The fees are not charged for past services that were received for free, only for future services.
So you are saying that legacy space holder who signed a memberhsip agreement would not owe the usual yearly fee associated with their legacy space holdings but only those fees associated with any future address space allocations/assignments?
Of course they would pay the normal membership fee. In ARIN, this fee is roughly related to the size of the address space holding, but only roughly. It is a flat fee for the annual membership subscription and it covers all the whois listings, changes to whois entries, in-addr.arpa hosting, ip6.arpa hosting, and new address allocations for the whole year. The fee is not directly related to the address holding, i.e. ARIN members do not pay a fee for the addresses which are allocated to them. The subscription fee is higher for larger allocations because larger organizations use more services more often. The holder of a class C only pays $1250 per year which seems a reasonable business expense for supporting the RIRs. And the holder of a class B would pay only $9,000 and a class A holder would pay the maximum rate of $18,000. It's hard to imagine an organization who can afford to run a network using BGP to announce a class C block and not be able to afford $1250 per year. --Michael Dillon