Daniel,

However it is very difficult to do it for some for free and ask the others to pay. So doing that may lead to a situation where the RIPE NCC membership ends up paying the whole bill. I would actually like that because it makes the measurements even more independent and I would not have to invest time into making agreements with the TLD admins, billing, etc. pp.

from our (DENIC) point of view an independant professional monitoring of our services has value and we certainly will pay a fair share to continue this service. Monitoring other parties that are not able to pay for that (maybe unwanted) service is nonetheless of value for us too, as we are often contacted to explain anomalies or to make judgements on explanations/justifications where independant monitoring is better than believe/rumors ;-)

But is this acceptable to the RIPE NCC memebrship in the long run?

I think the system has enough options to provide to those who pay more and better service (realtime vs. delayed data access, access to single monitor point data vs. only overview, breakdown so single minute measurements vs. 15 minutes overviews or just events, maybe complex alarming conditions). Have a nice day Andreas