[arin-ppml] Tenfold fee increases?

[Tom Fantacone]

I was a bit stunned this morning to see our organization's ARIN fees 
would be going up by a factor of 10.  We live in inflationary times, 
but that's an increase of, let's see, I guess 1,000%?

Before the rest of you resource holders on the list have a coronary, 
let me qualify that this fee increase is for just for registered 
facilitators (brokers) and most of you won't be affected.  This 
time.  But the more general issue of ARIN raising fees in an 
extravagant manner with no solicitation for public discussion of the 
impact affects all of us.

When ARIN began the facilitators' program the annual fee was just 
$100.  A few years later the fee was raised tenfold to $1,000.  Today 
we learned that another tenfold increase would go into effect making 
our annual fee $10,000.  So it's actually a 100-fold increase in 
about a decade.

Our own organization won't be too affected by this.  We can handle 
it, and most of the larger IP brokers can as well.  It may even help 
us by driving away some competition.  But that shouldn't be the 
point.  There are smaller organizations that are facilitators that 
will be severely impacted.  We work with some of these and while they 
may not handle the volume of transactions we do, they do an excellent 
job in moving IPv4 resources to organizations that need them and 
educating the parties along the way.

There are some other changes to the facilitator program, including 
requiring liability insurance for ARIN, background checks, customer 
references, etc.  I assume this is to keep some of the riff-raff out 
and may be helpful.  I don't see how outrageous fee increases help anyone.

Other sharp fee increases have been brought up and complained about 
on this list, always after the fact.  The recent resource holder fee 
increases that saw end user organizations suddenly treated as ISPs 
comes to mind.  Recently, transfer fees spiked from $300 to $500 per 
transfer and were suddenly appled to source organizations in all 
transfers (it used to be just transfers from end user orgs).  As if 
that wasn't enough, ARIN started charging transfer recipients an 
additional transfer fee.  I can tell you from first-hand experience 
this hurt small organizations looking to acquire IPv4 blocks.

I recommend ARIN transparently solicit public input when pondering 
fee increases of such magnitude.  Hopefully before our fee goes up 
another 1,000%.

Regards,

Tom Fantacone