On Thursday, September 11, 2003, at 10:56 AM, Pascal Julienne wrote:
David,
You can't talk about monopoly when you refer to a non profit organisation. If I follow your line of thought then many other European organisations are also monopolies and should draw attention. In that case, we better all go to Cancun instead of the next RIPE meeting.
I think the real question is how could the RIPE catter to ALL of its members.
So say:
1) You have a basic fee for a basic service 2) You have options which you can subscribe to or not - for instance if you want informations on traffic then you have to participate financially.
This would mean that as far as IP registering all members would pay a comon fee (which still could be separated in small, large, etc.) and that the money obtained from this would go to registery services and a bit of the overall RIPE structure.
Under this suggestion, would one be able to pay only for the co-ordination services and not the registration ones? Suppose I want to support the RIPE Routing Registry, plus dnsmon and possibly attend a dnssec course but I am not interested in registration services (because, for instance, the current policy does not allow me to get addresses from the RIR function of the NCC). The NCC has more to offer than just registration services, in the area of co-ordination. Co-ordination usually requires a party that is not one of the co-ordinated ones.
For the rest of the services, they would have to be financed by those who want them. Again what is paid by those would go into a separate slot and would finance their needs.
However, if the RIPE is also recognized by EU institutions as THE central body then some grants should be obtainable from the EU to work on EU projects related to services the RIPE can offer. If such grants are obtained, then it is tax money from all EU citizens which finance some overall EU/RIPE activities which the RIPE is probably the best body in EU to do.
In general, EU money tends to come with EU conditions. Careful consideration should be given to something like this. In addition, the RIPE NCC service region is broader than just the EU, something that sometimes is forgotten by all involved. Joao