Revising APNIC member "sizes"
Hi,
As you know, APNIC currently allows organizations to self-determine
their size, either small, medium, or large. The idea behind this
approach was the observation that some organizations are willing to
pay more to support APNIC than others. APNIC attempted to make such
support more justifiable in a business sense by making a few
incentives (such as number of votes, etc.), but in the end the idea
was along the lines of "out of the goodness of hearts".
The Internet has evolved a bit since this funding plan was first
conceived -- it is now much more business oriented, thus having no
real concrete difference in what you get as a "large", "medium", or
"small" difference has resulted in a (perfectly understandable) steady
migration of "large" and "medium" members to "small".
The problem is that at the current APNIC budget of around US $750,000,
and the current membership numbers, the per member cost (around US
$4800) is higher than the "small" membership fee resulting in the risk
that APNIC will have a shortfall should the migration continue.
As such, I'd like to open a discussion on how to evolve the APNIC
member tier system to avoid a possible shortfall.
The following ideas are what I came up with (in no particular order):
a) additional incentives to choose large or medium over small -- would
need to come up with the incentives. I came up with are things like
i) allocating a larger than /19 initial block to medium and large
(currently fixed at /19 for everyoone)
ii) increasing the maximum allocation size from APNIC (currently
(fixed at /14 for everyone)
iii) increasing the maximum assignment window (currently fixed at
(/19 for everyone)
iv) lower fees for future APNIC services such as training
however I don't think these would be sufficient and I solicit
additional ideas.
b) removing the tiers completely -- would make billing (marginally)
easier for APNIC, however would mean all members (regardless of
ability to pay) would be required to pay around US $5000.
c) tie the "size" to the amount of resources the organization has
consumed -- is the approach taken by RIPE-NCC, however would imply a
need to figure out what to do with "historic" allocations and would
remove choice from the membership
d) use service level for the different tiers instead of size -- throw
out the use of "size" and instead differentiate on levels of
service, e.g., have "Gold", "Silver", and "Bronze", with each level
having its own request queue. Gold requests would be serviced
before Silver requests which would be serviced before Bronze.
Might also include an "urgent processing fee" to allow a bronze
or silver member to upgrade a request to the next higher queue.
I'm sure there are other suggestions and I would like to encourage
people to make them, so we can have a set of proposals to vote on at
the next APNIC meeting.
Thanks,
-drc
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