[members-discuss] Some thought on how to lower membership fees follow bottom up principle

Dear Colleagues:

Some thought on fees for RIR’s in general, and how it could also apply to
RIPE.

I personally started in RIPE when I was in my early 20s when I was studying
in the Netherlands, nearly a decade ago.   While I never feel the pain to
pay any RIR fees, as it is relative low proportion to the business built on
it, I do know for lots of smaller members it is difficult to pay in one go,
especially when you are coming from relative low-income countries. We need
to be supporting these businesses, so they are given the same chance to
grow and develop.

RIRs at its core, is just a registration database with few hundreds
megabytes of data, it’s not expensive or technically complicated to manage.
Most of RIR’s expense are coming from its outreach activities and
additional service it’s provided to the public.

So how about members of RIR decide what service are important and what
activity are essential at individual level of members?

For example, for RIPE, we can divided the fees into (numbers are just
example):

Core service: (RPKI, registration service)(200euro/year)
Additional service:
RIPE stats(100euro/year)
RIPE atlas(100euro/year)
Etc

Outreach activities:

RIPE conference(150euro/year)
Additional conference:
ICANN related(100euro/year)
Other RIR related(100euro/year)

And we let each member voluntarily choose to pay what service they believe
is good for the community. For the service that does not get enough
funding, either those member of staff who were hired for the service should
ask for donations to support those services or those service should be
dropped as community doesn’t find value in them and does not want to pay
for it.

And we should also incorporate per capita income into the equation, for
example,  Central Asia member should pay 40% less than member in norway for
example justified by per capita income for each of the service.

So, only the core service would be compulsory to be paid, and therefore the
minimum membership fee for a developing country small ISP can be as long as
few hundreds euro per year. This will give those members a fighting chance
to build their businesses without paying for services they don’t need and
can’t afford

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Kind regards.
Lu
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