ARIN 35 Members Meeting Transcript - Wednesday, 15 April 2015 [Archived]

Note: This transcript may contain errors due to errors in transcription or in formatting it for posting. Therefore, the material is presented only to assist you, and is not an authoritative representation of discussion at the meeting.

Opening Announcements

John Curran: I’m John Curran, the President and CEO of ARIN, the American Registry of Internet Numbers.

I’d like to welcome you to our ARIN 35 Member Meeting. This is open to everyone. It’s not a policy meeting. It’s a meeting where we handle the business of the organization.

We have a couple of reports today. Fees and Services Update, I’ll be giving. We have the ARIN department reports, the Advisory Council Report. We have the ARIN Financial Report, Board of Trustees. We have an update on the IRR Consultation, and then we have an Open Microphone session.

We’re going to be pretty quick. We are only planning on going half a day, but if there’s lots of questions, we can stay all day and night. It’s all up to you guys.

Let me start right in. First, let’s welcome our sponsors. Usually. No? Okay. Rules and reminders. Please speak your name when you get to the microphone. Be polite.

At the head table, Paul Andersen, our Treasurer and Vice Chair; our Secretary, Tim Denton; the tall guy, Aaron; and Chair of the AC, Dan Alexander.

Paul Andersen: And you think these nametags are up for you.

John Curran: No, no, they’re not. Actually, if we put something on the back of them, I could see that. And it would really be helpful if it matched what was on the front of them.

Fees and Services Update

John Curran: Okay. Let’s get going. So first one is Fees and Services Update. Okay. So going to let you know where we are in this process.

First one, we had a fee services review panel. I think folks remember it. We had a community panel. We wrote a report, some 40 pages long, that modeled seven different options for where to take the fees and had a good discussion of those. And at the October meeting in Baltimore we had an online community consultation.

We have basically two themes that have emerged. The community would like us to express support that the IPv4 fee categories should be lower for the small address holders and larger for the larger address holders. So spread out the category. And that’s what we’re going to look at, obviously.

IPv6 support. We should encourage deployment with minimal IPv6 fees and avoid disincentives resulting in smaller allocations or fee increases.

Right now there’s this weird dynamic where, yes, you can always get v6 if you have v4 and you don’t have to pay anything more, but if you want to get the v6 block you want and not pay more, it might be a little challenging. So we’re going to fix that, too.

So they were equally important from what we had consensus on.

Was what we didn’t have consensus on, us having fees specifically or waiving fees specifically for v6. Completely. No consensus. Flat fee per member. Forget about this variable fees based on the size of your address holdings. Let’s just give a flat fee, simple enough. No.

Fee per transaction. Let’s get nominal fees for everyone for maintenance. And then when you come into ARIN, you pay this good sized transaction fee. No support.

Algorithmic – algorithmic fees, we actually – there’s another RIR that actually has some of that going on where you put the numbers in and you come out with the formula and everyone pays an extremely fair and proportional amount based on if you believe that fairness is based on the size of your holdings. No support.

A lot of folks noted that having their invoices change randomly creates a lot of fun with their accounting department. So those are things that didn’t garner support.

So now the ARIN staff is going to work with the Finance Committee to generate specific proposal to address the consensus point, IPv4 fairness and IPv6 support. There’s an open question.

So we’re actually thinking of modeling two different solutions that address those points. One would be with the existing ISP and end user fee categories.

The other one would be fairness plus, eliminating the ISP and end user distinction and just literally looking at the total resources.

And I guess we would either just model one or model both if people want us to look at it. Modeling both takes a little more time. There’s some excitement when you do that.

So I’d like to hear thoughts. Do you want to see that second option or not? It wouldn’t – the only thing that really matters is more work and more time. So we’re happy to do it. But if there’s no support for it, we’re also happy to give you something sooner.

Microphones are open even for our lawyer. Or I should say always for our lawyer.

(Laughter.)

Andrew Dul: Andrew Dul, ARIN AC. I support looking at the fair plus and reducing or removing the distinction between ISP and end users.

John Curran: We’ll model both. We don’t want to know whether we support one or the other because, until we see both, it’s hard to take a position. But if you want us to model both, that’s good to know.

Owen?

Owen DeLong: Owen DeLong. I’m fine with seeing you model both. I don’t think converging the fee structures makes a lot of sense.

John Curran: Okay. Rear mic. Go ahead.

Lee Howard: Lee Howard.

John Curran: Former Board treasurer.

Lee Howard: Yeah. So I work for a large ISP. It occurs to me that doing fair plus might well mean that the annual renewal fees would look very, very different for end users. And if we sort of brought the two categories together, then end users would – well, so end user fees would go like this and ISP fees would go down, and I would probably oppose reducing my fees in that way.

