Hi David,
On 17/08/2012, at 10:12 AM, David Woodgate wrote:
APNIC membership fees would be expected to naturally discourage
unnecessary requests, as these would be a far greater cost than
that for provider assigned addressing;
I'm not suggesting in any way that fees would be adjusted in any way to discourage portable address allocations, but only that the mere existence of any APNIC fees is itself a discouragement to joining APNIC simply to obtain addresses (in comparison with what would be very likely to be free allocations as part of the service from an ISP). It would take a dramatic and very unlikely change of fee structures for the statement to not apply.
I completely agree that fees are an EC concern, and that allocation policy proposals should not attempt to influence fees. The reference in this draft is intended simply as an observation of a natural economic element that should discourage demand for portable addresses, in that it is a fact that APNIC fees exist. (And the proposal details in Section 4 do not reference fees in any way, or rely on maintenance or changes to fees to be implemented.)
So I'd rather keep the statement in as I think it is a reasonable statement of economics, and again it's not supposed to suggest fee changes are required in any way.
Will you support the proposal even with the statement being retained?
Perhaps then say "The existing APNIC membership fees would . . ." - but will leave that to your discretion. I still support the technical aspects of the proposal.
<personal opinion> I'm constantly wary, and very sensitive, of any suggestion that allows an increase of any fees unless explicitly required under the space of cost recovery for the RIR registry function. </personal opinion>
Cheers
Terry