[arin-discuss] Community Consultation: Future Direction for the ARIN Fee Schedule

[John Curran]

On Oct 17, 2014, at 12:09 AM, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
> If the level of policy development activity is truly a driving cost, then what about charging relative to the amount of policy work being done. I notice that since the rewrite of the v6 policy a while back, the vast majority of our policy work and virtually all of the controversy is v4. Perhaps v6 should be relatively cheaper as a result and v4 should be relatively more expensive?

Some cost data by function is provided in Appendix C; registry development 
(which includes both support of policy development and implementation) are 
50% of ARIN's annual expenses.

Recognize that there will always been some registry development, either for 
maintenance or driven by requirements other than policy changes, but the 
level of policy development is something to think about for a long-term model.  

It's very difficult to consider on shorter times frames or from an incentive 
basis; e.g. we must lock in the number and size of public policy meetings and
hotels more than 12 months in advance in order to have availability, staff 
support slowly changes, etc.  We effectively have to plan for being able to 
support the present level of policy development short-term unless we are very
confident that requirements will be different.

> I think this is probably a bad idea, but if we are going to talk about policy development as a driving cost, then really most of that drive is about manipulating the IPv4 portable seating apparatus on the deck. 

A policy development process open to everyone is fairly foundational part 
of ARIN; my raising the question of long-term cost model was more focused 
on whether, given the present trajectory, it is possible to build upon an 
assumption of less policy development either after IPv4 regional free pool 
depletion or after some number of years given increasing IPv6 deployment.

/John

John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN