[arin-ppml] Tenfold fee increases?

[Bill Woodcock]

Removing the program, with its criteria and fees, would not stop the practice.  I will be the first to admit that, when I was on the ARIN board, I was completely against commercial brokerage of IP addresses, as a matter of principle.  I believed that IP addresses, when no longer needed, should be returned to the RIR for redistribution as needed.  Like phone numbers, for instance.  Now, however, I believe that there is a reasonable market niche for a few brokers, and that ARIN keeping a check on bad behavior in that space is valuable.

                                -Bill



> On Jun 2, 2023, at 9:28 AM, Michael B. Williams via ARIN-PPML <arin-ppml at arin.net> wrote:
> 
> I don’t see a reason to shut it down as it keeps at least some level of standard and provides revenue for ARIN.
> 
> But then again in completely against brokeraging IP addresses. So I could go either way.
> 
> On Fri, Jun 2, 2023 at 17:26 Dominik Dobrowolski <dominikdobrowolski.co at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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