@alex The endless debate is if RIPE should charge the membership based on how much (primarily) IPv4 they have, at the moment and since 2004 ish RIPE has been a flat fee no matter if you have some small amounts (say a 256 IPv4 addresses) or if you are France Telecom with 100M$+ worth of IPv4.

ARIN and APNIC and others bill based on address volume ( See ARINs fee schedule here ) and RIPE used to a while ago, Every year RIPE members vote on how the billing schedule works and one of possible (but not confirmed) options this upcoming round is a scheme like ARIN/APNIC, except the pricing is designed to not be linier, so that the France Telecom's of the world end up paying at max 8000 EUR, where the smallest pay 1000 EUR.

Basically there are two camps of argument, one is that people don't think this non linier scheme is fair (the smallest member pays more because of it), and the other side does not want to deal with variable pricing.

The other side is some ISPs (Mostly in Ukraine it seems) who have a lot of IP space but seemingly are under so much financial pressure that a increase of 4000 EUR/y will kill them (so they claim)