[arin-discuss] fee waivers

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

On 6/25/2010 10:50 PM, Owen DeLong wrote:
>
> On Jun 25, 2010, at 11:48 AM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
>
>
> Interesting... I would advocate overhauling the US Government
> Income Tax system and replacing it with a flat tax along the lines
> of Malcolm Forbes "Fair Tax" proposal for much the same reason
> I think the current system of fees at ARIN is reasonable and just.
>

Yep, you and the rest of the Libertarians and their reincarnation
as tea party come from the same page.

> I actually don't buy this argument. Absent such a government, the
> very wealthy have little trouble hiring their own private armed security
> willing to do far more than the police are able to do to protect their
> interest.

Why should they when it's cheaper to have the taxpayers do it for
them?

> In fact, statistically, people of lesser financial means are
> far more likely to be victims of such crimes than people of significant
> means and the government is rarely able to effectively prosecute
> the kind of crimes that do usually befall people of means (mostly
> committed by other people of means, amusingly enough).
>

It would take 200 years of ripping off car stereos at the current
rate to equal the amount of money that Bernie Madoff made off with.

The rich have far, far, far more to lose.  Far more.

But, we could probably have a lot of fun debating politics for the
next week or so.  Getting back to the topic:

>> 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.
>>
> Good actors are still required to publish Whois records for their
> delegations.
>

Right, but I'm talking about assumptions that you can depend on.

Take for example mandatory car insurance.  I live in a state
with mandatory auto insurance.  My own insurance policy has
a section called "uninsured motorist coverage" that covers me
in case I get hit by a driver without insurance.  The COST of
raising limits on that section is VERY SMALL compared to the other 
sections of the policy, such as personal injury.

Why?  Because the insurance company knows that everyone in my
state has a vested interest in maintaining auto insurance - not
because it's required under the law, but because every driver knows
that in MY state if you DON'T have auto insurance and are in
an accident that you WILL get ticketed, and even if the accident
wasn't "your fault", when you go to put in a claim at the other
insurance company, they will automatically deny it once they see
you have no insurance and claim the accident was your fault.  Because 
without auto insurance you are very unlikely to have enough money to 
fight them in court for what you deserve.

A "good actor" driver is going to carry auto insurance in my state
because it's required by law.  A "bad actor" is going to carry it
because of the fear of what will happen to them if they DON'T carry
it - not just fear of civil penalties by the government.  Thus, the
assumption that there will be very few uninsured drivers in my state
is a BANKABLE assumption, which is why that section of my policy
is very cheap to raise limits on.

As I see it, for an IPv6-ONLY org, who gets their minimum allocation
of IPv6, yes if they are "good guys" they will make an attempt
to do what is write and publish SWIPS.  But if they are bad guys
there's NO downside to NOT publishing SWIPS.  Unlike the car
insurance thing.  Thus, it is NOT a bankable assumption that
any specific org I'm interested in is a "good guy"

If ARIN starts pulling IPv6-only allocations from orgs who are
paying the fee but who are filing no SWIPS then that WOULD be
a bankable assumption.  But, ARIN has no incentive to do that
either.   We have plenty of IPv6, no need to take any of it away
from orgs that have it assigned.

Where's Milton when you need him?  He would I think do a good
job of explaining the economic incentives that will be in play
once the Internet is IPv6-only.

>> 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
>
> The good news is there isn't much IPv6 cruft in there yet, so, the
> IPv6 cleanup should be relatively easy. The majority of the mess
> is historic and IPv4 related.
>

True.

>> 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.
>>
> Perhaps we need policy allowing allocations to be reduced or
> revoked if there are not enough SWIP entries to justify the
> space, or, in cases where there is documented verifiable
> underreporting?
>

That is as likely to pass as a law against hoarding glass jars -
for IPv6.  It would have been a useful tool to use against IPv4
hoarders if it had been passed a few years ago.  I think that there
was some concern with that a few years ago.  But at the time some
people (IMHO) rather wanted to encourage hoarding of IPv4 because they
felt the sooner it was used up the sooner we could get on with
the IPv6 transition.

>> 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.
>>
> Fortunately, ISPs are not the majority of orgs receiving resources
> from ARIN these days. I do not know if they constitute a majority
> of the membership any more, or not. Certainly it would be relatively
> easy to overcome that fact if they do.
>
>> 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.
>>
> If it is, as you say, then, the small ISPs could, theoretically make the
> jumps in fees as you go up in size even larger.
>
> However, I don't think most small ISPs feel the need to do this.
>
>> 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
>
> I would suspect very few given that I know of at least one ISP that just
> transitioned from the IPv4 small to IPv4 medium to IPv4 large and has
> nearly exhausted most of their IPv6 /32 and is looking at applying for
> additional IPv6 space today.
>

Why speculate?  John should know the answer to this.  I'm interested in
his response.

Ted

>> 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?
>>
> Assuming business customers where /29 is the smallest practical
> assignment (even if you just do it as 2 /30s for a point-to-point and
> a CPE router+PC) you have 11 bits = 2048 theoretical customers
> without allowing for infrastructure and other overhead.
>
> A /32 gives you 65,536 /48 sized customers or 16.7Million /56
> customers. A /32 really is equivalent to at least a /16, and, much
> more like a /8 in the IPv4 world, but, IPv6 customers will be
> inherently larger consumers of addresses, so, there's not really
> a valid comparison there.
>
> If I were to guess where things will settle out:
>
> All x-small and small IPv4 ISPs will probably survive fine as IPv6 small.
>
> Some medium IPv4 will probably be OK in IPv6 small, some will probably
> need to be medium, a few may become large or even x-large.
>
> Most large IPv4 ISPs will likely become IPv6 large or possibly x-large
> in the near future, possibly even entering the xx-large category.
>
> Most x-large IPv4 ISPs will be x-Large IPv6 ISPs fairly quickly, possibly even
> xx-large.
>
> I know the ISP I mentioned above is likely to become an X-Large IPv6
> ISP on their next application to ARIN.
>
> Owen
>
>