RE: A request for presentation:change in JPNIC fee structure

["Paul Wilson" <pwilson@apnic.net>]

Dear Colleagues,

Thanks for your consideration and questions regarding the new fee
structure proposal.

> Q1. 
> Section 3.2 describes the reason of introducing the vsmall 
> membership category. 
> We think it is a good idea to offer a new member type with 
> reasonable fee structure for lagacy address space holder. 
> However, we are concerning the increase of gloabal routing 
> table size if a substantial number of small ISPs acquire IP 
> addresses from APNIC instead of from possible upstream ISPs. 
> Will APNIC approve any new membership applications to this 
> vsmall category?

Please do note that this proposal affects only APNIC's membership
structure and fees, and will have no effect on address management
policies.  Therefore it could not result in any additional small
allocations, and could not have any effect on the global routing tables.

On the other hand, there are many organisations which already have small
blocks of address space, and who may choose to join APNIC at a
reasonable fee level.  This also would have no impact on address
management or routing tables, as the address space is already allocated.
The intention of the proposal is simply to accommodate such
organisations, and allow APNIC to represent their interests fairly.

At the coming meeting, there will be some proposals made by various
people which *may* allow certain small allocations under some
circumstances.  This fee structure proposal could apply to these cases,
but only if those new policies are approved by the APNIC community.

> Q2.
> The votes and annual fee for the three new categories are 
> increased by twice or decreased by half based on the existing 
> categories. But the per address fee for each category does 
> not seem to follow any rule. We are wondering how these 
> numbers (per address fee) were generated?

Of course, the other element of the APNIC membership structure which
does not change by a factor of 2 is the address space holdings related
to each category.  In this case there is a factor of 8 between
successive categories, and a factor of 512 between small and very-large
(that is, 8^3).

I believe it is quite deliberate that the per-address fee reduces by
less than 50% with each increasing category, because this is a once-only
fee, intended to cover the cost to APNIC of making allocations to
confederatioln/nir members.  These costs are very substantial, and
directly related to the number of addresses being requested.  

It would be arguable in fact that there should be no difference in
per-address fees for different categories, since a /19 allocation costs
the same to process whether it is from a small confederation or from a
large.  However it may also be reasoned that large members will generate
more large requests, where there may be a certain economy of scale (but
realistically less than 50% frm one category to the next).

I hope that this helps.

Regards,

Paul.