> And if I'm reading the ARIN fees correctly, it only costs $4000 annually for a "/16" allocation:

For better or worse, you're not; that's for IPv4 /16. For IPv6 /16, it'd be the X-Large service category, so $16,000/year.

And for $256,000/year you can... exhaust the entirety of 2000::/3?

Yeah, that's not okay. Either the price needs to go up a lot or they need to include factors other than money in the allocation criteria.

> they need to include factors other than money in the allocation criteria

They already do, and simply being able to pay the fee does nothing to qualify you for an allocation: https://www.arin.net/participate/policy/nrpm/#6-ipv6

At least, in theory. I'm not going to attempt to defend the Capital One allocation.

They might have included them in the published policy, but it seems they aren't in whatever policy they're actually following.

It seems more likely to me that ARIN is following the text of published policy, but Capital One found a way to interpret it that violates its spirit. My guess is that they're treating each customer debit/credit card as a serving site that qualifies for a /48. To address this, ARIN should fix the policy, not raise fees.

It's ARIN's job to call BS on BS justifications, otherwise they're not following the policy, they're following whatever they allow. "The purpose of a system is what the system does" and all.

That's an interesting idea for how they justified it. There might be something like 4 billion active credit/debit cards in the US (but they probably weren't all issued by Capital One).