On Mon, 2012-07-09 at 17:36 +0200, Lu Heng wrote: [... what's to stop members from simply choosing the lowest category ...]
Sounds to me it will end up that way, Moral hazard will come into play.
Yes that's really the question. I'd rather doubt that this "pay as much as you think you want to afford" concept is something that is likely to work well with an essential technical service that few people outside the technical realm are even aware off. Especially since these fees are not paid by the technical people themselves but by their companies. Just consider how few of the 7000 something RIPE ever take an active interest in RIPE meetings, why should they see a problem in lowering their fees by self-assessment, if almost no one that matters to them will ever become aware of this? And if indeed large swathes of members will asses themselves to be of "category" small, wouldn't we really just be created an increase for the smalls by stealth (or a massive downward pressure on the RIPE NCC budget, depending how the real smalls will react). IMO, if the aim is to keep different fee categories alive in the long term for members with resource allocation levels (which on balance should be proportional a member's financials), why not simply tweak the current charging scheme a bit, and still have bands based on actual resource usage. If you really want to make a revolutionary change to the charging system, instead of keeping the essentially arbitrary bands we have today, we should either go for a system where everyone pays the same (and thus annoy the smalls but be honest about it right away) or a system that is truly proportional to resource allocation levels (and thus annoy the larges but also create some pressure to not sit on unused allocations). Otherwise why no not simply keep the existing system essentially as it is, which at least ensures that new entrance don't have to pay all that much and that the influence of larges is kept at bay (which BTW is big enough as it is as they can actually afford the people to meddle in RIPE affairs a lot more aggressively ;-). But maybe I am simply missing several years of debate on the topic here....