[arin-ppml] Fee structures for ARIN

[John Curran]

On Oct 28, 2011, at 6:07 PM, William Herrin wrote:

> The * being that we did more or less promise, as a condition of ARIN's
> creation, to leave alone those legacy IPv4 registrants who want to be
> left alone. With the rise of IPv6 (and subsequent decline of IPv4) set
> to moot the issue, I think it unhelpful to reopen the wound.

The challenge, of course, is that we're also doing addition registry 
services like ARIN Online, DNSSEC, and resource certification which
help the entire community by their deployment and weren't in the set
of services at that time.  The Internet doesn't remain still, and we
have to evolve registry services and policy in this region on behalf
of everyone, including legacy address registrations.  This is why I 
emphasize the importance for legacy address holders to get involved,
because they will be affected by the services and policies in this
region whether they participate in the decisions or not (e.g., all
organizational records in the registry now have an abuse contact.)

When it comes to something like ability to support DNSSEC records,
or use RESTful interfaces to ARIN online, or participate in RPKI,
use of these services could be claimed to be of benefit to the 
entire community, or could be considered optional.  If we provide
these services to everyone, including legacy address holders, then
we require entry into a registration services and we can either 
recover the costs "ala cart" or in the base annual maintenance fee.
This question applies to both end-user registrations and those with
legacy registration who want to make use of these services (those 
legacy users who don't want any of these services will likely just
keep the status quo and not enter into an LRSA.)  

In general, would you prefer seeing all of the $base fees be higher
(e.g. $250) or have ARIN charge separately for new service features,
even those which might improve the security or quality of registry 
data for everyone?  I can easily argue the merits of either side of
this, and really need to hear more input from the community before
preparing various fees structures for the ARIN Board to consider.

Thanks!
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN