[arin-ppml] simple question about money

[Howard, W. Lee]

> how would one find out what _does_ motivate the pricing 
> policies? 

As Treasurer, I try to be as open and clear as possible. 
The original guidance provided when ARIN was formed was
that fees should be set only high enough to cover ARIN's
costs, including a sufficient reserve to provide stability.


> Are the economic assumptions underlying ARIN fees 
> stated anywhere in ARIN documents? 

Other than the requirement that ARIN is a not-for-profit as
defined by the IRS 501(c)6, there is no such statement in 
the Articles of Incorporation or Bylaws, and nothing in the 
Fee Schedule (which is already hard enough to read).

There are also various public statements I've made, along 
the lines of "cover ARIN's costs."  Others on the Board of 
Trustees have said much the same.


> Are there archives of 
> discussions regarding that topic? 

You could search this PPML or the members mailing list
(arin-discuss) here:
http://www.arin.net/mailing_lists/index.html
You can also search public policy and member meeting 
archives here:
http://www.arin.net/meetings/minutes/index.html

> 
> A post by M. Dillon indicated that fees were set by ARIN 
> members/officers only, which is appropriate enough. However, 
> he also expressed an opinion that the topic of address fees 
> was off-limits for the public policy list. I would have to 
> disagree with that. 

As a membership organization, ARIN operates as instructed by
its membership.  Part of ARIN's foundation is an open public
policy process, but fees are generally not considered to be
policy.

> In the emerging environment of v4 
> depletion, etc., the fees people pay (directly or indirectly) 
> for IP addresses will be one of _the_ major public policy 
> issues for the next five years or so. It will have a major 
> impact on address conservation, route aggregation, the v6 
> migration, etc. Of course, discussion of that issue here does 
> not constitute some kind of a assertion that fee levels 
> should be set here, but as the unclear responses to Brian's 
> original question shows, everyone could benefit from a wider 
> discussion of the relationship between address utilization 
> and fee structures.

Of course, people can debate anything they want, within the
constraints of the AUP, http://www.arin.net/mailing_lists/aup.html 


Lee


> 
> Milton Mueller
> Professor, Syracuse University School of Information Studies 
> XS4All Professor, Delft University of Technology
> ------------------------------
> Internet Governance Project:
> http://internetgovernance.org
> 
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