[ppml] Proposed Policy: IPv4 Countdown

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Luke S. Crawford [mailto:lsc at prgmr.com]
>Sent: Friday, March 16, 2007 1:30 PM
>To: Ted Mittelstaedt
>Cc: Kevin Kargel; ppml at arin.net
>Subject: RE: [ppml] Proposed Policy: IPv4 Countdown
>
>
>On Fri, 16 Mar 2007, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
>> The problem with this is that any of your competitors who have large
>> blocks of unused space, are simply going to field those cheaper addresses
>> and put you out of business.  Or if they are a lot bigger than
>you they are
>> going to subsidize the newer more expensive IP numbers they get,
>and still
>> undercut you.  Then once your bankrupt, they will jack prices up.  This
>> is what the cable companies did to a lot of smaller DSL providers.
>
>I was proposing that the price would be jacked up on all renewals as well
>as all new allocations.    Otherwise, you are correct, the proposal helps
>not at all.   (It is possible that ARIN's contracts prevent jacking up the
>price on renewals... in which case, my proposal was badly-researched and
>unworkable.)

ARIN's contracts do not prevent jacking up the fees.

The problem is that so far ARIN's policies say that the fees cover the
cost of maintaining allocation information.  This assumes that ARIN cannot
use fees as a tool to modify address consumption - although the fact that
ARIN has maintained a wavier of IPv6 fees is basically an attempt to
use fees as a tool to modify address consumption.

Since ARIN is a non-profit, if it raises fees in order to modify how
organizations consume addresses, you then have a situation where ARIN
is now a profit-making organization.  (or you have to find something to
spend all the additional money on)  If it's a profit-making company you
then cannot disallow other profit-making companies from selling IP
addresses.

Basically the end result of all of this is that it is difficult to make
lots of ARIN fee changes in order to attempt to enforce policy.  It's
not impossible, but it is difficult.  And certainly, the fee changes that
you can make will not be significant enough to modify the behavior of
most organizations with large allocations.

The best way to approach fees is to make other policy changes then let
ARIN decide what to do about the fees.  For example if we all voted to
have ARIN become more agressive about retiring abandonded IPv4 blocks
then ARIN would have to hire more people to do this which would increase
their costs, they could then thus raise IPv4 fees.  Whether they would
actually raise just IPv4 fees or raise all fees is anyone's guess.

Ted