[arin-ppml] Draft Policy ARIN-2013-3: Tiny IPv6 Allocations for ISPs

[Matthew Kaufman]

On 4/7/2013 2:05 PM, Paul Vixie wrote:
> ...
>
> Matthew Kaufman wrote:
>> On 4/7/2013 9:58 AM, Steven Noble wrote:
>>> As noted before by others, I don't understand why a record has
>>> different costs based on what the record is for.  The difference in
>>> fees seems to go against ARINs goal of allocating resources to the
>>> community.
>>>
>>> Is the overhead of an IPv6 allocation record 5x an ASN record?
>> It is just ARIN trying to figure out how to maximize its own revenue.
> i don't think that's a fair or true statement.

Perhaps not. But we have clearly heard that we can't give everyone with 
a /32 of IPv6 the same low price otherwise ARIN wouldn't have enough 
money to operate. That's why there's this idea that somehow there need 
to be smaller categories than this, and scaled pricing schemes like this 
are always, at the root, a way to extract additional money from the top.

>
>> It knows that if it charged everyone the same amount, there would be
>> some large organizations who could easily afford to pay more but from
>> whom they aren't extracting any extra revenue.
> nor that one.

On this I'd definitely argue... We've heard several times that it 
wouldn't do to have all of the orgs holding IPv6 paying $500/year for 
that, because it wouldn't bring in enough money.

>
>> They justify this scaled pricing by then claiming that if they charged
>> everyone so little that it was affordable to the smallest, they
>> wouldn't bring in enough to pay for the usual overhead of costs that
>> happens when there's money in the bank account to support those costs,
>> despite the fact that the database itself could be run by volunteers
>> for free or nearly so. Simple economics I'm afraid.
> i've been here nine years now and i've been looking for the avoidable
> costs or the self-creating monetary vacuum that you're talking about
> here. i havn't found them. i don't think we'd like (you, me, anybody) a
> nearly-volunteer system without the controls, outreach, and policy
> process we're all getting from the RIR system in its current form.

Well, some of the policy process and nearly all of the outreach are more 
than I would want to pay for, personally.

Along with the entire travel budget.

But even if it is true that ARIN is being exceptionally frugal, the 
draft policy is bad policy and we're only talking about it because ARIN 
doesn't want to ("can't") simply charge everyone the x-small price and 
be done with it.


Matthew Kaufman