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

[Bob Fink]

Seth,

At 12:15 PM 4/10/99 -0700, Seth David Schoen wrote:
...
>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?

I'd prefer we stick to the topic of 6bone prequalification for Sub-TLAs.
However, I'm not really sure where a good place to have these kind of
conversations is. Possibly some ICANN mail list? Anyone know?

Meanwhile, I'm concerned that we've had lots of social commentary about
registries, addresses, etc., but no comment on the process that was
proposed for 6bone prequalification for Sub-TLAs.


Until I hear direct comments to the contrary, I'm assuming that no one has
a porblem with the proposed process.


Thanks,

Bob