Hi Owen, > I, for one, would not want to start having to pay RIPE-level fees. > > ARIN fees are a much better deal than RIPE fees.
Only up to Small... The RIPE NCC membership fee is €1750 (±$2400 currently) for everybody. The ARIN fees are between $500 and $32000, with category Small at $2000 and Medium at $4000. I personally am glad about this (although in ARIN I would probably be Small) because it doesn't give operators any financial incentive to stingy when giving their customers IPv6 prefixes. If you want to give a million customers a /48 it is not going to cost you more then giving them a /60. IPv6 resources are not such a scarce resource compared to IPv4, so differentiating price based on the amount of integers you need doesn't make much sense in the current world anymore :) But: this is all RIPE NCC members/AGM stuff, independent of the RIPE community and its working groups. (well the RIPE NCC facilitates the RIPE meetings (note: RIPE meeting, not RIPE NCC meeting) and without the help of the NCC the RIPE community wouldn't have such well organised meetings. The NCC only facilitates though, it doesn't control or influence the RIPE working groups) and the structure of the RIPE working groups was what Randy was referring to. Cheers, Sander
