[arin-ppml] ARIN-prop-133: No Volunteer Services on Behalf of Unaffiliated Address Blocks

[John Curran]

On Feb 14, 2011, at 4:45 PM, Jeffrey Lyon wrote:

> In a broad sense, my interest is to promote equality and help ensure
> that all users of IP resources are bound to the same requirements. Our
> company received its first directly assigned resources in 2004.
> 
> Specific to this proposition, I find it fundamentally flawed that I
> have to pay for something that another receives for free merely
> because they got in first.

Jeffrey - 
 
To the extent that you are referring to the Whois and Reverse DNS 
services provided to legacy holders by ARIN without charge, there
was a conscience decision made in the formation of ARIN recognizing
that many of the legacy address holders simply wished to be able 
to make use their assigned space and that the incremental cost to 
provides such services was relatively modest.  Over time, we added
the option of entering into a Legacy RSA and paying $100/year to 
help defray their share of those costs.

This policy proposal may not really change offering free services;
to the extent that ARIN is still maintaining "references and/or 
RWhois referral" information, these costs can be comparable.
Should ARIN maintain those for free under this policy (for sake
of the accuracy of the overall system), or not offer them unless
compensated?  The tradition of the Internet has been to provide
these services because they're necessary to keep things running,
but you are expressing concern about the proposal addressing an
inequity that I would like to better understand.

Thanks!
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN