[arin-ppml] fee structure

[John Curran]

On Mar 30, 2013, at 10:25 PM, Milton L Mueller <mueller at syr.edu> wrote:
> 
> [Milton L Mueller] So the end user membership fee is intended to be a payment of "earnest money" to prove that they are really interested?

No, it is to provide equitable engagement for all those participating
in the ARIN corporate governance matters.

> Is the fear that without this speed bump end user members will become "rotten boroughs" whose votes are manipulated by others (who?).

No, it is not a "speed bump" but simply a choice available to end-users;
having an equal voice includes taking on some equal responsibility.

> Is there a concern that some little organization with a /24 has the same voting power as an ISP with 2 /8s? Should voting power reflect "share" holding the way it does in stock ownership? Just some random thoughts...

Random thoughts indeed; I almost didn't know if they even warranted
reply, but have done so for clarity.

The idea was to keep the end-user fees at low and simple as possible
(for end-users that simply want maintenance of ARIN registry services.) 
The result is that end-user fees add up to a fraction of the registry 
costs compared to the ISPs (approximately $970K/year compared to $11.3M
per year, for approximately the same number of organizations)[1], whereas
including the recovery of ARIN's non-registry costs would have raised 
all end-user fees significantly and regardless of whether they wished 
to be a member or not.

Membership provides an equal vote to every member, yet ISPs pay on 
average $2500/year to ARIN.  Asking end-users to pay that same amount 
in order to be a member with equal vote would likely be considered 
unreasonable by many, but a contribution similar to the the _smallest_
ISPs provides for comparable standing for all those who participate 
with the same say in ARIN corporate governance matters.

FYI,
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN

[1] ARIN Dallas Revised Fee Presentation with referenced numbers, page 14
<https://www.arin.net/participate/meetings/reports/ARIN_XXX/PDF/thursday/curran_fee_schedule.pdf>