Re: [Wg-apnic-fees] An Informal report from the APNIC EC Fees Meeting in
Dear Randy,
Thank you very much for your detailed report, and sorry for the late
response. It helps for our understanding of the discussion among the board
and the secretariat.
> o Change the fees from being denominated in US Dollars to Australian
> Dollars so finances are predictable and budgetable, and
> o Raise fees 6-7% across the board, i.e. with no change in the fee
> model, just raise them all in parallel.
> And, of course, all this would need to be discussed by the membership as
> a whole, and formally reviewed and approved at the September Members'
> meeting if it is to take effect in January 2008.
So now it seems to me that APNIC will submit a proposal for those changes.
I am not sure if policy proposal submission deadline (Aug 6th) should be
applied to particular proposal, but can I assume they would show us the
proposal text by that day to give us sufficient time for the consideration?
(this may be not a question to randy by the way.)
best regards,
toshi
--
Toshiyuki Hosaka
JPNIC
Randy Bush wrote (2007/07/11 7:14):
( it's long and it is proprely capitalized. this is a bad sign. :)
As fees WG co-chair, I attended the APNIC EC meeting on fees held in
Singapore on 2007.07.09. This is my personal report and is not any kind
of formal position of the Fees WG, APNIC, ...
Aside from the normal business issues dealing with financial planning
for the organization (with the focus on fees, of course), I learned a
lot as the EC considered the very long-term financial and market issues
the organization may (or may not) face in the future, e.g.
o IPv4 free pool run-out and how that could affect income,
o IPv6 take-up of /32s implying members only need one allocation,
o categories of membership, associate, small, ... gigantic,
o the role(s) and impacts of NIRs,
o aging fees a la RIPE (can not work if NIRs are not transparent
with respect to transfers, and does not work well with IPv6 /32s)
o service-based charging as opposed to address-holding based
o etc.
But, while doing its best to explore how these very long term issues
might affect the APNIC business model, the EC was still very aware of
its responsibility to deal with current and near term (two to five year)
fiscal issues, particularly the fact that, because of currency exchange
rates vis the US Dollar, needed expense increases to meet service needs
while retaining employees, etc., APNIC is likely to have over a US$400k
loss in fiscal 2007. This means that pragmatic fiscal changes need to
be made this year, while the EC and the membership also do long range
business analysis and planning of the big-picture issues such as the
above (which I personally feel are so large that it is like the idiom we
have "boiling the ocean.").
Given that there are currently two major fiscal causes of the budget
shortfall, APNIC income is denominated in the falling US Dollar while it
incurs expenses in the rising Australian dollar, and costs of the
operation rise with inflation factors, the EC asked APNIC financial
management what the current prudent course would be. The answer was
twofold,
o Change the fees from being denominated in US Dollars to Australian
Dollars so finances are predictable and budgetable, and
o Raise fees 6-7% across the board, i.e. with no change in the fee
model, just raise them all in parallel.
This seemed normal prudent business planning and certainly appealed to
my sense of simplicity. But, it might make the membership nervous that
fees could go up arbitrarily in the future. So it was also suggested
that fee increases be capped at no more than 6% per annum. Though, of
course, the membership would have to vote on any fee change anyway.
And, of course, all this would need to be discussed by the membership as
a whole, and formally reviewed and approved at the September Members'
meeting if it is to take effect in January 2008.
So, Ming-Cheng Liang and I have asked the Secretariat to give the Fees
WG a meeting slot in September, as well as time to discuss all this at
the Members' Meeting then.
But this mailing list is also an excellent place to explore any issues
and ideas before the September meeting, and discussion here has a wider
audience and may save us some time in New Delhi. So I hope this
informal report helps us all to progress. My apologies for the long
message.
randy
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