Charging Scheme Task Force Minutes (16 June 2025)
16 June 2025
Attendees: Sebastian Brossier, Carlos Friaças, Raymond Jetten, Ulf Kieber, Pavel Odintsov, Clara Wade, Piotr Strzyżewski, Cynthia Revström, Victor Bolaños Guerra,
Apologies: Alexandru Doszlop, Alex de Joode, Ivaylo Josifov, Alptekin Sünnetci
Chairs: Ondřej Filip, Peter Hessler
RIPE NCC staff: Karla Liddle-White, Daniella Coutinho, Fergal Cunningham, Athina Fragkouli, Simon-Jan Haytink, Marco Schmidt
1. Welcome
Task Force Co-Chair Peter Hessler opened the meeting and welcomed everyone. There were no additions to the agenda so he welcomed Registration Services Manager Marco Schmidt to share data on legacy resources.
2. Legacy Principles
Marco said that he understood the task force had requested more data on the current status of legacy holders in the RIPE NCC service region to support drafting a new legacy principle. He then went through the requested statistics.
There were currently 25 organisations in a contractual relationship with the RIPE NCC which only held legacy resources. Marco went on to say there were also around 500 RIPE NCC members who held legacy resources as well as other resources. He said that, in theory, these members could decide to release the other resources and be left with legacy only but this was unlikely.
He said that legacy holders without a contract could be estimated at around 1,500 entities. Lastly he said there were around 600 sponsored legacy resource holders. Marco was asked how many legacy resources were not in the routing table and he answered that around 20% were not.
The task force thanked Marco for the statistics and reviewed the data which they then used to draft a new principle for charging legacy resource holders.
The group explored a focused number of options for legacy resources, with broad support emerging for a flat annual fee per organisation, with some also open to a two-tiered model based on block size with different charges for "small" and "large" legacy blocks. A proposed boundary was smaller than a /16 and larger than /16. Others favoured charging per legacy holder rather than block. While some supported applying similar charges to PI, others agreed those fees were not appropriate for larger legacy block holders.
Comparisons were drawn to other RIRs such as ARIN and APNIC, which apply flat fees regardless of block size, an approach that many of the group saw as a practical and fair fee structure. Throughout the discussion, task force members raised concerns about the fairness of charging large and small holders the same fee. Concerns were raised that overly high charges could lead legacy holders to end contractual relationships.
The group also considered corner cases, such as merged institutions and jointly-held allocations, which were common for NRENs. Opinions differed on whether the charging model should distinguish between original and secondary holders of legacy space, though many in the group were against overcomplicating a charging scheme in this way and this option was not taken forward.
Overall, the task force agreed that the need for cost recovery needed to be balanced against minimising administrative overhead and maintaining an equitable structure for all members. In the end, the group didn’t quite reach consensus on the principle text and committed to finalising the discussion on the charging scheme mailing list before the next meeting.
3. Finalising report and next steps
The chair confirmed that as well as finalising the exact wording of the legacy principle, the explanatory text would be rewritten to take into account the discussions regarding legacy space and the recent changes they were making. The group agreed to finalise the report at the next meeting and put a final stamp on it. The chair then closed the meeting.