Normal ARIN registration service fees for LRSA entrants after 31 Dec 2023 (was: Fwd: [arin-announce] Availability of the Legacy Fee Cap for New LRSA Entrants Ending as of 31 December 2023)

Thu Sep 15 19:41:28 UTC 2022

John Curran wrote:
> > We strongly encourage all legacy resource holders who have not yet
> > signed an LRSA to cover their legacy resources to

Randy Bush <randy at psg.com> wrote:
> consult a competent lawyer before signing an LRSA

Amen to that.  ARIN's stance on legacy resources has traditionally been
that ARIN would prefer to charge you annually for them, and then
"recover" them (take them away from you) if you ever stop paying, or if
they ever decide that you are not using them wisely.  If you once agree
to an ARIN contract, your resources lose their "legacy" status and you
become just another sharecropper subject to ARIN's future benevolence or
lack thereof.

The change recently announced by John Curran will make the situation
very slightly worse, by making ARIN's annual fees for legacy resources
changeable at their option, instead of being capped by contract.  ARIN
management could have changed their offer to be better, if they wanted
to attract legacy users, but they made an explicit choice to do the
opposite.

By contrast, RIPE has developed a much more welcoming stance on legacy
resources, including:

  *  retaining the legacy status of resources after a transfer or sale
  *  allowing resources to be registered without paying annual fees to RIPE
     (merely paying a one-time transaction fee), so that later non-payment
     of annual fees can't be used as an excuse to steal the resources.
  *  agreeing that RIPE members will keep all their legacy resources even if
     they later cease to be RIPE members

You are within the RIPE service area if your network touches Europe,
northern Asia, or Greenland.  This can be as simple as having a rented
or donated server located in Europe, or as complicated as running a
worldwide service provider.  If you have a presence there, you can
transfer your worldwide resources out from under ARIN policies and put
them under RIPE's jurisdiction instead.

Moving to RIPE is not an unalloyed good; Europeans invented bureaucracy,
and RIPE pursues it with vigor.  And getting the above treatment may
require firmly asserting to RIPE that you want it, rather than accepting
the defaults.  But their motives are more benevolent than ARIN's toward
legacy resource holders; RIPE honestly seems to want to gather in legacy
resource holders, either as RIPE members or not, without reducing any of
the holders' rights or abilities.  I commend them for that.

Other RIRs may have other good or bad policies about legacy resource
holders.  As Randy proposed, consult a lawyer competent in legacy domain
registration issues before making any changes.

	John