ARIN fee structure (was: re: 2749 routes AT RISK - Re: TIMELY/IMPORTANT)

Wed Apr 6 11:48:13 UTC 2022

On 5 Apr 2022, at 11:57 PM, William Herrin <bill at herrin.us<mailto:bill at herrin.us>> wrote:

On 5 Apr 2022, at 8:38 PM, Dan Mahoney (Gushi) <danm at prime.gushi.org<mailto:danm at prime.gushi.org>> wrote:
But say they sign an LRSA: Those $0 fees would go up to 150, this year, 175 next year, 200 the following...250 in year five... to be able to simply add DNSSEC, RPKI, and Validated IRR.

Hi Dan,

Speaking for myself, I'd be happy to pay the normal block size fee
just to get DNSSEC, RPKI and a validated IRR. I pay $80/month just for
my residential Internet service and another $80 or so for my off-site
virtual machines. A couple hundred bucks a _year_ for the niceties
which come with ARIN registration is no imposition at all.

Bill -

Good to hear - one hopes that the value is sufficient (but we should still look for opportunities for further improvements on both services and fees.)

My objection lies in having ARIN's RSA adhere to my address block
overall. I may feel differently about ARIN next year than I do this
year but once I've signed that RSA, well, that's just too bad. I now
have obligations to ARIN, some of them on shifting sand, and if I
don't fulfill them the addresses are gone.

That’s an Interesting perspective - thank you for sending.   It is true that both you and ARIN have obligations once you sign an RSA, but that’s true of any standardized agreement that you enter – standard agreements are found everywhere in life and are enforceable if applied uniformly with reasonable terms.

The part of your statement I don’t understand is that some of your obligations to ARIN are "on shifting sand"… If anything, you’ve got more protections in place regarding your ARIN RSA agreement than likely in most other standard agreement contexts (although it is true that we at ARIN don’t exactly emphasize these aspects as often as we might…)

Unlike many other standard agreements that you might find yourself in:

  1.  ARIN is an actual membership organization and governed accordingly.  Every customer with IPv4 or IPv6 resources under agreement is an ARIN member and has the option to participate in the ARIN election for Trustees and ARIN AC members. <https://www.arin.net/participate/oversight/membership/explained/>    (I know of many not-for-profits that have “members” but not actual membership organizations, and the difference is substantial regarding one’s legal rights and enforceability of same.)
  2.  While ARIN previously did have the ability to revise your registration services agreement (RSA) at will, we’ve achieved sufficient stability that it was possible to end that flexibility – now ARIN may only modify the terms of the RSA agreement if necessary due to a specific change in relevant statute or caselaw, or upon recommendation of the Board _and_ ratification vote by the ARIN members.
  3.  If ARIN fails to live up to its obligations under the agreement and our performance is found to have provided valid cause for termination, the agreement ends – and you keep your legacy number resources with them returning to their status before agreement.

It is true that our number resource policies are subject to change by the community through the open policy development process, and therefore your obligations under them might be the “shifting sand” to which you refer.  If that’s the case then I understand the reference, but as you’re aware that’s an inevitable consequence of having community-driven number resource policy – ARIN’s number resource policy instantiates community consensus regarding such obligations, which is not much different than obligations/expectation that networks face in other aspects of Internet operation, aside from actually being clearly written down in one place when it comes to the registry obligations.

Thanks!
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
American Registry for Internet Numbers

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