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RE: Addresses and ports and taxes -- oh my!

2000-08-03 14:50:03
Why would internet-enable appliances necessarily have to incur a charge?
Although internet-enabled, they could also be defined as 10. address within
your LAN (a.k.a. home).  They would be visible to the outside only through
your personal server - for which you are already paying a charge.  Whatever
security you ran on your PC would protect you from someone, say, turning
your heat up to around 90 degrees F while you were gone on vacation.

Regards,

Rodney H. Kay
Department of Veterans Affairs
Puget Sound Health Care System
Systems Manager
Seattle, Washington

-----Original Message-----
From: vinton g. cerf [mailto:vcerf(_at_)MCI(_dot_)NET]
Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2000 7:51 AM
To: Dennis Glatting; ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: Addresses and ports and taxes -- oh my!


Dennis

thanks for drawing attention to this question. One of the reasons
for fees, of course, is that the Address Registries also have responsibility
to support ICANN so they have some new costs in addition to their operating
costs (or if you like, their operating costs include support for ICANN).

It is a very good question whether one's internet-enabled household
appliances
will induce a monthly charges - do you suppose there would be a way to have
a
one-time charge to "pay" for some number of such addresses - perhaps built
into
the cost of the appliance (and paid by the manufacturer who "burns" an
address
into the device - at least the low order 64 bits or something to make it
end-to-end unique)? 

Please don't flame me for thinking out loud - Dennis' point is a good one
and
we ought to discuss - perhaps in a smaller group than the whole of ietf
announce
list!

Vint Cerf

At 05:32 AM 8/3/2000 -0700, Dennis Glatting wrote:

I've been thinking about the issue of ARIN fees from last night's plenary
and arrived at two philosophical questions.

I run my business out of my home and my DSL link is an important part of
my business. About six months ago my ISP started charging me a $20/mo. fee
for my /27 because "ARIN is now charging us." I am unhappy about this fee
but I understand its motivation -- conversation of IP space, though I
believe fees do not really effect the true wasters of this space and the
fee, or as it is called in some circles, a tax, is probably misguided.
Nonetheless, with IPv6, I naively hoped, until last night, the
conservation of space issues would go away, and thus the fees. Big duh!

If we look at today's marketing hype and think forward a bit there is a
thrust to "Internet enable" appliances, such as dryers, ovens, and
stereos. Assuming ARIN fees persist, my first philosophical question is
whether any consumer of these appliances MUST periodically (e.g., monthly)
drop coins in the ARIN fountain?

Thinking laterally, the reserved port space (<1024) is tight. Using the
same IP space conversation logic, should fees be charged to conserve port
space? If so, my second philosophiocal question is what is our role, as
protocol designers and IETF volunteers, in creating, what is slowly
becoming, an Internet consumption taxation model?

Imagine for a moment the effect of a fee against the allocation or use of
port 80 or 443, maybe even port 25 or 53.





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