> On 21 Oct 2020, at 10:07, JORDI PALET MARTINEZ via address-policy-wg
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> It is not fair that legacy holders are not bind to policies and services (and
> their cost) from the RIRs the same way as non-legacy.
Maybe, maybe not. There are plenty of other far more expensive cost centres in
the NCC’s budget that are not fairly shared across the membership and nobody’s
whining about them. Just look at all those cheapskates who get DNS and whois
lookups from the NCC for free. Many of them aren’t even from the RIPE
community. They should be paying. :-)
> We "rewind history" in real life all the time. There are laws (and customs)
> that as time passes, we discover that were wrong or broken or need to be
> adapted to new times
That’s not rewriting history Jordi. You should know better.
Whenever customs and laws change, the new measures do not apply to whatever had
happened in the past. They apply to the present and future. For instance,
suppose a government changes increases income tax. They don’t make you pay the
increased rate for all the preceding years before the rate went up.
> Transfers are a way to correct that, as it has been said (and done in other
> regions). And every day it has less sense to keep the resources legacy: you
> need other resources from the RIR (like IPv6, other ASN, etc.), so then you
> sign the service agreement.
I’ve already explained why that’s utterly wrong.
If you think legacy holders should pay something, I maybe agree with that in
principle. [But definitely not signing a service agreement which forces a
legacy holder to become an LIR.] And maybe that’s a discussion that could be
had once there was some hard data.
My gut feel is the cost to the NCC of looking after legacy space is negligible
and not worth worrying about. It’ll barely be a rounding error in the Registry
Services budget. Setting up and running a system to recover that insignificant
amount of money from legacy holders will cost far more: contracts, invoicing,
staff time, etc. Assuming there was a legal basis for imposing those charges.
Which there almost certainly isn’t.
OTOH devising such a system will provide endless opportunities for the
shed-painting and rat-holing that some members of our community *love*. Who
cares about the underlying issue? Just think of all the months we can waste
bickering over the policy and process minutiae.
In any case, the RIPE community and the NCC membership simply shouldn’t attempt
this sort of micro-management. That’s the path to madness: “I want X EUR off my
fee because I didn’t use any of the training courses last year. Or RIPEstat. Or
take part in a hackathon. Or update my database entries. Or....”.
It may well be reasonable to say something’s not fair. For some definition of
fair. But it can sometimes be even more unreasonable to attempt to correct that
-- extra costs, more complexity, higher administrative overheads, -- etc it
simply isn’t worth the effort. Or addressing that unfairness creates other
unfairnesses elsewhere. Sometimes pragmatic decisions have to be made because
these are the least-worst solutions for the perceived level of unfairness.
> RIPE region is a bit special on that, in the sense that we have a single fee
> for everything, but in other regions is not the same way, and it is somehow
> proportional to the "amount" of resources you hold. I also think that's
> unfair. Of course, that's a different discussion ...
Indeed. And a discussion to be had somewhere else, perhaps at the NCC’s AGM.
The NCC used to have a byzantine charging scheme for setting membership fees
based (roughly) on the member’s allocation of NCC-issued resources. Broadly
speaking, the biggest LIRs paid more. However that system was hard to
administer and created too many problems. So the membership applied common
sense and voted to have a flat fee.
If you want legacy holders to pay, both the RIPE and NCC policy making
machinery is open to you.
