[ARIN-consult] Consultation on Proposed 2018 Fee Schedule Changes

[John Curran]

On 9 Apr 2018, at 6:46 PM, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
> 
> And you (and the board) somehow felt that sticking the entirety of this fee increase to the 15%
> without any changes to the other 75% was a good idea why?

ARIN’s expenses are principally recovered from the 5,750 registration services plan organizations;
these organizations pay fees ranging from $250 year to $256,000 USD per year, i.e. just over $2500
each on average and about $14.4M USD annually in total.

There are approximately 15 thousand ARIN end-user customers who collectively pay $2.9M in fees;
approximately $200 annually on average, and that would rise to $300 annually on average with the
proposed fee increase.

If there is to be a fee increase, than an increase to the end-user fees has the benefit of being spread
over more organizations and yields a more equitable recovery ARIN’s expenses while still operating
under the current fee framework.  

ARIN has significant fixed expenses and while one can argue that end-users who don’t need anything 
other than stable registry operations shouldn’t have to pay more to ARIN, one could just as easily argue 
that IP addresses for ISPs that don’t need any services in a year shouldn’t result in their significantly 
larger fees.  In the end, it is clear that all customers benefit from the registry, even if no makes a single 
change or request all year.

> Why isn’t the board asking about a corresponding increase to ISP fees?
> 
> If we spread this increase across all constituents instead of just end-users and facilitators,
> seems to me that the increase per ORG would be significantly less, would it not?

Obviously one could vary the allocation of revenue increase among the two constituencies to
achieve any desired outcome, but If evenly spread by number of organizations, it would not 
yield a significantly different outcome (changing the divisor from 15000 to 20000 total would 
mean a $35/year per object maintenance increase instead of a $50/year per object increase.)  

Thanks,
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN)