[arin-discuss] IPv6 as justification for IPv4?

[Owen DeLong]

On Apr 15, 2013, at 10:51 , rlc at usfamily.net wrote:

> You ARE new to this.  If you had been around longer, you would have realized
> that large players run the show at ARIN.  Otherwise, the fees would have been
> proportional to the size of the netblocks on IPv4, at least since the time that
> people started to come to grips with the mathematics of IPv4.
> 

I don't believe that for a second.

I have been an active member of this community since before ARIN was formed
and have been active in the ARIN policy process since not long after it was formed.

In the early days, the process was clearly dominated by large players, but I don't
believe that for a second today (or in the last ~5 years and possibly longer).

I've worked for ISPs of all sizes ranging from running my own neighbornet-style
ISP up to and including several global reach ISPs of various flavors. Each and
every one of those constituencies is as well represented in ARIN's process as
its members choose to be. ANYONE with an email address can participate
in the policy process and every member of ARIN gets one vote in all ARIN
elections.

> Instead, the big guys mumble that ARIN has administrative economies of scale
> with them.  So what?  If ARIN REALLY wanted to encourage large-scale adoption
> of IPv6, they would have squeezed the big guys.  Never happened, never will.

I hate to break it to you, but as much as I favor reduced fees for smaller providers
and generally like to root for the little guy, there are certain economic realities
here which you seem to want to ignore.

1.	Little guys are often less well versed and less experienced in ARIN processes.
	This means staff tends to spend more time going back and forth on their
	requests even though they are for smaller amounts of address space.

2.	Larger providers tend to have better internal records and have their data
	better prepared when submitting additional requests to ARIN. While this
	isn't universal, overall, it results in easier processing of requests for
	larger providers most of the time.

This DOES mean that per address, the bigger ISPs cost ARIN less. That's not
the big guys mumbling, that's the actual math of the situation.

ARIN staff does an excellent job of applying the policies set by the community
in a fair and even-handed way. If large players so dominated the process,
we wouldn't have direct-assignment /22s, IPv6 PI, or lately direct assignment /24s.
In a process dominated by large providers, none of those proposals would have
achieved consensus.

Owen