[arin-ppml] Alternative to arbitrary transfers

[William Herrin]

On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 4:56 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm at ipinc.net> wrote:
> 4) ARIN modify pricing schedules to more closely bring prices of
> IPv4 addressing in alignment across ALL allocations - in other words,
> remove the discount for ISP's with large quantities of IPv4 - and
> institute a temporary "credit" program to those ISP's who return
> blocks they are already paying for.
>
> Check the current price list - the largest holders pay the least
> amount of money per IPv4 address.  Big disincentive to returning
> IPv4.

Ted,

If we ignore the elephant in the room (big orgs vote), there are
subtle problems with this idea that you may not have considered.

When you flat-tax the cost per address, do you just collect more money
from the big orgs? Or do you keep ARIN's budget the same and lower the
cost to the small orgs?

As anyone familiar with bureaucracies will tell you, they expand to
fit the budget. If you grow ARIN's budget then ARIN grows as a
regulatory bureaucracy. This is not a good thing.  In order for the
new staff to justify their presence, they add details to the
compliance process. When all is said and done, every dollar you add to
a bureaucracy adds ten dollars in indirect costs borne by the
customers (by which I mean you), auditing systems and preparing
documentation, usually far past the point of diminishing returns.

If you shrink the small org's payments, you shrink them a lot. A whole
lot. As in a /22 is in the same cost ballpark as a domain name. For
individuals, squatting addresses is a chancy long play. You have to
invest now while addresses are available, you have to hold them until
there's someone willing to buy them and you have to hope that no
policy change in between doesn't leave you stranded. You're unlikely
to chance $1250 on it and you certainly won't do so more than once.

At $50 for a /22, the odds look very different. Another $50 to
register a company and a couple ISP friends to write you no-dollar
no-service contracts which look good on paper and you're in the game.
Better, each of those shell companies is transferable under the
existing policy and will almost certainly remain so.

You could cause precisely the problem that you're trying to prevent.

Regards,
Bill Herrin

-- 
William D. Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
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