[ARIN-consult] Consultation on ARIN Fees

[John Curran]

On 10 May 2021, at 7:11 AM, Glen A. Pearce <arin-consult at ve4.ca<mailto:arin-consult at ve4.ca>> wrote:

I'd have to say that I agree with Owen here that organizations with an RSA and a LRSA should only have to pay the higher of the two fees for their LRSA IPv4 resource (price cap included) or their RSA IPv6 resources rather than both added together even if they are under 2 separate contracts.   So in Owen's case this would mean paying $250/year (based on his /48 of IPv6) until the capped fee on his legacy IPv4 creeps over that.
...
I think this is a reasonable accommodation for people that didn't actually have to pay anything but stepped forward to pay what at the time they thought was a reasonable amount towards keeping the registry running.

Glen -

Those who stepped forward received the numerous benefits including clear rights via contract and access to enhanced services developed by investment from this community.  The also received a significant cap on their fees compared to all other registry customers, and have been benefiting from that for more than a decade.

I tend to think of legacy registrations as the "native land" of the internet, at least that's the analogy I use when explaining it to someone.

Alas, legacy resource assignments were more akin to placement on government-controlled reservations absent any actual legal rights and/or mechanism for self-rule…  the formation of ARIN was specifically so that Internet community could engage in self-determination over their IP number resources; "Creation of ARIN will give the users of IP numbers (mostly Internet service providers, corporations and other large institutions) a voice in the policies by which they are managed and allocated within the North American region” [1]

Ultimately in the far future when IPv6 is dominant and IPv4 is only used for the niche of "retro-computing" and it's users have to tunnel IPv4 over IPv6 to use it none of this will really matter as everyone will either have to pay for their IPv6 space or make do with space assigned by their ISP and any IPv4 space, legacy or otherwise, won't have much use outside that small niche.

ARIN's present provisioning of basic registration services without contract or fee for IPv4 legacy resource holders is not assured into “the far future” and (as has been raised during this consultation) is probably worth revisiting once we’ve achieved consistent fee schedule for all customers.  It would not surprise me to ultimately find out that those legacy resource holders who stepped forward and entered into the LRSA (including its significant cap of total annual fees) may actually prove to be far more shrewd in the end than you imagine.

Thanks for the feedback!
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
American Registry for Internet Numbers

[1] https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=102819 - "Internet Moves Toward Privatization / IP numbers handled by non-profit”


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