Fundamental misunderstanding

[Dave McClure]

Actually, Michael, members will pay $1,000 per year, and membership is not required in order to register for address space.

Nonetheless, a fact of life for non-profits is that you cannot survive on dues revenue alone.  Most associations earn half or more of their revenues from dues, and I expect ARIN to be no exception.

Also, I believe that they will have trouble building a large member base at that dues level.  AOP can afford it, but most of our members cannot (or will not).  One of the problems in setting a dues level is an old marketing question -- everyone sagely agrees that it is a fair price and that they would likely pay it until they actually have to write the check.  I believe that $50,000 plus is a fair price for a Jaguar, but I won't buy one of them, either.

That's why it is critical to know exactly how many members of NSI will move to ARIN and what the structure will be.

I'm also curious as to why this, one of the most critical elements of the Internet infrastructure, can't be funded by the NSF Intellectual Infrastructure Fund. . .

Dave


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From: 	Michael Dillon[SMTP:michael at MEMRA.COM]
Sent: 	Sunday, February 02, 1997 1:15 PM
To: 	naipr at arin.net
Subject: 	Fundamental misunderstanding


I made some statements about the financing of ARIN by using
membership fees. However, I misunderstood the intent of the current
proposal which is that members will pay $1,000 when they join but will
only pay the annual subscription fee ($2,500 - $20,000) the next time they
apply to ARIN for more address space. Since this could be a long time
after ARIN is formed, it is clearly impractical to consider it for
initial funding.

Basically, this leaves NSI's offer to pay good money to move the IP
allocation function out of their company, employees and all. And while
there is a mystery fund sitting in an NSF trust account, I don't think
that there is any way that this could become available soon enough to get
ARIN off the ground in April.

Given that ARIN is jump-started with NSI funding, it makes sense that
their CEO sits on the board. If I were the CEO of NSI, then I would do the
same to make sure that things are done right and my goals are achieved.
And it seems likely that Mr. Telage's goal is to get this unfunded public
service activity out of his corporation. Under more normal circumstances a
CEO would either sell the division or shut it down. But since the NSF has
managed to saddle him with an operation that is not saleable, the
formation of ARIN seems to be the only reasonable way out. I'm sure Mr.
Telage would not hesitate to resign from ARIN after the startup stage is
complete since he has bigger fish to fry in the domain name business and
the intranet consulting business.


Michael Dillon                   -               Internet & ISP Consulting
Memra Software Inc.              -                  Fax: +1-250-546-3049
http://www.memra.com             -               E-mail: michael at memra.com