Location: Hotel Krasnapolsky, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Date: 5 October 2006
Scribe: Rob Allen
Kees Neggers, RIPE NCC Executive Board Chairman, opened the meeting at 17:08. He welcomed the attendees.
Jochem de Ruig, Chief Financial Officer of the RIPE NCC, presented the Financial and Administration Update.
The RIPE NCC reporting for the General Meeting was presented in the RIPE NCC Services Working Group on Thursday, 5 October 2006.
Kees Neggers presented the report from the RIPE NCC Executive Board.
Kees noted that currently the RIPE NCC operational reserves are higher than the target of one year's RIPE NCC budget. The Executive Board proposes to reduce the surplus in the operational reserves by giving a rebate to the RIPE NCC member service fee.
The Draft RIPE NCC Activity Plan for 2007 had been made available for comment and the Executive Board will decide on a final version in late 2006 based on input from RIPE NCC members.
Jochem de Ruig presented the draft RIPE NCC budget for 2007.
A question was asked about the membership rebate for 2007 and whether only current members would benefit from the rebate.
It was answered that only members who are active members on 30 September 2006 will be taken into account and eligible for the rebate. Regarding mergers, only the member that exists on the 30 September 2006 will be eligible and their rebate would be calculated using the fees that that member had paid.
The RIPE NCC Executive Board thought that it was most fair to look back from 2002 to 2006 and redistribute the surplus to members on a pro rata basis that reflected the sums that they had contributed to the reserves.
Jochem de Ruig presented the proposal for the RIPE NCC Charging Scheme 2007.
A question was asked about whether it was too late to make IPv6 assignments free for a trial period in order to promote IPv6 use. This led to a lively discussion which is summarised below.
The RIPE NCC members have to approve the RIPE NCC Charging Scheme. However major changes to be made to the Charging Scheme will require major preparation. Any such suggestions made at the GM will be elaborated in the scheme for next year.
One of the principles of the RIPE NCC Charging Scheme is that the activities performed by the RIPE NCC should recover their costs. If it was believed that IPv6 was the future, then it would be dangerous not to charge for the activity of providing it since this could cause the RIPE NCC to move from having a balance surplus to a deficit.
This kind of discussion came up earlier in the Contributors' Committee of the RIPE NCC a long time ago when there was debate about whether the RIPE NCC should give free service to LIRs in developing countries. The conclusion than was that the RIPE NCC should be very careful to avoid subsidising one part of the membership even if it was for a good cause.
It was noted that the RIPE NCC service region seemed to be doing well in its adoption of IPv6 and that the statistics do not seem to indicate that the RIPE NCC service region needs a special push to adopt IPv6 compared to the other service regions. IPv6 is no longer experimental, the decision to deploy it is a business based decision and not a technical decision and it is not the role of the RIPE NCC to steer business one way or another by changing its fee structure.
It was commented that it was a good thing to see IPv6 direct assignments in the proposed RIPE NCC Charging Scheme for 2007, that IPv6 PI address space would probably be coming in the next year and that this should be taken into account in the Charging Scheme 2008.
The Chairman summarised the conclusion of the discussion:
The conclusions were accepted by the GM attendees and will be taken into account by the RIPE NCC Executive Board in the preparations for next year's charging scheme.
As suggested by the Chairman, the members voted on the Charging Scheme by a show of hands.
The formal resolution: "The General Meeting adopts the RIPE NCC Charging Scheme 2007" was unanimously accepted with no abstentions.
The Chairman thanked the members for attending and for the useful discussions.
The Chairman closed the meeting at 18:16