On Jul 15, 2014, at 10:58 AM, Brett Glass <nanog@brettglass.com> wrote:
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!
Actually, they're not even discrete numbers, but address blocks (If there were specific costs associated with administration of individual IP addresses, ARIN would have collapsed under the astronomical cost increase of receiving the allocation of 83,076,749,736,557,242,056,487,941,267,521,536 [/12] IPv6 addresses for this region...) Actual cost to administer, i.e. maintain in the database and ARIN systems, invoice each holder, provide reverse DNS, etc. is actually remarkably similar for ARIN regardless of address block size, e.g.whether it is IPv4 /8, /16, /20, /24 or an IPv6 /32 or /48. ARIN has consistently lowered ISP fees over the years (more than four times so far) but it is still worth revisiting, and there is a Fee Structure Review Report that will be forthcoming that looks at very approaches going forward. I will make sure to notify the NANOG community as well, as we want as many voices as possible in the discussion which will take place the latter half of this year. Thanks! /John John Curran President and CEO ARIN