[ARIN-consult] Consultation on ARIN Fees

[Owen DeLong]

> On Apr 20, 2021, at 09:26 , Gary Buhrmaster <gary.buhrmaster at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Apr 20, 2021 at 3:08 PM Dale W. Carder <dwcarder at es.net> wrote:
> 
> 
>>>    * Increasing the transfer processing fee to $500
>> 
>> I would think that the fee here should be the full cost recovery to process the
>> transaction.  Is that the case here?
> 
> I cannot imagine that a fixed price is full cost recovery
> for all recoveries and transactions.
> 
> Organizations which have a long history with ARIN
> under an RSA would presumably not take as much
> staff resources to vet as a case where one needs to
> establish the proper association of an org claiming
> to be the rightful successor for a legacy block which
> has not seen registry updates for decades (and
> may have changed business names, locations, phone
> numbers, and organizational members half a dozen
> times over that time period).
> 
> I would certainly prefer to see there to be a
> minimum, and probably a maximum, but otherwise
> have a sliding scale that would more accurately
> reflect the staff resources needed to determine
> appropriate entries and charge those that
> require more work a higher fee.  Perhaps a
> fee based on a few steps (trivial, simple, hard, really
> really really hard), but that only makes sense if
> the transfers that ARIN have made could be easily
> categorized into a small set of groups and there
> is a substantial distinction in the effort involved by
> staff for those groups.

Wouldn’t most of that fall under the ORG Create/Recovery
process prior to the transfer?

It does occur to me that rather than charging. $100 for
every ORG Create/ORG Recovery, it might make more
sense to charge a more nominal fee for simple ORG Creates
and allow for two fees for transfers:

e.g. $350 for transfers involving established ORGs with
	“clean title” for lack of a better term and
	$600 for transfers requiring an ORG Recovery or
	other investigation of provenance.

These numbers are just straw-man examples with no
research. I’ll leave it to staff if they wish to consider the
implications of this idea and approach.

> In any case, as long as $500 moves in the
> right direction of actual costs, it seems the
> correct (first?) step.

It certainly seems a viable first step and I’m not opposed to it,
but I wonder if we can’t do better.

Owen