[arin-ppml] A modest proposal for IPv6 address allocations

[Matthew Kaufman]

Matthew Kaufman wrote:
> McTim wrote:
>>
>> What's unreasonable about free (If you have v4 resources), or 75%
>> discount if you don't have any v4 (this year).
>>
>> My reading of https://www.arin.net/fees/fee_schedule.html is that a
>> /32 will set you back a whopping $562.50.  Perhaps I've missed
>> something.
>>
>>   
> Yes, you've missed something. That the cost of running a 
> near-automated system for allocating address space is several orders 
> of magnitude higher than $562.50/year, and certainly won't be going 
> *up* over time as IPv6 rates will.
Lower, of course I meant.

The real point being that the cost of doing an allocation takes someone 
a short time to review the application for sanity. The cost of keeping 
an allocation in the database is about the cost of running the whois 
server and its backing database(s) on an ongoing basis, which is a lot 
lower than an ongoing $562-2250/year.

Why we've all bought into the illusion that ARIN and ICANN really need 
this much money to function, I don't know. Perhaps they do for IPv4 
allocations, where there's a lot less space and a lot more complaining, 
but IPv6 is just too easy for it to really cost this much.

Matthew Kaufman

Matthew Kaufman