[arin-discuss] fee waivers

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

On 6/24/2010 8:13 PM, John Curran wrote:
> On Jun 24, 2010, at 9:53 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
> How do you believe the fees should be structured 20 years
> from now with respect to IPv6?  If one presumes that 98%
> of the ISPs will be obtaining a single /32 allocation,
> should the fees be the same for all of these organizations
> or would you advocate a different model?
>

I would advocate the larger ISPs (larger meaning more users)
pay more for the same exact
reason the US Government's income tax system is progressive.
The larger operators gain far more financial benefit from the
existence of ARIN to keep things orderly than the smaller operators
do, just like people making a lot of money in the US have far
more interest in a government that preserves order and puts
thieves in jail and repairs the roads and all of that, then
poor people who have nothing worth stealing and no car. :-)

However the problem is one of visibility and definition and
how do you determine how large an org is.

At the current time, ISP's are essentially forced to publically
report their customer counts to each other.  That is, if I as
an ISP know that ISP X has just obtained an allocation from ARIN,
since all their allocations are public, I can roughly calculate their
customer base size by the 80% rule.  It's easy to base a fee
scheme on size this way since everyone knows what's what and
nobody can accuse ARIN of collusion with certain networks since
everyone's dirty laundry is on the table and we can all see it.

Under IPv6, ISP's are now going to be afforded a privacy about
their internal operations that they never had.  Under IPv6 only
I cannot calculate what any of my competitors sizes are because
few to none of them will ever request multiple IPv6 allocations
and thus I won't know if they are at 2% or 80% of their IPv6
allocation.

Granted, I can query whois but because the whois database is
such a mess right now, that data isn't trustworthy.  And even
when it finally becomes trustworthy when ARIN finishes
cleaning out the garbage POC entries, since ISP's today only
really feel the pressure to insert whois data in order to
be able to justify for more IPv4 addresses, under IPv6 if
they aren't ever planning on obtaining another IPv6 allocation
it's easy to see that there will be little incentive for them
to add records into whois.  So that data will be highly
underreported except by the very largest ISPs who will be
getting more than the minimum IPv6 allocations and will
thus be forced to report accurately to meet the 80% rule.

My guess is when most ISP's start to understand this, they will
be extremely uninterested in changing it.  This is competitive
data, ya know.

And without visibility of the ISP's actual size and utilization,
fee schemes based on the size of the allocation (such as the
current one) will be essentially unworkable.  Sure, ARIN can
faddle and fardle around with a progressive scheme by trying
to get ISP's to privately report utilization to them but that's
just opening the door to a lot of cranks to accuse ARIN of
favoritism.  Not to mention the compliance will be horrendous
unless ARIN does 3rd party auditing which will drive costs
sky high.

ARIN is likely to see a big fee squeeze in the next decade. ISPs
will not want to report utilization data to ARIN or to each other
and will want to have everyone pay the same flat fee - but I
suspect that in order to fund ARIN this flat fee will be even
more regressive than the ARIN fees are now.  To maintain it ARIN
will have to raise fees and that will push even more of the
small ISPs out of the game.  The small ISP's will fight this and
ARIN will be pressured to keep fees low - and since (as you I
believe have pointed out before) the small ISP's have the voting
power in numbers within ARIN, they will get their way.  Besides,
we aren't dumb and we all know that Internet innovation comes
from the smaller operators and ARIN would be doing a huge disservice
to the Internet to do anything to push more of them out of business.

I'd have to ask you this.  How many ISP's who are CURRENTLY running
on an IPv4 Medium/Large/X-Large allocation will be able to switch
to a IPv6 /32 Small allocation once IPv6 is in force - and once
they start dropping their IPv4 allocations they will be moving
DOWN the fee scale.  How many customers can an ISP serve off of
a /18 of IPv4 - and can they serve that same number off a /32 IPv6?
I would think that they can, wouldn't you?


Ted

> /John
>
>