[arin-discuss] IPv6 as justification for IPv4?

[Owen DeLong]

On Apr 16, 2013, at 7:53 AM, rlc at usfamily.net wrote:

> If I understand the ARIN revenue "needs" as approximately $8 per class C
> correctly, that means we are paying almost 6x more than that (in our particular
> case).  It would seem that a lot of you on the list don't seem to care that big
> ISP's get their IP's at a discounted rate, thus putting the rest of us at a
> market disadvantage.  I knew exactly where the thread go when I pulled it
> (nowhere), but it is amusing to watch the action.
> 

Your first mistake is in having the perception that you are paying for IP addresses.
You are not. They are not property. You are paying for IP address registration
services and smaller organizations get those same services for less money than
larger organizations.

You can ask anyone in the industry and I think my history also speaks for itself.
I tend to be pretty sympathetic to the smaller organizations. I, myself am a pretty
small end-user organization as well as an employee of a large ISP organization.
I also have clients who are XX-S, X-S, and Small ISPs.

Pricing ARIN services per IP address does not make any sense to me because
it has no correlation with how ARIN's costs are affected. I'm all for having fees
that are proportional to organization size for the most part, but it has to be
logarithmic rather than linear in nature (4x org size should not be 4x fees,
but 4x org size = 2x fees is probably close to right for the most part).

(I'll note that the current fee structure is roughly that).

IMHO, the only problem with the current adopted fee structure is at the low end
of IPv6 and all that is needed is a better mechanism than allocation size for
determining organization size at the low end of IPv6.

Mainly because I want to see us avoid creating powerful economic incentives
for organizations to shoe--horn their customers into undersized IPv6 assignments.
I recognize that some organizations intend to do this shoe-horning anyway, even
without an economic incentive. That's unfortunate, but it is allowed in policy.

However, there's a difference between allowing a certain amount of harmful
behavior by independent choice (necessary in a free society) vs. providing an
economic reward for that behavior (unnecessary and harmful in general).

> I did see somewhat of a new bizarre response this time around, though.  Someone
> actually likened this to getting the rich to "pay their fair share".  Perhaps
> they didn't notice, but nobody was advocating for a progressive tax.   Quite
> the contrary, we are talking about a "flat tax" to replace the current heavily
> REGRESSIVE tax.  Thus, that was one of the most preposterous responses ever.

It sounds good when you put it that way, but it ignores the economic realities because
it is based on the incorrect assertion about what you are actually paying for and
of the costs associated with the actual services you are receiving for your money.

> I have heard continual whining about lack of IPv6 adoption, while ARIN refuses
> to adopt policies to encourage it.  Stop the whining, or do something about it.

We have adopted a number of policies to encourage IPv6 adoption, actually.

I don't think a per-ip address fee structure would encourage IPv6 adoption.

If you have a proposal for policy that would do so, please submit it to policy at arin.net
and let's discuss it.

> In the meantime, the big ISP's will continue to pull the strings.

Repeating this claim doesn't make it true. The strings are pulled by the people
who participate in the policy discussions and the members who vote in the ARIN
elections. Neither of these is dominated by large ISPs.

Owen