[members-discuss] [ncc-announce] [GM] RIPE NCC Annual Report 2017 and Proposed RIPE NCC Charging Scheme 2019

On Thursday, 12 April 2018 09:30:09 CEST Gert Doering wrote:
> As people still use "open a new LIR!" as a cheaper way to acquire a /22
> than "buy it on the market", the price is still not high enough, I would
> say.
> 
> So it seems to be a reasonable compromise if one side says "it's too high"
> and the other side says "it should be higher"

This is extremely dependent on who you ask due to extreme operating scale 
differences between RIPE members, who are somewhat artificially held to the 
same standards of rights and responsibilities even if under no other 
circumstances would they be presumed equal in any respect or considered peers.

For a multinational corporation or a national ISP, the signup and annual RIPE 
fees are peanuts with a side of pocket lint. It costs them more per year to 
top up Coca-Cola in the free soft drink vending machines at their offices than 
to keep their RIPE membership.

Regional ISPs and other medium-sized businesses are probably more inclined to 
actually notice that membership fee in an expenses report, but I'm pretty sure 
it's not something anyone frets over. Come to think of it, a single decent 
server or L3 managed switch easily costs way more, and that's not even 
anywhere close to the "actually expensive" end of the scale.

Small local businesses, especially in low-income countries of Eastern and 
Southern Europe, are likely to be hit pretty hard by those fees, though, and 
there really isn't any alternative to becoming a member for a very small ISP 
that wishes to remain independent and competetive (read: small scale and often 
remote area of operation doesn't leave many "trusted LIRs" to choose from, who 
are not direct competitors at the same time, so the argument for  asking a 
"trusted LIR" to manage resource registration is sometimes kind of sketchy). 
On one hand, I would still be inclined to say that if 1400 EUR per year is a 
matter of life and death for one's business, they're probably doing something 
wrong; on the other, I can't help but agree that this *can* be a lot of money 
for someone who just wanted to run an ISP for their small town and a couple 
villages around it and remain independent from the bigger fish like their 
national ISP, but just happens to live in the middle of nowhere within a 
former Soviet republic or something like that.

Lastly, I presume there are some member-funded (as in funded by *their* 
members) non-profit NGOs among the RIPE memers, for whom the fees are rather 
painfully high. I should know, I represent one. 1400 EUR is about 5 to 6% of 
our *whole* expected annual budget for 2018, which is almost exclusively 
covered by member contributions and donations. Yet we are paying that fee and, 
apparently, we're less fussy about it than some members who are probably 
better prepared to afford it.

So, that's my take on the "why" of this whole discussion.

As for "what to do about it" - hell if I know, but I don't think it's possible 
to do much of anything without acknowledging factitiousness of the notion that 
entities of such wildly different sizes and financial capabilities can be 
considered equal peers in all respects. I haven't got the faintest idea of how 
to do that *properly*, though, and I can see at least a dozen ways to abuse 
any potential rules that tried to do that (knowing the human creativity when 
it comes to self-interest, there are probably a couple dozen more), so I'm not 
putting forth any proposals.

I just hope that, should this discussion continue now or resume in the future, 
the above will help it kickstart a more analytical approach to the problem, 
instead of a torrent of angry three-sentence tit-for-tats it is now.

Regards,
Remigiusz Marcinkiewicz
Warsaw Hackerspace // https://bgp.wtf/ // https://hackerspace.pl/

-- 
Remigiusz Marcinkiewicz, remigiusz at marcinkiewicz.me
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