Hello everybody, In my opinion, neither option 1 nor option 2 is a good choice. The annual contribution is named "service fee" and should reflect the costs, needed to deliver the service to the members of this NP-Organization. It should not be misused for policy reasons (e.g. make returning of address space attractive) or for the subvention of rather small or rather big members. Each member should pay for the costs, he is responsible for, the fee should not be a membership tax for the money earned by his LIRs. Here I see two components: 1) Usage independent Basic costs. That are costs for administration, for the hosting, operating and maintaining of all services like the RIPE Database, RPKI, DNS , for the Meetings and so on. These costs should be equally shared by all members. I agree with all other previous writers who requestet an economical use of our fees: It should not be the goal to distribute the additional costs. It should be the goal to minimize the costs for high end projects or sponsoring. 2) Member dependent operating expenses Of course, members with more or bigger Ressource Allocations are represented more in the group of Power-Users than other. But there is no functional correlation between the allocated Ressources and the real needed effort. We have also to consider: - The number of Tickets - Number and Frequency of Assignements - Complexity of the Registry-Check - Number of Route Objects - staff stability (quality and demands for courses) - Certification - many other things... ... and of course special Services like the transfer of Ressources. My Conclusion: A really fair solution will be extremly complex. At least, we need a good compromise between fairness and complexibility. Andreas