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