John Curran <jcurran@arin.net> wrote:
... the long-term direction is to provide the same services to all customers under the same agreement and fees – anything else wouldn’t be equitable.
There are many "anything else"s that would indeed be equitable. It is equitable for businesses to sell yesterday's bread at a lower price than today's bread. Or to rent unused hotel rooms to late-night transients for lower prices than those charged to people who want pre-booked certainty about their overnight shelter. ARIN could equitably charge different prices to people in different situations; it already does. And ARIN could equitably offer services to non-members, by charging them transaction fees for services rendered, rather than trying to force them into a disadvantageous long term contract. Please don't confuse "seeking equity" with "forcing everyone into the same procrustean bed". As a simple example, ARIN's contract need not require its customers to give up their resources when ceasing to pay ARIN for services. (There's an existence proof: RIPE's doesn't.) Such a contract would likely result in more-equitable sharing of costs, since it would encourage legacy holders to pay ARIN (and legacy holders are still more than a quarter of the total IP addresses, possibly much more). The fact that ARIN hasn't made this happen says nothing about equity; it's about something else. This whole tussle is about power. ARIN wants the power to take away legacy resources, while their current owners don't want that to happen. ARIN wants to be the puppeteer who pulls all the strings for the North American Internet. It pursues this desire by stealth and misdirection (e.g. "We strongly encourage all legacy resource holders who have not yet signed an LRSA to cover their legacy resources to consider doing so before 31 December 2023 in order to secure the most favorable fees for their ARIN Services...") ARIN is also trying to encourage ISPs to demand RPKI before providing transit to IP address holders, which would turn its optional RPKI service (that it has tied by contract into ARIN gaining control over legacy resources) into an effectively mandatory RPKI service. ARIN hides its power grab behind "our policies are set by our community" and "our board is elected by our community" misdirections. Its voting community consists almost entirely of those who aren't legacy holders (by definition: if you accept their contract, your legacy resource ownership goes away; if you don't, you can't vote). That community would love to confiscate some "underused" legacy IP addresses to be handed out for free to their own "waiting list". So this is equivalent to putting foxes in charge of policy for a henhouse. Now that markets exist for IP addresses, all that IP addresses need is a deed-registry to discourage fraud, like a county real-estate registrar's office. IP addresses no longer need a bureacracy for socialistic determinations about which supplicants "deserve" addresses. Addresses now have prices, and if you want some, you buy them. Deed registries get to charge fees for transactions, but they don't get to take away your property, nor tell you that you can't buy any more property because they disapprove of how you managed your previous properties. Actual ownership of real estate is defined by contracts and courts, not by the registry, which is just a set of pointers to help people figure out the history and current status of each parcel. The registry is important, but it's not definitive. Deed-registry is apparently not a model that ARIN wants to be operating in. They initially tried to refuse to record purchases of address blocks, because it violated their model of "if you don't use your IP addresses, you must give them back to us and receive no money for them". They saw their job as being the power broker who hands out free favors. But when their supply of free IP addresses dried up, they had no remaining function other than to record ownership (be a deed registry), and to run an occasional conference. It dawned on them that if they refused to record these transactions, they would not even be a reliable deed-registry; they would have entirely outlived their usefulness. So they reluctantly agreed to do that job, but their policies are still left over from their power-broker past. They'd love to go back to it, if only they could figure out how. IPv6? Sure! RPKI maybe? Worth a try! ARIN prefers to be a power broker rather than a scribe. Who can blame them for that? But don't mistake their strategy for stewardship. "Doing what the community wants" or "seeking the equitable thing" quacks like stewardship, so of course they brand themselves that way. But in my opinion their power-seeking is self-serving, not community-serving. John Gilmore