Legacy prefixes do not support RPKI unless you sign ARIN’s registration agreement and agree to pay. Many early IP address holders (including myself!) have never signed.
You don’t have to pay a dime. But don’t expect the rest of the Internet (that DO pay for their resources) to continue to guarantee reachability to your address space.
If you won’t get on board with RPKI/IRR you can’t cry foul when the rest of the Internet is paying the price to be reachable.
I am a resource holder and I pay my dues. I have no problems with paying for that privilege.
Internet access is not an inalienable right. It is a privilege. Even as it’s become increasingly more and more of a utility. Until laws start to reflect that, it is still a privilege at best.
Edit: before someone says anything about the trust anchors. Reminder, There are two overarching namespaces to the Internet. IP and DNS. You are free to ignore the authorities of both but don’t expect the rest of the Internet to play along when you want to use .billybob as your TLD.
As long as RPKI "unknown" / not-found prefixes are able to be globally routed, I will not pay. I have a legacy ARIN /24 from the 90's. It was cheaper for me to get an ASN and IPv6 block through a RIPE LIR than go through ARIN.
As for IRR, one of my upstreams created an RADB entry for me on behalf of my ASN, so not too concerned there.