[arin-ppml] Using fees to encourage route aggregation

[Warren Johnson]

Kevin,

This is well said. ARIN's ability to enforce policy is fairly limited.  In
my limited experience, it seems enforcement is done primarily at the time
when an organization requests it's first allocation or upon subsequent
allocations.  Post-IPv4 exhaustion ARIN's ability to enforce policy will
diminish significantly if it doesn't find a way to keep itself relevant
(i.e. managing some sort of IPv4 transfer market).  I don't feel handing out
IPv6 allocations will be enough because ultimately any organization only
needs 1 allocation and thus enforcement is only done once.

Right now, everything is pretty friendly.  We all get the IPv4 Ips we need
without much trouble.  Post-exhaustion, the policy purists are going to be
under pressure from a corporate master up the food chain (and there always
is one) to affect policy that financially benefits them and their ipv4
holdings.  Going to your point of cooperation, what the community should be
concerned about is the world splitting into various factions and NOT
cooperating in the way they have to date.  There's a word for that.

Thanks,
Warren



-----Original Message-----
From: arin-ppml-bounces at arin.net [mailto:arin-ppml-bounces at arin.net] On
Behalf Of Kevin Kargel
Sent: Friday, October 16, 2009 10:38 AM
To: arin-ppml at arin.net
Subject: Re: [arin-ppml] Using fees to encourage route aggregation



Regarding fees for behavior modification:
ARIN properly charges reasonable fees for services provided.  This is well
and good.  When ARIN starts to act like a government by emplacing mandatory
taxes (artificial fees) to regulate behavior it will be bad.  Be careful not
to outgrow your britches.  Remember that ARIN works only because of
voluntary cooperation by the community.  That cooperation exists because of
the wonderful work done thus far ensuring that compliance is not too onorus
a task and fees are not excessive.  If you change either of those people
will start finding ways around ARIN to avoid either the excessive fees or
the onorus tasks.  

In fact people already do this.  There are companies (some rather large
corporations) using "public" IP networks not assigned to them for internal
routing.  The only penalty for doing so is that they cannot communicate with
the rightful network.  So long as they pick a network rightfully "on the far
side of the earth" the impact of their policy is negligable.

ARIN does not have an Army or direct force of law to police it's policies.
What it does have is the support and cooperation of the community.  Members
correctly and voluntarily agree not to route networks operating outside of
ARIN policy.  Members voluntarily pay reasonable fees for services rendered
and commit to policy agreements.

I completely and enthusiastically support this methodology.  It is the best,
most effective and most efficient way to manage a global network possible.
So far we have done a great job.  Let's not muck it up now with taxes thinly
veiled as economic incentives.

We also need to think of the economy that everyone is complaining about.  We
should be working to find ways to make internet operations less costly, not
dreaming up artificial fees to make it more expensive.  We can directly
affect the state of the economy.  We can choose whether to make it better or
worse.