[members-discuss] [ncc-announce] [GM] Consultation on RIPE NCC Charging Scheme 2024

So, there have been many replies to this, and I'll add my two cents.

RIPE is a membership organization. What we pay for is membership, not resources. Said payment of the membership fees finances RIPE's operations, and what the goal should be is a sustainable model for the future.

It seems to me that the excel sheet did us a bit of a disservice. It basically prompts people to input their numbers and saying, they support the variant where they themselves pay less. And then there are the people that say, yes the tired model is good, but we need to change the thresholds to [Insert wherever they would fall into the next lower tier]. It doesn't work that way, as I assume that most of the LIRs fall into the lower tiers - and if we reduce the thresholds, it directly results in the costs for the lower tiers to increase.

I'm all for a category based model. It seems reasonable to me that bigger LIRs, which profit more from their membership, should be able to shoulder more of the financial burden. I also think that the categories should go higher or the distribution ratio should be changed, as I'm sure the hyper scalers or huge organizations like Deutsche Telekom wouldn't even notice the 8000 € that are the example value of the excel sheet. However we won't know what makes sense here until we have numbers (number of LIRs per size backet). I've seen the argument "yes but we have a large number of IP addresses because that's what you got back then" but if they don't use those, they should give them back, and If they use them there is cash flow associated with that.

As we're not buying resources but paying for the membership, I'm strictly against paying "per IP address " or something like that. For the same reason, I don't get why there is a "per ASN" fee, as those are (finite) resources like the IP addresses and I don't see the additional cost to RIPE operations. So now RIPE is selling ASN numbers? That seems hypocritical. If we want to take those into account we can always make them part of the category calculations. If there's a LIR with one /24 that needs ten ASNs and not have the budget for the membership then somebody needs to explain that to me.

Many people have criticized the growing budget of RIPE. That may be true (I don't know enough facts to say if the numbers are necessary for RIPEs mission or not), but it's a separate discussion. Whatever the new charging scheme will be, it should be defined as percentages of the budget which the membership has to approve. If the budget increases, the membership fees increase, if it decreases, so does the fee.

Best regards,
Andreas Grabmüller


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