[ARIN-consult] Fee restructuring

[Owen DeLong]

Sent from my iPad

On Oct 25, 2012, at 4:39 PM, John Curran <jcurran at arin.net> wrote:

> On Oct 25, 2012, at 4:35 PM, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> Additionally, end-users faced with this fee structure are faced with an incentive to do very bad things to the ARIN free pool. Consider, for example, an organization with multiple disparate small blocks. Perhaps these are 129 /24 blocks which would result in annual fees of $12,900. This user would be faced with a situation where it is in their extreme best interest to return those 129 blocks to ARIN and request a /16 which is fully supported under current amnesty policy, resulting in new fees of $100/year, even though 127 /24s of that new /16 will go unused vs. $12,900 for their current situation.
> 
> Owen - 
> 
>  This is only an option due to current Amnesty policy; it is not
>  created by the Revised Fee Proposal.  

Currently the amnesty policy makes sense in some circumstances and is desirable for purposes of aggregation or other optimizations. The policy is not currently skewed by a financial incentive to abuse the policy in ways it was not intended.

> 
>  If such amnesty returns and reissue of address space is no longer 
>  desired, then that policy should should be retired.
> 

Some amnesty returns and reissues are desirable. However, what is new here is that the proposed fee structure creates a financial incentive to misuse the policy for purposes of fee reduction. Currently, the only motivation to use the amnesty policy is to optimize your network resources for better aggregation or some other beneficial (to the internet) purpose.

Owen