[members-discuss] Proposal for New RIPE NCC Charging Scheme Model

On Jul 13, 2012, at 9:40 PM, Nigel Titley wrote:
> Andrea, in the previous round of discussions we said why we can't  
> use an
> "n euros per address model".
>
> To re-iterate the argument, if we are seen to be "selling" IP  
> addresses
> by the Dutch tax authorities then we lose our special tax status. This
> will immediately cause a rise in the cost of running the RIPE as we  
> will
> be liable for Dutch corporation tax. Up until now the membership  
> hasn't
> wanted this.

I am sorry I was not here in the previous discussions.

I understand your point, but I personally see RIPE and its role as  
something that goes beyond a "company", as a matter of fact RIPE is  
something whose policies go far beyond the Dutch laws … and even  
though I do not have to propose a "technical" solution I am still  
convinced that the technicalities of the dutch tax system should not  
impact something so important (I understand that this is easy to state  
as a principle, but hard to apply as a matter of fact).

The principle in my mind is quite simple: IPv4 is a limited resource,  
everyone would love to have a /8 allocated tomorrow morning, but that  
is simply not possible. With all limited (shared) resources in the  
world the only way to limit their misuse is a magic and hated word:  
taxes. This is what happens to use of water, to pollution, to a lot of  
other things: the more you use/pollute/occupy the more taxes you pay.

Now I understand that it is probably impossible for legal reasons to  
put it in the form "pay 0.1 euro per IP", but still I think it would  
make sense to push toward a "the more you use the more you pay" model,  
and not toward "everyone pays the same" scheme. I see that this  
proposal goes toward the "everyone pays the same" schema.

My opinion is that RIPE should go in the opposite direction. Since I  
represent a "medium" LIR (we have about 16K addresses allocated) the  
two models do not change much on our side. By the way I can say that  
the RIPE fee is a marginal cost in our budget (you bet a few gigabits  
of transit on Tier1 networks costs a couple of orders of magnitude  
more). So there is no personal/institutional bias on this.

I would say that a model like "up to a /21 total allocation you are  
small and pay 1; up to a /18 you are medium and pay 8; up to a /15 you  
are large and pay 64; up to /12 you are fat and pay 512…" would be a  
fair approach, technically not different from the preexisting one and  
pushing toward resource saving and evolution (knock knock… time to  
shift to IPv6??? or want to pay 500k euros??).

Really, I suppose these are known and already discussed arguments, I  
apologize if being the last coming here I reiterate them… but still,  
that's what my opinion is.

Regards,

A.