[address-policy-wg] fairness and legacy resources

> On 21 Oct 2020, at 10:07, JORDI PALET MARTINEZ via address-policy-wg <address-policy-wg at ripe.net> 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.