[ncc-services-wg] legacy holders paying for registration services and 2012-07v2

On 25 Feb 2013, at 10:48, Hank Nussbacher <hank at efes.iucc.ac.il> wrote:

> Exactly because of the complexity, the NCC should require payment for registration services to handle the request.

I'm not so sure.

In principle, yes of course everyone should pay. OTOH, the costs of generating these bills might not be worth the effort in some cases. It could also put an extra (excessive?) load on the NCC's finance and legal people -- changes to finance systems and bookkeeping, new invoice/payment tracking procedures, T&C's for these transactions, etc, etc. Setting up all of that just so a phone number in an LRH contact object could be changed (say) that might well be overkill.

My preference would be for the NCC to provide the same services to LRHs that they got from the old Internic under the same terms and conditions: ie "for free". IMO, that's just part of the cost of doing business for an RIR. For any other services -- for instance getting an RPKI cert or adding a DNSSEC key for reverse DNS -- an LRH should pay. Ideally, they would do that by becoming an LIR or going through a sponsoring LIR. That way there would be no need to change the NCC's existing finance systems and processes. If this is not acceptable, then we need to be careful that whatever cost recovery mechanisms get proposed do not impose unwelcome overheads on the NCC.

I wish we could get some hard data about this now instead of waiting until the proposal gets to the impact assessment stage. For instance, how many of these LRH transactions are expected each year, what sort of financial systems and processes will be needed to handle them, what will these cost. I fear we could be proposing something that grows into a cumbersome bureaucracy that needs a small army of beancounters to manage it. It would be nice if we could reach consensus on something that is workable before going to impact assessment and then finding the proposal is impractical because of the load/costs it imposes on the NCC.