Colleagues, The following was written by David Conrad, who I respect greatly, and was posted to NANOG today as part of a conversation on the policy for and implementation choices of prefix recovery, announced by a party other than the allocatee. The answer to the prefix question lies in the RPKI project, but the most proximal question was what do RIRs do and how much does it cost to do whatever it is RIRs do. As the ICANN budget is so frequently a subject of discussion, I've copied David's mail to NANOG below:
Jimmy,
On Aug 21, 2011, at 8:15 AM, Jimmy Hess wrote:
The system is this way BY DESIGN, and any other method would concentrate power which would be detrimental to the internet and counter to its open/consensus driven nature.
See recent discussions in RIPEland regarding BGPSEC+RPKI regarding policy 2008-08.
The RIRs' job is to provide unique registrations, nothing else. And registry fees are for recovering costs necessary to provide the service and to maintain addressing policy.
Googling "<RIR> budget 2011" gives (all in US$, using today's Euro and Aus$ conversion rates):
AfriNIC: 2011 Expenses: $2,832,614 (http://www.afrinic.org/corporate/Budget2011.pdf) APNIC: 2011 Expenses: $14,815,906 (http://meetings.apnic.net/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/31478/treasurers_repor...) ARIN: 2011 Expenses: $16,412,160 (https://www.arin.net/about_us/corp_docs/budget.html) RIPE: 2011 Expenses: $26,313,894 (http://www.ripe.net/ripe/docs/ripe-507, using today's exchange rate)
Can't seem to find a 2011 (or anything more recent than 2005) budget for LACNIC.
BTW, since you made passing reference to them and just FYA:
ICANN: Expenses: $61,164,000 (http://www.icann.org/en/financials/adopted-opplan-budget-fy12-09aug11-en.pdf)
So if LACNIC's budget is more than $790K, the RIRs combined budget for "providing unique registrations, nothing else" for IP addresses will be more than ICANN's budget for coordinating all unique Internet identifiers including addresses, IETF protocol parameters, and domains (and "promoting competition" in the latter) and dealing with a much larger community (at least as measured by meeting attendance).
_Enforcement_ of RIR allocations is by network operators refusing to originate or propagate announcements by organizations unauthorized by the registered resource holder.
Very true. Of course, defining "registered resource holder" and finding that information will likely get a bit more complicated in the future...
Regards, -drc
The ICANN Financials page is: http://www.icann.org/en/general/financial.html Eric