Inevitable death, was Re: Verizon Public Policy on Netflix

Thu Jul 17 11:58:17 UTC 2014

When was the last time you did an ARIN request for resources for a large or x-large provider?

I have reasonably recent (<2 years ago) experience doing requests for XX-Small, X-Small,
Small, Large, and X-Large organizations, including 2 organizations that qualified for /24s
(the max size for a large organization, one as an additional and one as an initial). I can tell you
for certain that the scrutiny on ARIN's part has been very nearly identical in all cases. If
anything, I got more scrutiny on some of the bigger requests than any of the smaller ones.

Further, ARIN also has economies of scale, because you are paying for registration services,
not IP addresses. No matter how much you want to keep trying to ignore that, the reality is
that if anything, the bigger organizations are the ones potentially getting overcharged because
the records for a /16 cost roughly the same to maintain as the records for a /48.

There are some mitigating factors (numbers of SWIPs, frequency of additional requests,
quality of request submissions, etc.), but exact cost accounting and billing based on it
would be a bigger nightmare that might cost more to administer than is collected under
the current system.

While I will agree that some of the changes to the ARIN fee structure in the last round
were not for the good, I really don't think your argument about price per IP has any
merit whatsoever as it is completely divorced from the reality of what you are paying
ARIN for.

Owen

On Jul 15, 2014, at 07:58 , Brett Glass <nanog at brettglass.com> wrote:

> Matt:
> 
> Here's the thing. With physical goods, there are economies of scale in
> shipping and delivering them in bulk. But IP addresses are simply numbers!
> Since there's already a base fee to cover the fixed costs, there's no 
> reason for the cost per IP to be different. And, in fact, good reason 
> for it not to be. Big carriers waste a lot of IPs compared to little
> guys, who get disproportionate scrutiny.
> 
> --Brett Glass
> 
> At 12:24 AM 7/15/2014, Matt Palmer wrote:
> 
>> 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         /22         0.49
>> $1000        /20         0.24
>> $2000        /18         0.12
>> $4000        /16         0.06
>> $8000        /14         0.03
>> $16000       /12         0.02
>> $32000       > /12       Mastercard!
>> 
>> Then again, the vast majority of businesses have discounts for volume
>> purchases.