JPNIC Translated Document Source document: JPNIC REPORT 4 Date of the source: December 1993 Date of the last update of this translation: November 1, 1995 This is a translation of a JPNIC document. JPNIC provides this translation for convenience of those who can not read Japanese. But it may contain mis-translations, and is by no means official. One should consult the source document written in Japanese for detail. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Members and Membership fees JPNIC is a voluntary organization and the network projects are its member. The main financial resource for the administration of JPNIC is sought from the membership fees of its members. Therefore the member and membership fees might not be directly related to the persons who are connected to the Internet or using the same through the network projects. However, recently new type of networks like local networks or commercial Internet etc. have appeared and they collect maintenance fees from the connected organizations. Because of that, these network organizations argue about the membership fees that is sought for participating with JPNIC as a member, and admirable opinions related to JPNIC's member classification and membership fees have increased. Because of that, the member and the mechanism for determining membership fees is discussed here. The subjects that are to be discussed here are based on the rules and the regulations of JPNIC. Any one interested in more details is requested to obtain the public document related to the rules and regulations (*1) of JPNIC from the ftp server. (1*) The public documents related to the rules and regulations of JPNIC is kept in the anonymous ftp server called ftp.nic.ad.jp and the documents are under the directory /pub/jpnic-pub. Documents related to JCRN can also be obtained from the same server under the directory /pub/jcrn. Members of JPNIC Although, there are two types of members called regular members and supporting members, here only regular members will be considered. The regular members of JPNIC are not the organizations who are participating in Internet or any individual user, but the network projects that operates the network. These are networks where the organizations and the administrative regulations are clear, and to be specific network projects like TISN, WIDE Internet etc., academic information centers, Internet administrated by Internet service providers (commercial networks), local networks etc. fall into this category. As it is explained in the first part of this serial document (9/1993), JPNIC is the center where the common works of each network is performed and because of that the unit of membership fees is network project. Network projects that are regular members of JPNIC, register their representatives as JPNIC committee members. The activities of JPNIC are decided during the general meeting where the members take part, or during the board of trustees meeting where the trustees are elected during the general meeting. However, the actual actions are taken by the steering committee and the secretariat who are appointed by the board of trustees. Depending on the nature of the organization or on the objective of the network, the regular members are divided into two types and they are A and B. Type A are non-commercial organizations with no commercial objectives and they are academic networks. Networks other than type A are considered to be type B. Based on the number of organization or the number of user connected to a regular member, it is divided into 11 groups and depending on the scale of the network, the membership fees and the maximum number of committee member that can be registered is decided. The membership fees of each division and the number of committee member registered for each group is given in table 1. Even if the objective of the network is academic, if it is administrated by a commercial organization, non-commercial organization and if commercial activities are allowed on the network then it will be classified as type B. table 1 The membership fees and the number of committee member registered +--------+------------+--------------------+--------------+-------------------+ |Category| Number of | Number of user |Membership fee|Number of member | | |organization|connected to network|type A type B|registered to JPNIC| +--------+------------+--------------------+--------------+-------------------+ | 1 | - 10 | - 10,000| 2 10 | 1 | | 2 | 11 - 20 | 10,001 - 20,000| 3 15 | 2 | | 3 | 21 - 30 | 20,001 - 30,000| 4 20 | 2 | | 4 | 31 - 50 | 30,001 - 50,000| 5 25 | 3 | | 5 | 51 - 70 | 50,001 - 70,000| 6 30 | 3 | | 6 | 71 - 100 | 70,001 - 100,000| 7 35 | 3 | | 7 | 101 - 200 | 100,001 - 200,000| 8 40 | 4 | | 8 | 201 - 300 | 200,001 - 300,000| 9 45 | 4 | | 9 | 301 - 500 | 300,001 - 500,000| 10 50 | 5 | | 10 | 501 - 700 | 500,001 - 700,000| 11 55 | 5 | | 11 | 701 - 1000 | 700,001 - 1,000,000| 12 60 | 5 | +--------+------------+--------------------+--------------+-------------------+ *Membership fee: 100,000 yen per one unit Authorization of academic research networks As explained earlier, the members of type A must satisfy the following three conditions. 