[arin-ppml] maintenance fees for legacy space holders

[Howard, W. Lee]

> 1. Is there any way to break out new 
> allocation/assignment/transfer expenses vs. general 
> maintenance, so that we can determine the share of expenses 
> attributable to folks who are doing nothing other than 
> holding on to legacy resources, not getting anything new, as 
> well as making sure that the fees for new resources 
> adequately cover the costs of evaluating justification that 
> policy requires?

I don't think it's possible.  I'm not sure how we would measure
the number of IN-ADDR lookups on legacy records only, or how 
many participants on the mailing list only hold legacy resources,
or how much outreach benefits that segment of the community 
alone.  I don't mean to be intractable, but I can't figure out 
how to frame the question in a specific enough way to get a 
meaningful answer.

> 2. What would the fees need to be if they were per-object 
> instead of per-org?  IMHO, this is the key to the whole "a 
> domain only costs $10/yr" argument.

Also a little tough to figure out.  Currently, we allow all 
objects to be rolled up into a single maintenance fee.  I 
haven't examined the records closely, but let's assume that
all Class A and B assignments are classful, and that the
average assignment size in Class C space is a /21 (there are
many Class Cs, but also a good number of CIDR /18 - /20).
let's say there are 90 Class A holders,
36*255=9000 Class B holders, and 
7*255*32=57,000 legacy objects in Class C space.

Approaching 67000 discrete legacy objects, so that's your
denominator.  You can do the math: 67k * $10 is $670,000.
That's 5% of ARIN's 2008 budget.

Would this be fairer?  

We could debate whether that's a fair share, but it would be
a matter of opinion of "fair."

It would mean that those with a single allocation (say, a 
Class A) pay a single low fee, while those with multiple
CIDR allocations pay several times as much.

It would increase the number of invoices and processing ARIN
has to do, but we don't have a way to track our cost-per-
transaction (it's still a fairly small organization).  Plus
the additional work tracking overdue fees, where it's easy
to imagine that tracking late payments could be multiples of
the fee itself.

Another note:  if you can return 25% of your address space,
we'll discount your fees under section 10(a) of the LRSA.

Once more, I'm trying to avoid defending the status quo 
merely because it's quo.  These are legitimate questions that
I think the Treasurer should hear and respond to.  It's true
that I'm prejudiced toward the openness and transparency and
level of service that ARIN provides, but you get to respond
to that prejudice directly, on this list and by voting.

Lee