[arin-ppml] maintenance fees for legacy space holders

John Paul Morrison jmorrison at bogomips.com
Thu Sep 4 20:39:46 EDT 2008


I never said it was worth nothing. Owen  Delong asked how to justify a 
different pricing model and I simply gave some examples.

Maybe it should be $10/year or maybe $10 every time someone changes 
their whois or DNS record, or maybe it's a sunk cost - it's net $0/year 
but that doesn't make it worthless. I don't know if ARIN has an 
endownment, but maybe they have capital assets, software etc. that were 
given to them.  The biggest "Legacy" ARIN inherited is not the Legacy IP 
assignments but rather it is the recurring income they receive from 
fees, derived from administering a database of numbers (the Banks must 
be envious!) -  for a protocol developed and funded largely by 
governments, military, academic and corporate research groups. I'm not 
going to moan here about all the hard work of the legacy holders and how 
they deserve a free ride, but I'm not going to cry about that fact either.

As Cliff Bedore and Eric Westbrook point out though, it isn't just about 
the money.


On 9/4/2008 4:59 PM, Bill Darte wrote:
>
> The services rendered to legacy holders is real and if you don't think 
> it is worth anything then simply say.
> Please stop providing any and all services that are rendered on behalf 
> of legacy addresses that have taken effect since the initial allocation.
> Fair?
> bd
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: arin-ppml-bounces at arin.net on behalf of John Paul Morrison
> Sent: Thu 9/4/2008 4:53 PM
> To: arin-ppml at arin.net
> Subject: Re: [arin-ppml] maintenance fees for legacy space holders
>
> On 9/4/2008 1:17 PM, Owen DeLong wrote:
> > The problem comes in trying to justify why you have a different
> > pricing model for Legacy than for everyone else who is (and has
> > been) paying the standard fees for years.
> >  
> This isn't that hard.
>
> First of all, there was no fee specified at the time they were given.
> And IP addresses were given out, no strings attached, with no
> expectation that they would come back, so why would there be any
> expectation of a recurring charge? If an item was given away for free
> with no terms of service, how can one argue that a "service" whether
> it's whois/DNS, or PPML, be tacked on later and then charged for? Under
> that light, $10/year seems fair, even charitable of Legacy holders to
> pay, given there's likely been little change since the original
> assignments.
>
> Second, there's no real justification for any costs to Legacy holders.
> The addresses were given out while the administration of the Internet
> was publicly funded, by the NSF, CA*Net (in Canada) etc., so any real
> work has already been paid out of tax dollars. The allocation is simply
> an entry in a database, or back of a napkin for that matter. It's great
> that it's recorded in Whois, but it's not a requirement that it be 
> that way.
>
> For the sake of argument, someone could document all the Legacy
> allocations and publish an RFC and say 'that's the historical record'
> and do away with any whois, other requirements, or ARIN's involvement
> with all of Legacy space for that matter, and that would be the
> historical record for all time, unless anyone cared enough to make minor
> revisions as a courtesy. What's to distinguish one Legacy assignment
> from another? 127.0.0.0/8 is assigned in an RFC, so are the Class E
> addresses and many others. I'm pretty sure the RFC process pre-dates
> whois, especially since 811 prior RFCs were published before they got
> around to publishing the one for Whois, but I could be wrong. (And if
> this Legacy holders RFC were published on April 1, I think that would
> definitely absolve the Legacy holders of any obligation to chip in for
> their 1/5000th share of the costs of hosting and maintaining the RFCs!)
>
> Especially in light of IPv4 address exhaustion, would anyone like to
> reclaim 127.0.0.0/8 or the Class E space, or parts of Legacy space? Yes,
> of course if we had the chance to do it all over, we would do things
> differently, but we can't. If people don't like that, that's too bad. In
> practical terms, IP address assignments are permanent and irrevocable.
>
> > If we're going to drop the annual maintenance fee to some lower
> > level, I'd like to see that happen across the board rather than
> > just for legacy holders.  Thus, we'd need to calculate it
> > in those terms.
> >  
> It's sounding like it's just not worth the effort to collect a token
> amount.
> > Owen
> >
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