[ARIN-consult] Community Consultation: Future Direction for the ARIN Fee Schedule

[William Herrin]

On Fri, Oct 10, 2014 at 12:24 PM, ARIN <info at arin.net> wrote:
> Following the adoption of the current ARIN Fee Schedule on 1 July 2013,
> the ARIN Board of Trustees convened a "Fee Structure Review Panel". The
> panel recently released the "ARIN Fee Structure Review Report" which
> provides alternative long-term directions for the ARIN fee schedule,
> outlining the potential merits of each.
>
> The full report is available at:
> https://www.arin.net/participate/acsp/community_consult/fee-structure-review.pdf

Hello,

I was very disappointed to see my 2012 campaign platform of no fees
for IPv6 in the short term completely ignored by the review panel.
Were you asleep? Seriously, I got half the votes I'd have needed to be
elected to the board on that platform. Is even that not enough for you
to evaluate the notion, even if only to state the reasons you think
it's a bad idea?

I'd like to see the cost of IPv6 reduced to $10/year or less for the
first assignment or allocation to an organization regardless of size
*until* IPv6 replaces IPv4 as the dominant protocol on the Internet.
Charging for IPv6 address now, as most organizations continue to
realize little or no revenue from it, slows adoption to no good
purpose.

Once IPv6 is the dominant driver on the Internet, its registry cost
will have to change. Even today's IPv6 fees are not enough to sustain
the organization once revenue from IPv4 fees begins its plunge. But
let's deal with that when the time is ripe for it. Charging more than
pocket change today just gets in the way of an already sluggish
uptake.


In IPv4 I'd like to see a cost schedule tied to the number of IP
addresses allocated. Perhaps not linearly, but it should diverge by no
more than a single order of magnitude across the range of allocations.
So, if a /24 costs $100 per year (39 cents per address) then a /8
should cost *at least* $655,000 per year (3.9 cents per address). Or
turn it around: if a /8 costs $32,000 per year (0.2 cents per address)
then a /24 should cost no more than $5.12 (2 cents per address).

When the cost per address diverges by not one or two, but three full
orders of magnitude (1000 times) between the largest address hoarders,
excuse me, address holders and the smallest, the system has a pretty
severe fairness problem.

Regards,
Bill Herrin


-- 
William Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
Owner, Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>
May I solve your unusual networking challenges?