[ARIN-consult] Consultation on ASN Fee Harmonization

[Owen DeLong]

> On Jul 10, 2023, at 22:27, Ross Tajvar <ross at tajvar.io> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> While I do think there's merit to Steve's point that ASN-only customers have chosen not to become members, I have to say, I would care about this a lot more (at all, really) if the fees were higher. For a business doing anything real, $250/yr is negligible. Even $500 or $1000 is not a big deal...keeping an LLC open costs a few hundred dollars a year. Buying transit (in order to use the ASN) costs a couple hundred dollars a MONTH.

Not every ASN holder is a business.

> I understand that there is administrative overhead associated with maintaining a registry of internet numbers, keeping whois services highly available, handling support requests, etc. ARIN must recover these costs by charging fees to its customers. I couldn't say what the average cost per ASN is (maybe John has some estimate there?), but $250/yr for up to 3 ASNs does not seem wildly unreasonable to me.

Given that RIPE seems to be able to do it for $20-30/ASN (so let’s be generous and call it $100 for 3 ASNs and the fact that almost everything else imaginable is more expensive in Europe than in north America, I’d have to say that $250 for 3 ASNs does seem rather excessive for “equitable cost recovery” in this case.

> I also think there is value in the added simplicity achieved by adopting a unified fee structure.

I’m guessing you’re not one of the people on the pay-more-per-year for the same thing you had (and possibly other things you don’t really care about) side of this equation.

I’m not on that side of this equation this time, but I have been in the past in other fee structure changes by ARIN. I will say that IMHO, the value of that simplicity paled
in comparison to the amount of money it was intended to cost me.

So much os that I transferred some (most of the paid ones) of my resources out of the ARIN region to avoid said fee changes.

Owen