[arin-ppml] maintenance fees for legacy space holders

Thu Sep 4 21:11:44 EDT 2008

John,

What you say makes sense. When I got my addresses no one ever said that
fifteen years later we are now going to charge you $100.

I have no problem paying a reasonable fee so ARIN can continue to keep the
intrastructure up-to-date.

I understand that I will have to pay to get a ipv6 block, at least that is
how I understand things.

But, I'm not ready to do that yet since I don't use ipv6.

J. R.

--------------------

J. R. Westmoreland

E-mail: jr at jrw.org

From: arin-ppml-bounces at arin.net [mailto:arin-ppml-bounces at arin.net] On
Behalf Of John Paul Morrison
Sent: Thursday, September 04, 2008 6:40 PM
To: Bill Darte
Cc: arin-ppml at arin.net
Subject: Re: [arin-ppml] maintenance fees for legacy space holders

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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