[arin-discuss] IPv6 as justification for IPv4?

[rlc at usfamily.net]

Have any of you ever calculated the amount of money ARIN charges per ip (IPv4)
for the little guy vs the big guy?  I am willing to spot you that bigger ISP's
have better records and are more efficient in dealing with ARIN.  So 
what? ARIN could generate all the money they need to operate (and then 
some) with
pricing proportional to total ip space.  And, in the process, they would have
actually encouraged the larger ISP's to adopt IPv6 much earlier, which, in
turn, would have pulled everyone else along.

Quite in fact, they should have been handing out IPv6 space for free to early
adopters who were already paying for IPv4 and gradually ratcheting up the
per-ip cost of IPv4, if their goal was to expedite IPv6 adoption, which it
clearly isn't.

More to the point, there seems to be a peculiar distaste for market-based
solutions.


Quoting Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com>:

>
> 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
>
>