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

[John Curran]

On Mar 28, 2013, at 1:34 PM, William Herrin <bill at herrin.us> wrote:

> I'm not convinced that an ISP paying ARIN less than $200/month
> represents a any kind of hardship. If there's an ISP out there for
> which the difference between $2000/year and $500/year is big deal, I
> want to know more about his service delivery infrastructure, because
> he must have driven his costs down to something I'd desperately like
> to emulate.

We've actually heard exactly that concern from some folks on 
this list; there are ISPs which are community-based or non-
profit efforts for whom ARIN fees represent a significant 
hit to their non-volunteered capital.

> On the other hand, I'm very much convinced that ARIN's fees should
> encourage (or at least fail to discourage) immediate deployment of
> IPv6 as designated by the presumptively technically sound number
> policies. Whatever a registrant is paying for his IPv4, his fees
> should not increase by a single nickle to gain what the number policy
> suggests is a technically appropriate IPv6 registration.

Bill - that is precisely the benefit of the revised fee schedule;
every size ISP category now includes both IPv4 and IPv6, so every
ISP can add an IPv6 allocation and see _no_ change in fees at all.
(This does mean that we can get ISPs for whom there is a "mismatch"
between their IPv4 and IPv6 allocations, and they end up in a higher
category, but to be truly fair we'd need to have distinct proportional
fee for each of IPv4 and IPv6, and that's exactly what you don't want:
any addition of IPv6 means an additional fee.)

> I propose full cross-subsidy for IPv6 registration until IPv6 is ready
> to stand on its own.

Indeed, there is a full cross-subsidy in place for IPv6 under the new
fee schedule, and each IPv4 ISP can obtain an IPv6 allocation for their
size category without any change in fees.  There is no distinct IPv4 or
IPv6 fee anymore; there is simply a ISP size category which includes
both in all cases.

Thanks,
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN