Alternative Funding Proposal

["Don McLane" <dmclane@ieee.org>]

Comment on the July 13th draft of "IMPLEMENTATION OF A NEW
INTERNET ASSIGNED NUMBERS AUTHORITY (IANA)"

I'm concerned that our funding model will prevent the
diversity of input that we desire.  The current draft
states "The Supporting Organizations also should constitute
the primary funding sources for the Corporation ."  Such a
model could stifle input from persons, or organizations
which are not well funded.

Consider the Industry/User Supporting Organization: much
of the input from the user community could be
from non-profit organizations, which don't have a lot of
money.  These are the organizations that we'd like to have,
but some may not be able to afford the cost.

What about researchers who want to take part in the
Protocol Supporting Organization?  Will they have to pay
to do their research?

Perhaps I'm exagerating, but the scenarios seem possible.

Is there any alternative?  I'm proposing that IANA charge
a fee for IP addresses.  While this is counter to current
practice, I will argue that the costs per address are so
small, that they won't be a burden, even to non-profit
organizations, schools, libraries, etc.

Consider a scenario where each year we charge $.001 for
each class A address, $.002 for each class B address,
and $.003 for each class C address. (US dollars)

A class A address space has 16 million addresses.  At $.001
per address, the holder of a class A space would be
assesed $16,700 per year.  I realize that some reasearch
organizations have class A address spaces, but this should
still be within their budget.  There are 125 class A
address spaces available.  If all are assigned (not
unreasonable), IANA would get $2,000,000 per year.

Similiarly, a class B address space has 65,000 addresses.
At $.002 per address, the holder of a class B address
space would have to pay $131 per year.  There are 16,000
class B address spaces available, so IANA could recieve
$2,000,000 for this.

A class C address space has 254 addresses.  At $.003 per
address, the cost to the holder of a class C address
space would be less than a dollar.  Since there are
over 2 million class C address spaces available, IANA
could recieve about $1.6 million from class C holders.

The total yearly income to IANA could be as much as
$5.6 million.  A substantial fraction of this would
probably be used simply in the process of collecting
it.  However, it should be enough to support an office,
and several root servers.

How would this affect users?  Not much.  Even if the
cost per address inflated to $.10 per address by the
time it got to the end user, it's still a small
portion of typical service costs.  Even when we
picture a future, where every home has 100 IP
addresses, for various appliances, the cost per
home would only be $10 per year (in 1998 dollars).

Submitted for your consideration.

Don McLane
dmclane@ieee.org

(speaking for neither Syllogistics, LLC, nor the IEEE).