Hi Sascha,
There have been unfortunate conflicts between community and membership before. In my opinion, policy should be made in a way so it can stand without infringing on the freedom of the board and membership to manage their financial matters. In that respect, yes, 2001-07 was flawed too.
Agree. We're focusing too much on the money side here. I think the objections to the charging scheme have nothing to do with money. It is all about having some downside to keeping unused resources, and the default way we got to think about that is to charge money for it. And that is really a matter for the NCC and its members. But it is an implementation detail, not a goal by itself. I think that the community wants (needs to be checked) to have a garbage correction mechanism and maybe rate limiter so that people don't request resources that they don't really need. That is what we should focus on, not whether we do that with money or by making someone fill in a captcha every year for every resource or by something else. We're circling around a balance point here. The address policy WG wants to make policies easy and simple, but if they become too easy then abuse and negligence is feared so we try to put a limit on that. The current trends is to do this by making the NCC charge the holders, but there had to be a better way. One that keeps us from constantly getting into silly conflicts over this. If I only new what... Maybe that captcha idea isn't so weird after all... :) Cheers, Sander