Inevitable death, was Re: Verizon Public Policy on Netflix

Thu Jul 17 11:47:40 UTC 2014

On Jul 14, 2014, at 23:24 , Matt Palmer <mpalmer at hezmatt.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 10:05:21PM -0600, Brett Glass wrote:
>> At 09:40 PM 7/14/2014, John Curran wrote:
>> 
>>> Myself, I'd call such fees to be uniform, 
>> 
>> Ah, but they are not. Smaller providers pay more per IP address than larger ones. And a much
>> larger share of their revenues as the base fee for being "in the club" to start with.
> 
> While the "share of revenue" argument is bogus (as John's cup-of-coffee
> analogy made clear), you do have a point with the cost-per-IP-address
> argument:
> 
Annual Fee   Max CIDR    $/IP
$500         /40         <0.01
$1000        /36         way<0.01
$2000        /32         way way<0.01
$4000        /28         far <0.01
$8000        /24         way far <0.01
$16000       /20         tremendoulsy <0.01
$32000       > /20       Mastercard!

> Then again, the vast majority of businesses have discounts for volume
> purchases.  I note that even LARIAT does this.  You charge $60 for
> 1000Kbps, but $80 for 1500Kbps.  Shouldn't that be $90 for 1500Kbps, to
> ensure everyone pays the same price per Kbps?

More importantly, in those cases, you are paying for units of a product.

ARIN is a registry, kind of like your local DMV. Have you noticed that if you own more than one vehicle, you don't pay the same amount for those vehicles? Did you know that most DMV's have fleet registration discounts where you pay less per vehicle to register multiple vehicles?

In the case of ARIN, you are not buying IP addresses from ARIN. You are paying ARIN for the service
of registering the block(s) to you for uniqueness among cooperating entities.

So arguing about ARIN fees in terms of cost per IP is absurd.

Oh, and I've taken the liberty of correcting the prefix sizes in the above table to reflect the modern internet, rather than the antiquated prefix and pricing data presented before.

Owen