[members-discuss] A Whim about next year's fees

Hi Lu & the people in the community,

> A very simple solution would be, let the companies using more address to pay---that can really help reduce their willingness to hold address while they are not using it. In the real world, many goverment input very high property taxes are the same reason.

As stated in the reply from Henrik as he put it soo nicely in his reply ...  The cake is gone.. there is no cake. IPv4 is gone.
Anything that has anything to do with any kind of fee structure based on how many IPv4's you have / own / use / not use / can't get is planning for failure imho.

The RIPE NCC is a not for profit membership. This means that we as the members have to pay in order to have the organization do what we like them to do.
What they do, is based on the activity plan. And that is also what is agreed (voted on) by the members on the AGM meeting.

What we as members need to learn is that a membership of any kind of organization, if it is your political party or your soccer club or your friendly neighborhood IP redistribution friends which we call RIPE NCC, is that it costs money to run such an organization. It is always much more what they do for their funds, than just their core activity.
A political party has, for instance to pay for balloons during campaigns or security and the cake and champagne they consume.
And a soccer club has to pay the lease for their building, the weekly maintenance of the field and the goal netting, to name a view. But also for the Emergency Medics to be present during games, or pay a preset price to the local Red Cross to do such task.

We have endless discussions about IPv4, and how we should charge based on how large a certain LIR is (looking at how many IP's they hold.)

We want a fair system for people that want to start and don't make it impossible for all to start in this business.

So here is the option one can chew on for the discussion:

There is a membership fee, based on (budget minus (the young / new members newer than  years times 1500 euro a year)) divided by the total number of members that are older than 2 years.

You can play with the sliding scale for the cost for the initial year member, second year member in between 1500 and the longer than 2 years member fee, but that should be it.
It is the fairest system that allows for people to grow their business, it has nothing to do with IPv4 / IPv6 ... or how much one has or doesn't have. It is based on the actual required budget/activities (which members vote on via the AGM meeting)

And RIPE NCC can't get charged on a fee per IP TAX or something similar. And we can close this discussion every year.

Regards,
Erik Bais