On 22/04/2026 13:49:58, "Job Snijders via members-discuss" <members-discuss@ripe.net> wrote:
For exampe, it is not too hard to imagine that a probable outcome of lowering the financial barrier-to-participate-as-a-LIR would be an increase in the number of people that then can participate in the RIPE community (and consequently the global Internet infrastructure community).
That is laudable and can be achieved in other ways than pushing everyone into this category scheme. Categories have been rejected before so finessing them until they attract sufficient votes seems questionable. My opinion is there are only two fair charging schemes. The current single fee, and a direct use charge be that by direct counting of NCC resources and services used or the current proxy for that - IP count. Counting resource use would be hard and likely expensive and discourage people from keeping the data current so has previously been discounted. IP count would satisfy the sense of injustice at those with /8s sat idle but has been deemed unworkable too. It also fails when most are IPv6 only as there would be approx one category with most of us in it. Anything between is a fudge, choosing one set of members to subsidise another fails the stated fairness goals.
Signing up as your own small LIR is an excellent way to get some hands-on experience with IP & AS assignment procedures and to obtain global Internet number resources & RPKI certification services, all under one's own full control.
I agree, so lets consider that as the driving need. When we started there were categories, we were 2005/EXTRA_SMALL and paid EU1750. That was worth a lot more back then but was considered acceptable for people starting up. It is almost the same as the current flat fee. So how much should personal/startup LIRs pay? The current categories say EU500, that sounds fine, there could be a different membership for that, just two categories not 20. A startup membership should have constraints to avoid abuse, such as one /24, one IPv6 prefix and only allowed one additional resource - an ASN. The main thing the 20 categories does is enable the 7k spike of members in category 4 to get a reduction in fees at the expense of those in the categories above. Why? They ran the final /8 out and got space for free that people now have to pay for, they knew the cost when getting it and chose to pay. They are not helping those startup members that now can't get space.
A "smaller pricetag for the smaller category" in some ways could be seen as a vehicle to support the creation of more affordable self-study opportunities for others, perhaps to help them prepare for what otherwise can be hard-to-enter "experience required" jobmarket segments.
With /24 pricing that is an expensive way to learn, perhaps they can do it as IPv6 only, it is sufficient to learn with. brandon