[arin-ppml] Tenfold fee increases?

[Dominik Dobrowolski]

If we are at it,
Why shouldn't we discuss openly whether to even keep facilitators program
alive?

Dominik Dobrowolski,
dominet LLC

On Thu, Jun 1, 2023, 10:32 PM Tom Fantacone <tom at iptrading.com> wrote:

> 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
>
>
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