[ARIN-consult] [arin-announce] Fee Schedule Change Consultation

[John Curran]

On Nov 14, 2012, at 4:10 PM, John Comfort <john at comfortconsulting.com>
 wrote:

> It seems to me that Jesse is the only one considering the smaller organizations and the exponential increase in fees over time. With the additional costs per year, does ARIN intend on providing more services in addition to IP allocation assistance? Or will ARIN continue with the status-quo? In other words, how will ARIN really add *benefit* to the SMB market by instituting this new fee structure?

Note that there is not a proposed increase over time; this is a single change
for end-user fees for per-block annual maintenance fees as opposed to the
present single $100 annual maintenance fee for an unlimited number of registry 
objects.

With respect to services offered, ARIN has indeed increased registry services 
in recent years, including enhancements to the online interface, additional of
DNSSEC support for reverse DNS zones, and resource certification via RPKI.  

> I see three items with this fee schedule: force the reduction of IPv4 space allocation requests;

For end-users, we refer to these as "IPv4 assignment requests", and while they
might go down because of the additional $100 of annual maintenance that results
of receiving one, most organizations that qualify for additional space may find 
that a reasonable tradeoff in light of the upcoming depletion of ARIN's available
pool and very limited ability to receive additional assignments.

> penalize organizations with a large number of smaller IPv4 blocks;

I believe that "penalize" is not quite the intent, as much as making end-user
organizations with a large number of smaller IPv4 blocks pay to reflect their
greater costs.

> encourage organizations to request larger IPv6 blocks to reduce the number of purchased blocks thus reducing the price-per-year costs. Why should I order a /40? I might as well order a /32!

(You should probably request whatever block you qualify for...)
 
> Unless ARIN provides some kind of benefit, only the large ISPs seem to benefit by locking customers into the ISP's own IP blocks due to cost. I was under the impression that the IPv6 space gave "unlimited" number of address space, and thus it would be "cheaper" (supply and demand ring a bell??). But this looks like a monopolistic move to increase prices with no apparent change in real customer-driven services. How does this encourage the move to IPv6?

It has been proposed that a single IPv4 block, single IPv6 block, and an ASN be 
included in the $100 annual maintenance fee; such a change to the proposal would
mean that obtaining IPv6 would not entail any incremental fee for any organization
with an AS # or IPv4 today.  Would that address your concern stated above?

Thanks!
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN