While everyone is worried about their fee increase, maybe it is time to
look at the other side of the ledger and find out exactly what is being
paid for, and if things can be done to help control those costs.
Is there a breakdown of exactly what are the things that our fees pay for,
and are they all related to management of our resources?
Also, are all the things listed consumed by everyone with number
resources? If not, maybe those costs not used by everyone should be borne
by ONLY those that are using these services. For example SWIP is not
needed by those who do not provide assignments above the minimums or not
at all.
If billing and collection is a big item, maybe we should have a base
customer charge like utility companies that cover only those billing
charges. Also, maybe al larger base customer charge for those that must
have a mailed statement, instead of an electronic statement.
Have we ever really taken a good look at these costs, with a mind to
controlling costs? We might find some things that cost a lot are not
really that important.
20% is a good chunk of change. What costs have gone up that are driving
this increase, and what is the driver of that need for more revenue?
Albert Erdmann
Network Administrator
Paradise On Line Inc.
On Fri, 17 Sep 2021, David Farmer via ARIN-PPML wrote:
The lines between what is an end-user and what is an ISP are getting very
blurry these days. Is there really a difference between a data center, a
university campus network, an enterprise network, and a small ISP each with a
/20?
No, this isn't revenue neutral for ARIN, but they have been running deficits
the past few years, and need additional revenue anyway.
Reguaring who made up the the fee structure review panel, see slide 3 of the
following;
https://www.arin.net/vault/participate/meetings/reports/ARIN_32/PDF/friday/curran-fee.pdf
As for outreach;
The creation of the fee structure review panel was announced at ARIN 31, and on
at least one mailing list, if not more.
https://lists.arin.net/pipermail/arin-discuss/2013-April/002699.html
The fee structure review was discussed at several ARIN meetings and final
report was discussed extensively online and at least one ARIN Meeting;
https://www.arin.net/vault/participate/meetings/reports/ARIN_34/PDF/friday/curran-fees.pdf
You know the saying, "you can lead a horse to water, but you can make it drink."
Well unfortunately, there is a corollary, "some people don't pay attention,
until they get the bill."
I'm not sure I completely agree with all the decisions, but there has been a
lot of outreach and the series or decisions that lead us here hasn't been done
in secret, as far as I'm concerned it all has been above boards.
Thanks
On Fri, Sep 17, 2021 at 11:32 AM Mark McDonald <[email protected]> wrote:
John,
I just came across your spreadsheet of fee increases. It pretty much
summarizes what I’ve been saying - this isn’t a neutral harmonization of fees,
it’s a 20% rate hike on roughly 40% of ARIN’s customers that disproportionally
affects ARIN’s smaller customers, with Large being the middle tier in
ARIN’s fee schedule, while targeting end users that use a fraction of the
services of an ISP. In nearly 20 years we’ve opened 5 ticket and in all
cases, chose to better optimize IP space rather than pull from a finite
resource (IPv4 address space). That works out to about $1000/ticket - does it
really cost ARIN more than $1000 to respond to a ticket?
It would be nice to show in that spreadsheet how many IP’s are represented in
each Category - both RSP and End User. My assumption, and I could be
wrong, is that these fees are going towards users who are already paying 30-40x
more than those utilizing the most resources. The previously proposed
$800/object almost seems like a bargain compared to what’s being proposed for
us. This isn’t about the money, it’s about the principal of what users
ARIN is raising fees on.
I’m curious as to who made/makes up ARIN’s Fee Structure Review Panel and why
wasn’t outreach done back then? I was sure notified from 3 different
departments when ARIN blasted out fee increases of 650% so it seems capable of
better communication.
What should happen is ARIN truly engages it’s customers and if it needs 20%
more revenue so badly, perhaps look at taking it from the companies that
have profited most from the services you provide and who already pay a tiny
fraction of what smaller users do for the resources (IPv4 addresses) they
consume.
I need to get back to vendor negotiations. I’m trying to get Verisign to
reduce our domain renewal rates by 99.61% because we only use their API and
don’t consume even a tiny fraction of resources of what a retail customer does
and they only discount our rates by like 8% - crazy right?! They’re
pushing back stating that domain names are a limited resource and we’re going
to make a boat-load of money off of my proposal by buying nearly every
domain at 3/10ths of 1% of their normal customer but they simply don’t
understand the volume we’ll be able to bring. I’ll keep you posted on how my
negotiations go.
-Mark
On Sep 17, 2021, at 4:36 AM, John Curran <[email protected]> wrote:
On 17 Sep 2021, at 3:52 AM, [email protected] wrote:
Some have suggested the fee should not have a relationship to the number
of addresses, but I strongly disagree.
For the most part, the more addresses you have, the more SWIP
transactions and reverse lookups and customer service transactions are
going to take place, so it is quite proportional.
Albert –
This is incorrect – i.e. the assertion that ARIN’s costs are proportional
to the span of address space represented by registry
objects – and it is also likely beyond the possibility of physics (as
noted below.)
Larger entities almost always have dedicated personal who knowledgable of ARIN
and our processes – while they may make some additional
customer services transactions (due to acquiring additional resources or using
more advanced services), it would be highly unusual for any
of them to make hundreds of more frequent customer service requests, let alone
the thousands, or hundreds of thousands, that you suggest
and would be necessary for ARIN to bear a proportional cost burden due to
servicing such organizations.
There are significant fixed costs of operating the registry and these fixed
costs are predominately related to the number of organizations
that must have billing relationships with ARIN and the number of resource
entries in the registry – they are _not_ proportional in any
manner to the size of the address space span represented by the registry
objects.
Note – In 2014, the previously mentioned Fee Structure Review Panel looked at
an approach that sought recover a fixed amount per registry
object and use rather significant transactions fees to correspond more directly
to the level of effort for recovering costs of
registration service requests (aka Proposal #7 “Transaction Fee Proposal” in
the previously referenced report.) It was clear that such an
approach would quite significantly penalize the smaller registry users, as it
results in per registry object fees of more than $800 per
object per year and larger transaction fees. The fact of the matter is that
ARIN’s present geometric registry fee scale burdens
organizations with the largest number resource holdings far in excess of their
imputed costs to ARIN, and while this is obvious, it was
also felt to be overall reasonable because the _benefit_ obtained could also be
deemed to be disproportionate.
FYI,
/John
John Curran
President and CEO
American Registry for Internet Numbers
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