[members-discuss] is the self-assessment model really a good idea?

On Mon, 2012-07-09 at 17:36 +0200, Lu Heng wrote:
[... what's to stop members from simply choosing the lowest
category ...]
> Sounds to me it will end up that way, Moral hazard will come into play.

Yes that's really the question. I'd rather doubt that this "pay as much
as you think you want to afford" concept is something that is likely to
work well with an essential technical service that few people outside
the technical realm are even aware off. Especially since these fees
are not paid by the technical people themselves but by their
companies. Just consider how few of the 7000 something RIPE ever
take an active interest in RIPE meetings, why should they
see a problem in lowering their fees by self-assessment, if almost
no one that matters to them will ever become aware of this?

And if indeed large swathes of members will asses themselves to be
of "category" small, wouldn't we really just be created an
increase for the smalls by stealth (or a massive downward pressure
on the RIPE NCC budget, depending how the real smalls will react).

IMO, if the aim is to keep different fee categories alive in the long
term for members with resource allocation levels (which on balance
should be proportional a member's financials), why not simply
tweak the current charging scheme a bit, and still have bands
based on actual resource usage.

If you really want to make a revolutionary change to the charging
system, instead of keeping the essentially arbitrary bands we
have today, we should either go for a system where everyone pays the
same (and thus annoy the smalls but be honest about it right
away) or a system that is truly proportional to resource allocation
levels (and thus annoy the larges but also create some pressure
to not sit on unused allocations).

Otherwise why no not simply keep the existing system essentially
as it is, which at least ensures that new entrance don't have
to pay all that much and that the influence of larges is kept
at bay (which BTW is big enough as it is as they can actually afford the
people to meddle in RIPE affairs a lot more aggressively ;-).

But maybe I am simply missing several years of debate on the
topic here....