Proposal Regarding Signup Fees
- Date: Fri, 17 Mar 1995 14:25:54 +0100
Dear Contributors,
the NCC has been approached by the GARR NIS about waiving the
signup fees for new registries which already receive local support
from an experienced registry and thus need very little direct
support from the RIPE NCC. After some discussion Antonio Blasco Bonito
and myself worked out a proposal about this which you find below.
Please note that this only concerns the signup fee and not the other
charges.
I propose to accept the proposal unless there is serious discussion or
dissent before March 24th.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Regards
Daniel Karrenberg
RIPE NCC Manager
Motivation
----------
Everyone in Europe is experiencing an enormous increase in Internet
activities. This is particularly evident in larger countries which
growth rate has been under the continental average until now or where
commercial internet providers have been less active than in other
countries. There is a mass of new users who are fascinated by what they
are told about the Internet by a newspapers and television. They want
to be "on the Internet" as soon as possible. Therefore there is a large
number of new commercial providers who are willing to take advantage of
this promising business: they want to start providing connectivity and
services but in many cases they are "new in the game", almost completely
unaware of the "rules of the game".
This situation is particularly true in Italy. New providers need to be
"educated" and that is a task which is largely beyond the scope of a
central european registry such as the RIPE-NCC. This is a task for
people who can speak the same language spending hours on the phone to
explain what the Internet commnunity expects from a service provider.
New providers, RIPE-NCC and GARR-NIS
------------------------------------
The staff working at GARR-NIS has been requested several times to
provide all the necessary information and assistance to new providers.
In many cases it has proven more effective to act on their behalf on a
number of issues (administration of IP address space, maintenance of
network management databases, interaction with RIPE procedures, etc.) at
least in an initial phase, rather than delaying their startup until they
know how to behave in the european Internet. The GARR-NIS staff has
convinced a number of new providers to clearly identify themselves as
such, thus becoming RIPE-NCC contributors. Without the GARR-NIS
activity some of them could have made an alternative choice: "staying in
the dark", getting address space by someone else and thus not
contributing to the NCC budget. The GARR-NIS staff is continuosly
monitoring the appearance of new provider s in Italy and pressing old
ones which are staying in the dark in order to get them "on the stage".
Presently there are four italian providers who are supported by GARR-NIS
staff, they have delegated the maintenance of their IP local registry
in order to be freed, at least in the initial phase, by all the
administrative procedures which are needed to fulfill RIPE-NCC
requirements. Likely there will be more in the near future. In those
cases the workload put on RIPE-NCC staff has been, or will be, minimal
or even negligible.
Since RIPE-NCC contribution includes a "startup fee" GARR-NIS staff is
an unconfortable position asking a similar contribution to those new
providers . But indeed the startup workload has been, or will be, on
GARR-NIS staff, not on RIPE-NCC.
The proposal
------------
The proposal is to waive the signup fee for newly established registries
under the following conditions:
- The newly established registry is supported
by the staff of another MEDIUM or LARGE registry with
sufficient experience and a good track record of registry
operations.
- The supporting registry handles and is responsible for
the correct execution of all registry tasks for an initial
period of at least 9 months.
- The supporting registry undertakes to train the new
registry staff sufficiently, that support from the RIPE NCC
will be minimal once new registry staff take over operations.
This will ensure that a fee for initial support of new registries can
be paid to the registry actually supporting the new registry rather than
the NCC.
