Keith Davidson wrote:
I agree in principle with Joe, APNIC are pretty easy to deal with, and for any reasonable robuts requirer of numbers, the costs are hardly prohibitive at US$2,000 one-off, plus US$1,250 per annum. But I guess the argument is that some people have a class C or 2 that they pay nothing for currently and would like to continue to pay nothing.
Isn't this the nub of the whole debate here. There's a bunch of people who think they have a class C or 2 that they've paid nothing for over the years who now find that Telecom has in fact been doing precisely what they should have been doing and, at first glance at least, Telecom has established title to these five /16s for a paltry US$10000 a year. Large numbers of people with IP addresses in this range haven't done anything about keeping their records up to date, engaging with APNIC about title and now they're paying the penalty. Your IP address space is about as important a resource as you can think of. I'm stunned when people think they shouldn't have to pay for it. We're talking less that one laptop every other year - is it really that much money? Why should those of us who are APNIC members subsidise those in the community who are paying for their resource? We had this argument many years ago when we had to start paying for domain name registrations - now nobody thinks twice about it. And setting up an NZ registry isn't the answer - there'd still be costs that you'd need to meet. Start talking to APNIC here about your IP assignments and offer to pay the money - that way you'll get some traction. Complaining that this used to be free and Telecom are a bunch of thieves etc in this forum won't resolve the issue.