Specifically, RIPE is charging a fee to ISP's to get large blocks of IP addresses to allocate to their customers
We charge *everyone* for registration services. That is how it should be. There is no reason why governments (read: taxpayers) should be footing the bill.
No quarrel with that, but the folks who pay those high fees kind of expected that they were guaranteed to work on the global Internet. As you pointed out, there really *IS* some co-operation between registries and NSP's and the filtering isue really *IS* becoming more sane, i.e. co-ordinated with registry activities. This is good news.
No quarrel with that either, except for the bit about high fees. RIPE NCC tariffs are quite moderate. With the help of market buoyancy, they've been able to reduce them significantly year on year. This year, most of the ISPs receiving service from the RIPE NCC pay a charge of 1500 ecu (about $1800). The scale of charges are agreed each September by the ISPs themselves as a committee of NCC contributors. Mike Norris