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

[Owen DeLong]

Having taken some time to do a more detailed review of the proposed fee re-alignment, I think it is overly burdensome to end-users:

If you look at https://www.arin.net/participate/meetings/reports/ARIN_XXX/PDF/thursday/curran_fee_schedule.pdf,

Page 7 has a break down of ARIN revenues. Allocations (ISPs) total almost $11.4M. Assignments are less than $1.4M. This includes both the annual maintenance fees (which we are discussing) and the initial assignment fees. There's some category called "Other" which I'm uncertain what it would contain, but, it's almost $1.5M. Current assignment revenue, including initial and recurring fees totals less than "Miscellaneous income".

Under the proposed fee structure, this would go from <$1.4M to nearly $4M, mainly due to the increase as a result of charging per ASN ($1M vs. what is likely now $0). Given the number of ASNs listed, however, I suspect that this charge is distributed among both End-Users and ISPs and that ISPs pay for each ASN in addition to their IP Address subscriptions. (10,416 ASNs vs. 3,500 End-user ORGs). (Page 14 of the same document).

While I presume that the average number of ASNs per end-user organization may be >1, I would be willing to bet that it is less than 2. So, if we presume that ≤7,000 of those 10,416 ASNs are for End-user ORGs, the end-user portion of that revenue drops to ≤$700,000.

In other words, the entire structure is a proposal to provide relatively small discounts to most ISPs at the cost of putting a huge additional burden on end-users and ISPs that happen to fall into the wrong side of fee-bucket-realignment. I will point out that for the most part, only 56 very large ISPs are in this category and their fees double from $16,000/year to $32,000/year (with the possible additional cost of $100/asn on top of that).

While many organizations receive roughly a 10% discount in their fees, those that are unfortunate enough to be on the wrong side of these realignments are hit with 2, 3, 4, 5, or even as much as 10x increases in their fees.

Owen