On Dec 5, 2021, at 9:03 AM, John Curran <jcurran@arin.net> wrote:
Owen -
The RSA and LRSA agreements are identical, however, it is true that you would lose legacy holder resource status (for those IPv4 resources issued to you before ARIN’s formation) if you consolidate to a single Org with one bill under the RSA.
I see no difference in the status of legacy holder resources vs. resources. I care not about that. However, there is (to some extent) a limit on how badly the board can elect to screw me financially year over year in the LRSA which simply does not exist in the RSA. To claim that an agreement which limits my fee increases year over year to $25 is identical to an agreement which has no cap on fee increases is ludicrous at best, and certainly a bit disingenuous, if not worse.
For the curious, there are two implications to such a change:
a) you lose the $25 per year cap on fee increases (unclear if this is a substantial benefit at this point since we tend not to adjust the fees except every 3 or 4 years and the fees have been almost for those with the smaller total block sizes), and
The last time you did a major change to fees, my fees tripled immediately as a result. This time, they will more than double.
b) there is different agreement exit conditions in the result of prevailing against ARIN in an arbitration dispute.
You have the choice to consolidate or not as you see fit; none of this is particularly germane to the original question of whether ARIN IPv4-only resource holders can obtain an IPv6 block without increase in their annual fees — to that that the answer is yes.
But I was not given the choice to reconsolidate or not… When I signed, both contracts were under a single organization with a single annual fee for the organization. The board unilaterally changed that over my objections at the time and continues to take unfair advantage of their ability to do so, further compounding the fee increases. In fairness, it was my lack of foresight as to how the board could behave in this matter that is partly to blame here. Had I properly foreseen that a complete rewrite of the fee structure and a forced separation of my contracts into two separate ORG IDs would allow the board to increase fees well beyond the expectations at the time of my original agreement, I would simply have not signed the LRSA and there would be no issue at this time. Unfortunately, when the board did change the terms, it was made quite clear that the only way to terminate the LRSA was to surrender my resources in the process. This continues to be a thorn in my side and each and every time the issue of fee increases comes up, so will this. Owen