[arin-discuss] fee waivers

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

On 6/23/2010 12:58 PM, John Curran wrote:
> On Jun 23, 2010, at 9:01 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
>
>> Frankly I've never understood how ARIN arrived at the fee AMOUNTS in
>> the first place,and the fact that those fees have NOT increased along
>> with inflation pretty much points to the notion that they are, to put
>> it bluntly, arbitrary.
>
> Ted -
>
>   For reference, the fee structure was put in place back at ARIN's
>   origin in order to provide a scaled distribution of costs across
>   a wide variety of different sized service providers and end user
>   organizations.  We've tried to keep the fees relatively "fair",
>   i.e. the fee schedule increases with size of resource usage but
>   not linearly, as ARIN's costs are greater for larger resource
>   applications but do not increase in a linear fashion.
>
>   With respect to the lack of increases in the fees, we've managed
>   to successfully lower fees numerous times as the total number of
>   members has increased, as the additional members are far greater
>   factor than inflation in the overall budget. (I'd also like to
>   note that this was reducing fees while also developing a 1 to 2
>   year operating reserve as is prudent to organization like ARIN).
>

You deserve kudos for that and I won't deny that.

>   So, the fees are not directly tied to the underlying cost of
>   specific services, but instead reflect an attempt to provide
>   for proportional contribution from the community as a whole.
>   Given the underlying reasoning of the fee schedule, I myself
>   would not characterize it as arbitrary.

John,  you and I have discussed this before - the fact is that with
the exception of content providers, every ISP on the Internet merely
reassigns those IP numbers they are getting from ARIN out to customers.

If you want to make the claim that ARIN is trying to track fees to
it's internal costs that's fine, but the fact is that doing it
this way greatly favors the large ISPs over the small ISP's because
both the large and small ISP are forced by market competitiveness to
charge customers the SAME amount for those IP addresses, and the
price-per-IP is much much smaller the larger the ISP.  Thus the
small ISP bears much more of the expense of the IP since they cannot
pass most of their cost of it along to their customer.

Within ARIN's own little world of it's non-profit company the IP
fee may not be arbitrary.  But on the Internet since we don't have
the detailed operational visibility of ARIN's expenses (and yes I've
looked at the posted financials, and no they don't have operational
detail) the fees look arbitrary.

But at this time, you and I are engaged in an accounting discussion
on a list where I'd guess that 90% of the readers don't even do
their own personal income taxes (they use HR block) let alone corporate
taxes so I strongly suspect that most have long since fallen asleep
reading this.

And also, IPv6 changes most of this since most ISP's are going to
get the minimum IPv6 allocation and never come back for more numbers,
thus I am contended for now with the fact that despite what ARIN
does with regards to fees, in 20 years or so most ISPs will be
paying the same amount.

Ted

>
> /John
>
> John Curran
> President and CEO
> ARIN
>
>
>
>