[ARIN-consult] Consultation on Approaches for Adjusting the ARIN Registration Services Plan Fee Schedule
John Curran
jcurran at arin.net
Wed Apr 3 13:53:45 EDT 2024
> On Apr 3, 2024, at 1:20 PM, William Herrin <bill at herrin.us> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Apr 3, 2024 at 9:40 AM ARIN <info at arin.net> wrote:
>> Introduce a structured approach to fee adjustments, allowing
>> for an annual increase of no more than 5%, subject to approval
>> by the Board of Trustees. This strategy aims to offer a predictable
>> and manageable escalation in fees, aligning more closely with the
>> budget planning processes of many organizations within our community.
Hello Bill -
You’ve got some great questions – let's go through each:
> That's great if inflation stays far enough below 5% to allow for the
> cost of new services, but what happens when it doesn't? Break the
> implicit promise of stability in the fees?
So it is not the “cost of new services” that is the concern, it’s rather the routine
increase in ARIN’s own operations costs that we have to deal with… While we do
make efforts to rebid significant suppliers (e.g., benefits, telecommunications, etc.)
in order to manage costs, there are still times when we are unable to avoid seeing
cost increases in the services that we contract. In addition, we do provide
competitive compensation to the staff, and these results in a 2 to 3% increase
in our salary pool each year.
As for “new services”, we generally can accommodate the various changes that
are requested (whether features or policy changes) with the existing resources;
we balance new feature and maintenance development tasks as needed for this.
> And what happens when you want to restructure the fees? Is the 5%
> promise simply void since the new fees are discontinuous from the old?
> Like what happened to the LRSA folks?
Having finally achieved a fee schedule that treats all parties equitably, I would
like to think we’re past the point of further restructuring of the fee schedule…
However, to be clear, the question before the community is whether we come
every 2 or 3 years with a proposal to make an adjustment to the existing fee
schedule that might be quite significant (i.e. potentially more than 10%) or
would the community prefer that the Board do a small adjustment annually
based on increase in costs – an approach that is typical in some industries.
> And philosophically, should ARIN be experiencing a 5% growth that
> isn't tied to a comparable growth in its customer base? Isn't that
> called bloat?
As noted, our costs increase nominally each year based on underlying
vendors and staff cost, and this does not directly correspond to either
number of members or number resources in the registry. In fact, we may
easily see a reduction in number of members given that the structure of the
fee schedule encourages consolidation of organizational accounts when
such is possible (i.e., one can increase the number resources under an RSA
by 4x before seeing the fee category increment and corresponding service fee
increase by only 2x.)
I hope this helps explain somewhat the situation, and the question being asked
of the members–it is really a question of how the nominal changes in costs get
accommodated; would the community prefer this to occur routinely as a matter
of course, or would it prefer revisiting the fees every few years (and potentially
considering a significantly larger increase at that time).
Thanks!
/John
John Curran
President and CEO
American Registry for Internet Numbers
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