On Apr 8, 2010, at 4:35 PM, Joe Greco wrote:
The problem, as I've heard it, is that ARIN's fees are steep in order to pay for various costs. Since there isn't the economy of scale of hundreds of millions of domain names, and instead you just have ... what? Probably less than a hundred thousand objects that are revenue-generating? If you charge $1/yr for each registered object, that means your organizational budget is sufficient for one full time person, maybe two. At $100/yr, you have enough funding for some office space, some gear, and a small staff.
Joe - Your financial breakdown is heading the right direction, but let help out with some more information (FYI - ARIN's 2009 Budget is available at https://www.arin.net/about_us/corp_docs/budget.html, and the 2010 one should be there sometime next week.) ARIN runs about a $15M annual operating expense. As you noted below, it can be hard to separate into distinct "products', and in fact, in some cases it is not appropriate to separate since one function (e.g. support for public policy development) might actually be a prerequisite for another (i.e.new address allocations). I am actually working to get more service- oriented cost information going forward, but this is non-trivial to make happen. In terms of fees, we have about 3500 ISPs (whose registration subscription service fees cover the bulk of ARIN's expenses, i.e. an average of several thousand dollars per ISP per year) In other fees, we have over 1000 end-user organization and presently about 800 legacy RSA holders which pay $100/year for maintenance. This doesn't really cover much expense, and that is quite appropriate since handling registration services requests (and the supporting public policy process) does dominant the expenses of ARIN, at least today. The question is how that evolves over time, particularly if the level of registration services requests in an post-IPv6 world is very modest. At that point, ARIN's expenses will be predominantly registry systems support, and whatever public policy process the community wishes us to maintain. These costs will need to be predominantly covered by the maintenance fees, and will support the objects in the database, which includes the resource records of 3500 ISPs, 1000+ enduser organizations, the signed LRSA holders, and estimated 15000 legacy resource holders who have not signed an LRSA... At the end of the day, the Board of Trustees will determine the best fee schedule to provide for cost-recovery of whatever functions are needed for the mission at that time.
So when you run into expensive stuff, like litigation, the best course of action is to avoid it unless you absolutely can't.
Correct.
Further, if you've suffered mission creep and are funding other things such as IPv6 educational outreach, that's going to run up your costs as well.
Presently, IPv6 outreach is not considered "mission creep", as it has been an overwhelming request of the community both online and in the public policy meetings.
An established entity like ARIN typically has a very rough time going on any sort of diet. Further, companies typically do not segregate their "products" well: if IPv4 policy enforcement runs into legal wrangling and lawsuits, ARIN as a whole gets sued, and it is tempting to spread the resulting expenses over all their products. Segregation into two (or more!) entities is a trivial way to fix that, though it also brings about other challenges.
Absolutely correct. I think it is possible to understand those costs better, but in some cases they can't be put into separate organizations without some changes to structural assumptions about ARIN's mission.
I have my doubts, based on a ~decade of observation. I don't think ARIN is deliberately evil, but I think there are some bits that'd be hard to fix.
Joe - If you want to improve ARIN policy, jump right in. If you want to propose policy for the sake of changing the nature of the organization, that's also fine, if you contact me I'll assist in providing estimates of cost savings and structural changes that can result from your proposals. At the end of the day, it will be the community's discussion of your proposal, and the AC & Boards consideration of the discussion which will decide the matter. /John John Curran President and CEO ARIN