for every LRSA signatory holding more than one record (which I expect is the vast majority of them, since most likely have some address block(s) and at least one ASN).

Every revenue graph ARIN has produced shows that these end-user fees are a pittance compared to the fees collected for allocation. The end result is that the impact to LRSA
signatories is large, the impact to other end-user organizations is large, but the savings to other ARIN organizations is relatively small.

The unfairness of the restructure does not end there, however. In addition to the above issues, end-user organizations, no matter how much they are paying, do not receive ARIN membership unless they pay an additional $500 per year for that membership. This means that the vast majority of end-user organizations are disenfranchised from electing the ARIN AC and the ARIN Board of Trustees. If nothing else, this creates a conflict of interest which incentivizes the Board to victimize end-users in favor of subscriber member organizations.

For example, an X-small ISP with a /22 pays $500 in annual fees. They pay one time $550 for an ASN, and thereafter,  they pay $500 per year, all in.

For an end-user to get a little less from ARIN (a /22, an ASN, but no ability to subdelegate that /22), the end user would pay $500 up front for the /22, $550 one time for the ASN, $200 per year in maintenance fees and $500 for membership.

Add an IPv6 /36 into that mix and the (now Small) ISP is up to $1000 in annual fees all in.

For the end-user, your at $800, but still no ability to subdelegate the /22 or /36. However, the end-user also paid an additional $1,000 up front for the /36, so the $200 advantage takes at least 5 years to be actualized.

Further, if the end-user has multiple blocks and/or multiple ASNs, their fees just keep going up with each new resource. For the ISP, their fees don't go up until their 16x larger than their current fee tier.

At the very least, if you're going to increase the fees to end-users in this way, they shouldn't be disenfranchised any longer.

Owen