Lightly used IP addresses

John Curran jcurran at arin.net
Sun Aug 15 04:23:42 UTC 2010


On Aug 14, 2010, at 11:30 PM, Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:
> 
> Question:  Why does it cost $11 million or more per year (going to some
> $22 million per year after 2013) to run a couple of databases that are
> Internet-accessible?

Patrick - If this is a reference to ARIN, the budget is approximately $15M
annually, and is not substantially changing any faster than expected for 
normal cost-of-living trends (If $22M is a reference to having both IPv4 
and IPv6 fees, ARIN charges each organization only once for the larger of 
IPv4 or IPv6 registration services fee it makes use of)

Even so, it's a fair question to ask why it costs $15M annual to run ARIN.  
That includes the costs for many tasks which might not be obvious, including 
running the legacy registry system (which handles SWIP email templates), the 
new ARIN Online system (which is quite a bit more elegant), the public WHOIS 
servers, bulk WHOIS and FTP services, IN-ADDR services, the public web sites, 
the polling & election systems, the billing/invoicing systems, and the staging,
development/QA support for same, and the normal office infrastructure for things 
like email, mailing lists, replication, business record keeping, and archival.
There's some engineering staff to keep all that  running, registration services 
staff to handle incoming requests, member services for running the meetings, 
elections, and policy process, and outreach thats already been mentioned with 
respect to trade shows and press, but also includes engagement with our friends 
at the ITU, international bodies, and governments.  The full budget is available 
in each year's annual report along with the audited financials, and can be found
here:  https://www.arin.net/about_us/corp_docs/annual_rprt.html 

Clearly, the budget can be increased or decreased based on the services desired 
by the community, and this typically discussed on the last day of the ARIN Public
Policy & Member meeting (twice yearly) during the Financial Services report.  In 
between meetings, this topic is probably best suited for the arin-discuss mailing 
list as opposed to the nanog list.

FYI,
/John

John Curran 
President and CEO
ARIN






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