[arin-ppml] The annual limit on total maintenance fees for legacy number resources under the ARIN fee schedule

[Owen DeLong]

> On Apr 12, 2022, at 22:05, hostmaster at uneedus.com wrote:
> 
> Does there not still exist some legacy addresses that pay NO fees?  While there are those legacy blocks without contact addresses, there also appear to be addresses who have updated contacts, but are not paying fees to ARIN.
> 
> For example, 192.168.112.0/24 is a legacy block controled by Berea College. To the best of my knowledge, they do not pay for this block. I became aware of this block because this school, like myself does not have a street address, a problem I ran into in the past when a major ISP was insisting on a unique street address for every public transit bus with a static address assignment be provided in SWIP, which of course is not possible. They would not accept all busses being registered to the street address of administrative entity that ran the bus system, as they wanted a unique street address for all 500+ busses, and not one address for all.

That can’t possibly be the accurate block address you are referring to. Nobody pays fees to any RIR for RFC-1918 space.

However, there are many legacy holders that were smart enough to avoid signing the LRSA and do not pay ARIN fees. In the interests of an accurate registry, non-contract legacy holders are able to update their contact information and certain other details in the database.

> How much legacy space is like this /24 that does not pay, but still has valid contact information on file?

I don’t know, ARIN would need to answer that question.

> How much legacy space is like other blocks discussed that have NO valid contact addresses at all, and therefore is not paying either?

You make an invalid assumption here that lack of valid contacts necessarily means not paying. I suspect that there are some organizations that continue to pay annually (accounting department), but have no idea that their contact data is out of date (technical department).

However, there are also probably a great many organizations which are defunct, or otherwise not paying or whatever that don’t have valid contact information as well.  The ones that signed an LRSA or RSA with ARIN will have their space reclaimed. The ones that did not will likely exist in perpetuity in the database.

> I personally think this great search for IPv4 space is becoming more pointless every day.  4 billion IPv4 addresses with a world population of 7+ billion alone shows the pointlessness of IPv4 space recovery.

It’s worse than that… When you subtract out RFC-1918, Loopback, 240.0.0.0/4, 224.0.0.0/4 (multicast), and a few other reservations I don’t remember off the top of my head, you’re left with about 3.2 billion unicast addresses.

> I would hope that eventually this fixed address shortage will be dealt with by most operators by the simple act of using IPv6.  So much effort has been done toward the recovery of every possible IPv4 address, which effort would be better placed toward using a protocol that is available today, supported by nearly every operating system and router on the planet, and provides even the smallest network with more addresses than they can ever use.

Not to mention squeezing as many users as possible into each IPv4 address creating an unnecessary and undesirable dichotomy between consumers and suppliers of information on the internet.

> ARIN has made IPv6 available for no extra charge for all but some corner cases.  Even then, most of those corner cases can still join the IPv6 community by obtaining a block of IPv6 addresses from their upstream at little to no charge. Those cases appear to be mostly legacy IPv4 holders like Berea College who can receive IPv6 space with their circuits for little or no additional cost.

Uh, I don’t quite buy that assertion, especially in light of the current discussions.

> To me, it looks like certain parties do not want to move to IPv6 because wide spread adoption will crash the values of their IPv4 holdings that they keep expanding, like it is some kind of investment.

There’s probably some of that, certainly.

> However it is time to adopt, as trying to continue to build networks on IPv4 with CALEA requirements with less than 1 address per person on the earth cannot be sustainable. All kinds of effort and money are being spent to remain IP4 only such as CGnat and Logging, rather than simply using this money to move to IPv6.

Yep.

> We have the tools for network address growth, and it is called IPv6.  Lets use it.

I couldn’t agree more.

Owen