History and economics of fees? (was: Re: 6bone Prequalification...)

[Seth David Schoen]

Francis Dupont writes:

>  In your previous mail you wrote:
> 
>    > Is ARIN so different?
>    
>    http://www.arin.net/feeschedule.html
>    
> => my concern with this topic is the xxx-TLA assignment can be
> interpreted as an attack against the regional NIC business...
> Obviously IPv4 addresses are not for free and the fee schedule
> of IPv4 cannot be translated easily to IPv6.

How did the regional NICs appear the first time around?  I remember when they
showed up, but I wasn't really following Internet architecture matters yet.

Brian Carpenter is right that these delegation and pricing issues aren't going
to be solved suddenly on this list, but I'm curious about that part of the
historical context.

At some time before the regional NICs, IPv4 addresses _were_ "free"; the
explanation I'm familiar with is that the InterNIC's registration services
were being subsized by the US government.  While I certainly don't want to
see a return to such a subsidy, I'm also very curious about the economics
of the process; the fees have been said to exist in order to cover registries'
costs (which makes sense) and also in order to conserve scarce IPv4 address
space (which also makes sense).  But now IPv6 addresses are not scarce, at
least not in the same sense that IPv4 addresses are.  Shouldn't this, as I've
heard suggested, cause the scarcity portion of the fees (if registration fees
can actually be broken down this way) to evaporate?

Is this off-topic for this list?  If so, is it on-topic somewhere else?

-- 
              Seth David Schoen / schoen@uclink4.berkeley.edu
He said, "This is what the king who will reign over you will do."  And they
said, "Nay, but we will have a king over us, that we also may be like all the
nations." (1 Sam 8)  http://ishmael.geecs.org/~sigma/   http://www.loyalty.org/