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

[Francis Dupont]

 In your previous mail you wrote:

   How did the regional NICs appear the first time around?

=> I know well the RIPE history: the idea of RIPE is the coordination
of IP networking in Europe (read RFC 1181). This has grown as the Internet
has grown then one time a permanent structure became necessary: the RIPE NCC.
When IANA delegated some parts of IPv4 address space to "Europe",
the RIPE NCC began to manage them and to distribute address blocks to
so-called "local IRs" which are now access ISPs but NCC fees are not
bound to address blocks, their purpose is make up for NCC costs...
I believe the ARIN history is very different (and short), the only
clear purpose of ARIN is to replace the IANA/InterNIC for IPv4 address
assignment/allocation in the "American" region.
   
   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.
   
=> the historical context is very important because some years ago
the idea of address fees was not imaginable. But now IPv4 addresses
are a rare resource (perhaps they are not but the important point is
one believes they are) and you can only buy them... Obviously this
should be transposed to IPv6 as it!

   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?
   
=> we agree.

   Is this off-topic for this list?  If so, is it on-topic somewhere else?
   
=> perhaps the 6bone list is not the good place but I don't know what
list to use about this topic and wordwide (ie not the RIPE IPv6 WG list).
The discussion is supposed to be about the 6bone prequalification idea.
I believe this is a good idea and most of the persons on the list agree.

Thanks

Francis.Dupont@inria.fr