[ARIN-consult] Consultation on Approaches for Adjusting the ARIN Registration Services Plan Fee Schedule

[John Curran]

> On Apr 3, 2024, at 1:20 PM, William Herrin <bill at herrin.us> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Apr 3, 2024 at 9:40 AM ARIN <info at arin.net> wrote:
>> Introduce a structured approach to fee adjustments, allowing
>> for an annual increase of no more than 5%, subject to approval
>> by the Board of Trustees. This strategy aims to offer a predictable
>> and manageable escalation in fees, aligning more closely with the
>> budget planning processes of many organizations within our community.

Hello Bill - 

You’ve got some great questions – let's go through each: 

> That's great if inflation stays far enough below 5% to allow for the
> cost of new services, but what happens when it doesn't? Break the
> implicit promise of stability in the fees?

So it is not the “cost of new services” that is the concern, it’s rather the routine 
increase in ARIN’s own operations costs that we have to deal with…  While we do 
make efforts to rebid significant suppliers (e.g., benefits, telecommunications, etc.) 
in order to manage costs, there are still times when we are unable to avoid seeing 
cost increases in the services that we contract.   In addition, we do provide 
competitive compensation to the staff, and these results in a 2 to 3% increase
in our salary pool each year. 

As for “new services”, we generally can accommodate the various changes that 
are requested (whether features or policy changes) with the existing resources;
we balance new feature and maintenance development tasks as needed for this. 

> And what happens when you want to restructure the fees? Is the 5%
> promise simply void since the new fees are discontinuous from the old?
> Like what happened to the LRSA folks?

Having finally achieved a fee schedule that treats all parties equitably, I would
like to think we’re past the point of further restructuring of the fee schedule… 

However, to be clear, the question before the community is whether we come 
every 2 or 3 years with a proposal to make an adjustment to the existing fee 
schedule that might be quite significant (i.e. potentially more than 10%) or 
would the community prefer that the Board do a small adjustment annually
based on increase in costs – an approach that is typical in some industries.

> And philosophically, should ARIN be experiencing a 5% growth that
> isn't tied to a comparable growth in its customer base? Isn't that
> called bloat?

As noted, our costs increase nominally each year based on underlying 
vendors and staff cost, and this does not directly correspond to either 
number of members or number resources in the registry.  In fact, we may
easily see a reduction in number of members given that the structure of the
fee schedule encourages consolidation of organizational accounts when 
such is possible (i.e., one can increase the number resources under an RSA 
by 4x before seeing the fee category increment and corresponding service fee 
increase by only 2x.) 

I hope this helps explain somewhat the situation, and the question being asked 
of the members–it is really a question of how the nominal changes in costs get 
accommodated; would the community prefer this to occur routinely as a matter 
of course, or would it prefer revisiting the fees every few years (and potentially 
considering a significantly larger increase at that time). 

Thanks!
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
American Registry for Internet Numbers