[arin-ppml] [was Re: Millions of slashdotters are idle]

[Howard, W. Lee]

> > ARIN's job is not to 
> > establish market-based incentives for anything.
> > There's nothing inherently wrong with doing so, it's just that we'd 
> > need community consensus that we should do so.  To date, 
> there has not 
> > been member consensus that ARIN should increase fees by order(s) of 
> > magnitude in order to drive organizations away from IPv4.
> > 
> 
> It is disingenuous to claim that ARIN's job is not to 
> establish market-based incentives for anything.  ARIN already 
> engages in this, the IPv6 fee waiver a market-based 
> incentive, and the "greater of IPv4 or IPv6 costs" 
> registration policy is also a market-based incentive. 

I was pretty careful with my words there.  
You could not fairly say, "ARIN's job is to establish market-based
incentives."  You could argue that ARIN should (or should not)
make use of such incentives in pursuit of ARIN's mission.  You may
say that ARIN has used that particular tool in the past, but use
of that tool is not ARIN's primary objective.


>  And as 
> I recall both of those were from the ARIN board, not from the 
> membership.

No, both were clearly requested (you could say demanded) by the
community, mostly by the members.

> In addition, the sliding fees on IPv4 are also a market-based 
> incentive, although you may deny this, the fact of the matter 
> is that on a per-IP-address basis, the larger allocations are 
> cheaper.  ARIN favors the larger ISPs and networks in this manner.

That is an adventitious artifact of the intent of the fee schedule,
which was to roughly recover costs without creating too complex a
cost-recovery mechanism.  

> Further, the requirement that orgs go to upstream providers 
> for IP numbering unless they are large is also a market 
> incentive for the org to become large before obtaining a 
> portable allocation.

That's a policy requirement, not a market requirement.  Nobody
would increase their customer base just so they could get a 
postable allocation--that's backwards.

> Also, as I understand it, fee amounts are not set in the NPRM 
> and there is thus no mechanism for the membership to have any 
> consensus on fee amounts.

Fees are set by the Board, not the members directly.  That's 
because the Board pays close attention to the organization's 
finances, and while some members pay attention to ARIN's
finances, it would be unreasonable to expect all 3000 members 
to pay as much attention.  Many of you do, and I appreciate it.


ARIN-discuss is the mailing list for members.  The Finance 
Committee of the Board of Trustees has discussed every fee 
proposal that has been sent, whether via the formal Suggestion 
Process, by email to individual FinCom or Board members, or 
discussed on an ARIN mailing list.  

The fee structure is intended to recover costs, because that's 
what the members told the Board to do a long time ago.  If 
members want to direct the Board to do something else, it might 
be interesting for a member to raise the issue on ARIN-discuss.

Lee