[arin-ppml] Fee structures for ARIN

[William Herrin]

On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 4:43 PM, John Curran <jcurran at arin.net> wrote:
> 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.

Hi John,

So there are really four moving pieces to consider here, not just two.

There are the services where everybody is going to consume them or for
some other reason everybody must stand on equal footing.

There are the capabilities where folks with larger holdings will
generate greater consumption.

There are the services where only folks with specific needs will use them.

There are the pure overhead functions which don't directly serve the
registrants in any form but are required to keep the organization
running.


We'll all maintain an org record and POCs. As a matter of fairness, we
all require access to the PPML and the public meetings.

DNSSEC (as with all RDNS) will be consumed more heavily by registrants
with large holdings. The same with RPKI, whois and the REST API -- you
can expect about the same number of queries per registered IP address,
thus far more activity attributable to a large holder than a small
one.

There are things like the STLS or ARIN on the road which only specific
users will ever engage in.

And finally we have HR, payroll, marketing, etc.


In principle, I'd like to see the first group covered by the base fee,
the second group covered by fees linearly proportional to the
registrant's holdings and the third group by a la carte fees.

Traditionally the fourth group, pure overhead tasks, are tacked on as
a uniform percentage applied to each direct source of revenue. In
other words, if ARIN's budget excluding overhead was 30% base, 60%
proportional and 10% a la carte then the overhead costs should be
divvied up with the same percentages. Treating overhead and base as
the same category would be a major accounting error.

In practice, it's far easier to categorize something as base or
overhead than to do the careful evaluation it takes to place it in one
of the other categories. Worse, accounting for it well enough to
justify the numbers adds considerable and undesirable nuisance and
expense.


I guess where I'm going with this is that I think that rather than try
to calculate the optimal $base from the individual services, I think
you'll get a "better" result by seeking consensus on a formula (e.g.
$base + $linear resource consumption + $a la carte) and then polling
the community to find out (A) what folks think an intuitively "fair"
$base should be and (B) which items folks think belong in a la carte.
Discard the outliers, average the rest and from there you can
calculate $consumption. This leaves you with a complete answer that if
not scientifically computed at least accurately reflects the
community's preference.



Regards,
Bill Herrin

-- 
William D. Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
Falls Church, VA 22042-3004