I completely agree. I got the impression that the same people are trying to push the same idea in "someone" interests. Ignoring the option of charging for each resource Ipv4 becomes a marker of the odiousness of these offers. Unfortunately, the content in these texts and speeches is "useful water", which does not make much sense. But it hides the true meaning: "To consolidate the existing inequality in access to scarce IPv4 resources." -- Dmitry Serbulov
We have consistently voted no to categories so I was surprised to see the only option is categories. I had hoped there might be a new option, however this was probably an impossible task.
"The amount of categories should be determined by the RIPE NCC, but there should be enough categories to ensure there is no significant increase from one category to the next"
NCC now has to magic something aceptable and make everyone feel they did OK. I can't comment on that until then but an open ended category risk is what we keep voting against. Even if the categories are acceptable now will they remain so, a rule should be added that there will always be a flat membership fee available to vote each year to cover this risk so we may safely give categories a go and not feel like it is a trap.
"equity rather than equality should be seen as the key driver of fairness" sounds good but the reality of "not all members with large resource holdings are using those resources to make money or have the ability to pass the cost down to their customers" makes equity impossible if all those with the same resources have to be treated the same as their poorest cousins.
That means the very large commercial orgs continue to get a much better deal than everyone else so categories can not introduce equality or equity.
It's not really about the number of categories,
There are two "fair" models, flat membership and per IP. Categories just shuffle unfairness around.
"The category that members are placed in should be based on the total PA resource holdings"
Why are we persisting this legacy PA/PI differentiation, why no make them all just IPs and treated the same.
"The category model should ensure that those with a small number of resources would pay less than they would under a one LIR account-one fee model"
Lets not forget the reason for this issue and the future risk. A lot of lucky IP miners were able to extract blocks from the run out space. As a result there are a large number of small members wanting to pay less even though they knew the price when they got them. Why is it expected the charging model should accommodate that at the other members expense?
Members may agree to do that but in doing so the larger peril is that many of those members are cashing in their winnings so the number of members will reduce significantly. How that will affect a the category model is unknown, all we know is a large chunk of revenue will be shifted rather than cut spending. If the model continued to favour the small category paying less than currently then without a significant move of costs to higher categories the middle categories are going to end up paying a lot more.
IPv6 charges: Consideration should be given to what the categories would look like post v4, if there are only a handful of allocation sizes would that break the category model. If so is it worth introducing categories based on legacy v4 now?
brandon