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@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.