[members-discuss] RIPE NCC Budget Discussions

Dear all,

We have seen many comments on the RIPE NCC's budget, expenses and 
staffing. We take all those comments on board and they will be valuable 
when we start work on our Activity Plan and Budget 2024 later this year. 
However, for this consultation, we are working to come up with a 
charging scheme model that will work for the foreseeable future 
regardless of whether the budget is higher, lower or the same as the 
current one. I understand that there is a connection to our charging 
model, but the two consultation processes aim at different things. This 
one is about how we charge in a way that is acceptable to the 
membership. The later one is about what activities we carry out, as well 
as how much we pay for them and how we resource them. I note that 
currently over 50% of our costs (budget and actuals) are staff-related 
costs.

Having said that, we have seen some comments that might create 
misconceptions about our staff levels and our overall budget. For 
instance, our Community Projects Fund allocates 250,000 euro across all 
Good of the Internet projects rather than 250,000 euro for each project.

Also, there have been comments that fewer LIRs should have meant less 
work for the RIPE NCC. However, this has not proven to be the case for 
many reasons. We still need to ensure there is an accurate registry, and 
there has been a dramatic increase in the amount of transfers since IPv4 
run-out that need proper due diligence from our side. Similarly, the 
effects of sanctions compliance on the RIPE NCC has been significant for 
our work on the registry side but also on the legal, financial and 
political fronts. We also need to put resources into ensuring a 
resilient and secure RPKI Trust Anchor. We have seen the need to greatly 
increase our security and compliance efforts to protect our 
infrastructure and your resources. Members across our service region 
have very different needs in terms of capacity building and training. We 
provide measurements on the Internet that we are uniquely placed to 
provide and we see much demand for those insights. And of course the 
effect of instability in the service region (war and dealing with ultra 
high-risk countries, for example) has caused uncertainty around being 
able to collect part of the membership fees and that has in turn 
increased our workload.

There are many other examples of how our workload has increased in 
recent years, and I encourage you to look at our Activity Plans over the 
past few years to see more details on this.

Best regards,

Hans Petter Holen
Managing Director
RIPE NCC