Option 1: Charge by amount of resources. Larger LIRs (in 99.9% of the cases the larger telco's) pay more than smaller LIRs. Some people claim this is unfair to the large ones, as support-load is not proportional to LIR size.
All depends on defining the measurement technique... Number of IPs is _largely_ irrelevant, there's no additional work involved at RIPE to approve the application, no additional database overhead in having a larger inetnum etc. If you charged by DB entries, then (as seems to be the case for most LIRs anyway) people will stop creating the inetnums, maintainers, persons etc and the DB will become even more irrelevant than it already has The current system marginally favours the longer established RIPE members - afterall we're the ones who have funded the developments, the numerous projects (whether wanted or not), who've paid out for years and years to get RIPE to what it is now, read/commented/implemented the thousands of policies, attended the meetings etc All so the "newbies" can benefit from all of that investment. You might think it's perfectly "fair" to suggest/offer a system where everyone pays the same - I'm not going to disagree. How about a system where all the new entrants have to catchup on 10 years of fees they've missed, which gets shared amongst the existing members ? No one method of charging is going to appeal to everyone, no business _wants_ to pay more for something. Perhaps a better approach would be to push for the overall budget to be reduced by 10% per year _every-year_, helping the RIR focus on what it's there for, and all the extraneous items that we fund as RIPE members can start to die off ? Rob