[arin-ppml] {Spam?} Re: Open Letter Regarding 650% Rate-Hike for Legacy Users

[Owen DeLong]

> On Sep 18, 2021, at 03:04 , John Curran <jcurran at arin.net> wrote:
> 
> On 17 Sep 2021, at 11:40 PM, arin-ppml <arin-ppml at arin.net> wrote:
>> 
>> Why not let them choose? They don’t really get any benefit from being an LIR member and since they aren’t running a local registry even though they are an ISP, why force them into the LIR category?
> 
> They don’t need to have a relationship with ARIN, but opt to do so in order to have number resources in the registry system that are independent of their service provider.  That means a contract with ARIN for services and thus sharing in the cost recovery model.

Perhaps you missed it, John, but we’re not talking about taking them out of cost recovery. We’re talking about the elimination of the distinction between LIR and end user being bad for end users and David and I were debating ways to make that distinction more applicable/less blurry in the modern age.

We’re taking about the fact that if you’re an end user, this latest fee hike is pretty abominable, while it’s a pretty nice subsidy for most LIRs paid for on the backs of the end users.

The one silver lining in all of this is that it gives end users membership, so they can vote the board that chose to do this to them out of office, because I’m pretty sure that end users outnumber LIRs over all.


> You can assert that ARIN's costs are predominantly the result of “LIRs” but that doesn’t reflect reality – many of our services and functions are equivalent for an entire address block and only a small set of them are related to subdelegation functions.   

IRR
RPKI
SWIP/RDAP/WHOIS
RDNS
Frequency of updates
Frequency of additional requests/transfers/etc.

are all impacted more by LIRs than by end users.

Sure, there are some things that are not…
	ARIN’s travel budget
	ARIN’s policy process
	ARIN’s Board Expenses
	The expenses supporting the AC
	The costs of keeping the office open
	The costs to support remote workers
	etc.

On the other hand, there’s also the fact that the LIRs are (generally) using their addresses directly for profit (i.e. their business _IS_ (at least in part) providing IP addresses to their customers). Essentially, they are reselling RIR services.
End users, OTOH, tend to be using addresses to run their organization, many of which are not for profit and some of which are even individuals or families. They aren’t reselling registration services for profit.

This goes along the lines of the same expectation that you pay less and get a lesser level of service from being a residential customer of an ISP than if you are a business level customer.

What you’ve done here, is to make everyone pay the same (within any given resource category, and not withstanding the double billing issue for LRSA+RSA holders mentioned earlier) regardless of whether or not they receive the same
level of service. Essentially, you’re taxing end users to fund LIR level services for SWIP/RDAP/WHOIS, RPKI, IRR, RDNS, and more.

> Furthermore, there are costs that ARIN incurs as a result of customers that have no relation at all to the customers individual utilization of services or their choice to subdelegate, but still must be recovered (e.g. costs of responding to customers on mailing lists…)

If the costs of responding to members on mailing lists is a significant fraction of the ARIN budget, something has gone horribly wrong somewhere.

Owen