1. Administration by a nonprofit organization 2. Nonprofit purpose 3. Academic research network Although 1 and 2 can be simply decided from the agreement, JPNIC does not judge the decision for 3. Therefore, at present JCRN (Japan Committee for Research Network) is in charge for deciding 3. JCRN was established on October, 1990 and its committee members are the representatives of the information processing society, the institute of electronics information and communication, other major scientific society and academic networks. It promotes and coordinates the academic usage of domestic networks. The chair of JCRN is professor Syouihi Noguchi of Japan university, and the secretariat is professor Haruhisa Ishida of Tokyo university. In order to be a type A member of JPNIC, it is necessary to get an authorization from JCRN as an academic research network. However, for the present year(1993), nonprofit organization with nonprofit objectives can register as a type A member with or without the authorization from JCRN. Membership fees The objective of JPNIC is not profit-making, and therefore it cannot charge fees more than the necessary expenses. On the other hand this expense has to be shared among the members in a fair and reasonable way. The membership fees given in table 1 was decided by the steering committee of JNIC in 1992. For deciding the expenses, the opinions of related networks and network projects has been considered. The estimated expenses of JPNIC for the year 1993 is based on the estimated number of network projects that are to become members and the scale of those network projects. The membership fees for the year 1994 will be reexamined based on the next year's plan for activities, budget and the estimated number of new member. The present membership fees get almost exponentially high as the scale of the network gets large. On the other hand the membership fees of the non-academic and other networks are five times higher than the academic networks. The reason for this is explained next. The expenses necessary for the activities of JPNIC is obtained from the members based on the idea of sharing the expenses depending on the scale of the network, and therefore as the scale of the network gets large the membership fees also gets higher. Besides, based on the following idea the membership fees gets exponentially high. As the scale of the network gets large, the labor for the administration of name server and address gets increased. Also because of sharing of work among the member's own network, the membership fees is not always proportional to the scale of the network. On the other hand administrative works of small networks is not always less. Maintenance of project and database, official works take the same amount of time and effort as it is with a large network project. The relation between the scale of the network and the membership fees is derived by considering these points. JPNIC administrates network resources/information like IP address, domain name and these are to be administrated and managed as a common asset for the people related to network in an unbiased manner. Because of the arrival of local and commercial networks, these resources are no more limited to the academic research networks only. Here, it should be noted that the big difference between the membership fees of type A and type B is not because of any favor towards academic research networks. At present, the expenses of JPNIC is not only sought from its members. In reality a large part of it is obtained from the activities of the volunteers and staffs of network projects. If the facilities for the activities of the volunteers and staffs are taken into account then the real expenses for the activities of JPNIC will become five times more than its present earnings which is from membership fees. Moreover that, most of these activities are performed by the persons related to academic research networks. On the other hand it is necessary to consider the fact that compared to membership fees technical contribution is easy for academic research networks and if compared to technical contribution, membership fees is easy for commercial Internet and local networks that receive membership fees from their members. Therefore this 1 to 5 difference does not mean that academic research networks should pay only 1/5, instead it means that the remaining 5/4 is to be the technical contributions from volunteers. Considering the future activities of JPNIC, the dependency on volunteers is to be reduced and a fair system for sharing the expenses has to be established. In future the big difference between the membership fees of type A and type B is to be decreased. The role of JPNIC has become more important. Because of the growth of the Internet within the country, the official works for domain administration and address allocation is on a sudden increase. Besides, the facilities for a stabilized operation of domain name server and online information service is to be improved. Moreover that, information exchange among InterNIC and NIC of other countries, cooperation to APNIC which arranges the information of circum-Pacific networks including Japan and other international cooperation is also scheduled. These are necessary for maintaining the network environment of Japan and for the connectivity to the rest of the world. For a smooth activity and for a stable system, all of us should consider the necessity of membership fees, volunteers and staffs. (Susumu Sano, WIDE Project / NEC)