[ppml] ARIN IP conservation and FREE IP Addresses

[Jason Schiller]

On Sat, 6 Oct 2007, Stephen Sprunk wrote:

> The point is that right now, all your (VZB's) new addresses are _free_ from 
> ARIN because you use/waste so much of them.  That gives your sales people 
> _no_ reason not to give customers as much as they want at no extra charge 
> other than the general practice of squeezing them for as much as possible. 
> This _is_ used as a competitive tactic -- mega-ISPs will give address space 
> to customers at no extra charge as one way to win deals because their 
> smaller competitors have to pay up to $5/yr/IP to ARIN (which they have to 
> add to the customer's bill, one way or another, unlike you) just to get the 
> same space.  Instead of encouraging customers to conserve, a mega-ISP 
> encourages customers to waste by giving them free IPs -- which they may 
> never even use.  If the mega-ISPs actually paid for their addresses, they'd 
> be encouraging customers to conserve like their smaller competitors are 
> forced to.

I don't know about other ISPs, but we require customers to justify all of
thier IP space.  This way it is possible to get IP space from ARIN when we
need it.  Our customers conserve IP space because we uphold ARIN policies.

> 
> > Charging for IP addresses gives the impression that the
> > addresses are property.
> > As a result, it leads to the conclusion that the only justification
> > required to get said addresses is if one pays enough money.
> 
> The NRPM does cover that, but I doubt it's enforced much in practice.  In 
> the real world, yes, customers can get as much address space as they're 
> willing to pay for.  The problem is that some LIRs the customers are paying 
> to get that space from have to pay for it, while others do not (and take 
> those fees as pure profit).  Please explain to me how that's remotely 
> fair...

Verizon Business does not charge for space, so our customers do not get as
much as they can pay for.  Instead they get only as much as they can
justify.  

I do understnd your point though.  When customers pay for address space,
they feel entilted to as much address space as they pay for.  And since
sales people want to sell as many services as possible, they are likely to
they and pile on extra IP addresses to raise the cost.


> 
> > The question I have is do we want to limit the use of IP addresses
> > based on address utilization or based on the amount of money
> > an org is willing to pay for each address?
> 
> The utilization requirement still applies.  Requiring payments in addition 
> to (not instead of) encourages people to use less than they can justify, 
> i.e. conserve.
> 
As I said above using payment as a justification (even in part) for IP
addresses muddies the waters.

__Jason