Re: RADB Fees

[Dean Anderson <dean () av8 com>]

Oh come on.  AV8 is pretty small, and I'll pay the fee.  Though, I think $200 is pretty high for what is provided. I 
mean, its just a database entry after all. Right?  Server operation at exchanges is paid for by server users at the 
exchanges. Right? So we pay Internic the outrageously high fee of $35 per year for domain registration...  Doesn't seem 
that much different...

                --Dean

Around 09:49 PM 10/25/1999 -0400, rumor has it that Majdi Abbas said:
> Owen wrote:
> > While I agree with you in principal, the reality is that we live
> > in a capitalist society, and governments are eliminating the socialist
> > funding of these mechanisms which has allowed them to exist to date.
> > If they are to continue to exist, they will require a source of
> > funding.  If you have an alternative that is better than user fees,
> > please propose it.  Otherwise, please recognize that this isn't
> > an effort to nickle and dime so much as the result of multiple
> > independent agencies being forced to self-fund their pieces of
> > internet infrastructure as they lose their government funding.
>
>       I don't see it as being cost recovery (although it is
> certainly intended as such)...more as cost shifting.  Here's
> how it'll work:
>
>       The people who will be affected will, in many cases,
> either pool their resources (maintainers, in this case), or
> get their upstreams to start handling their RADB entries.
>
>       The end result?  Merit will recover a lot less of
> their costs than they might expect, and the larger ISPs 
> out there will get hit hard -- suddenly they're doing a 
> lot more administrative work than they used to have to.
>
>       Smaller ISPs and people who just don't care enough
> will stop using the RADB or not start in the first place
> if they perceive the obstacles as outweighing the benefits--
> thus making it a less effective resource than it is today.
>
>       Short term, because Merit hasn't been very public
> about it to date, even on this mailing list (which was the
> first on my list), a lot of people will be receiving bills
> they're unaware of, and may or may not be able to get paid
> on time -- presuming the maintainer contact was even up to
> date in the first place -- so a lot of objects go away in 
> the database, and the internet will become a much less
> happy place until things are resolved.
>
>       I don't have an issue with the cost recovery aspects,
> I just feel that this is rather short notice, and also rather
> poorly timed (a lot of people are still busy with y2k issues,
> it would have been better to wait until sometime next year).
>
>       --msa
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           Plain Aviation, Inc                  dean () av8 com
           LAN/WAN/UNIX/NT/TCPIP          http://www.av8.com
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