John Curran: Good to know. So we have some concerns, but there is willingness to have us model both. It will take a little more time, but it’s probably worthwhile. We will do both, we’ll bring it to the community.

Heather Schiller: It wasn’t clear, but would this affect membership?

John Curran: So membership shouldn’t be affected either way, but I think that if we’re going to look at the fees, regardless of which approach we take, we probably need to make membership inherent to getting ARIN services, and we’re going to try to do that in the process.

We need to be a little careful because you don’t want to suddenly have people be members who don’t know they’re members or don’t even wish to be members and suddenly your membership triples and your actual participation rate and things like elections goes down by a factor of one third of your, quote, membership.

So you need – I think we need to look at addressing having membership as an easy option for end users. The question is whether or not it’s built in or whether it’s not.

In the case where everyone is paying the same fees, I can’t imagine not including it.

In the case where we go with this current approach, we probably still want to look at it. It’s just a question of doing it in the ways that those people who want it get it, and not everyone getting it automatically. Because everyone getting it automatically gives you a lot of members who actually don’t know or even necessarily want to be members.

Paul Andersen: Do you have a view on that?

Heather Schiller: I don’t know yet. More members is good, generally.

John Curran: More members who show up or members in name?

Heather Schiller: More members that participate good. Participation good. Thank you, Lee.

I think my only kind of – it doesn’t have to be answered now. Like, do you know yet if this is a decision that is inherently part of this fee discussion, or is it occurring separately from –

John Curran: Separately. There’s a couple of options. How we handle both membership and legacy customers are both options that need to be perambulated.

Rob Seastrom: Hi, Rob Seastrom, Time Warner Cable, ARIN Advisory Council and ClueTrust. So I work for – or, I’m sorry, I’m employed by, which involves a paycheck, a very, very, very large ISP. But I work for also, without the benefit of a paycheck, an extra, extra small ISP with an extra, extra small budget.

And so I would like to remind the Board and the fee schedule committee of previous comments I’ve made about please don’t penalize people at the very, very low end for taking up IPv6.

John Curran: Right. But we are going to hold to the principles that were supported, which is that we’re going to seek to lower fees for the smaller parties and have no disincentives for taking up v6.

Rob Seastrom: Lowering fees for the smaller parties is nice. Not having disincentives for taking up IPv6 is critical.

John Curran: Right. We understand that. That’s considered a requirement.

Rob Seastrom: Thank you.

John Curran: Next.

Owen DeLong: It seems to me, and I could be biased here – Owen DeLong, LRSA resource holder – that membership on an opt-in basis for all resource holders should not be a difficult problem to solve.

You send everybody who holds resources that isn’t automatically a member a nice little letter that says if you want ARIN membership, tell us and we will give it to you, and problem solved.

That way they’ve at least agreed to be members so you’re not creating a whole bunch of members that don’t want to be members or don’t know that they’re members, and you allow them to not be as disenfranchised as they have been.

John Curran: That’s 80 or 90 percent problem solved. There’s a 10 percent case where 2,000 people who may not actually be interested in being members suddenly send letters and become members and you end up with 2,000 organizations that are proxy for one effectively taking the organization.

So with some nuances I agree with you. There’s some protections that need to be looked at that the Board also has to worry at.

Owen DeLong: Okay, I’m not entirely sure how that happens, but we can talk about that offline.

John Curran: Okay. Anyone else on the fees portion. Remote? Okay, Kevin.

Kevin Blumberg: You go with Marty.

John Curran: Marty?

Martin Hannigan: Martin Hannigan, Akamai Technologies. I got here late, but I see the fee schedule is being discussed, and I would like to just offer you my requisite opinion that I would like a fee reduction, please.

Also, how do you plan to address the miscategorization of some of us? For example, do you think Akamai is an ISP?

John Curran: I have no idea if Akamai is an ISP.

Martin Hannigan: I think everyone in the room knows that we’re not an ISP, but I would be interested to know if you’re going to address the miscategorization because many people are labeled ISPs that are end users and vice versa.

John Curran: Okay, the categorization happens in two different ways. It has to do with how you make requests, and then the fee schedule is a downstream effect of that. So how you make requests and whether we have a distinction between end user and ISPs is a policy question.

Martin Hannigan: I would disagree because when we were declared an ISP, then that fine gentleman over there was the guy that recommended it, it was a negotiation, it wasn’t really a categorization.

John Curran: Right. But if you’re saying –

Martin Hannigan: The reason we were recommended to be an ISP – and I have the actual ticket email that I can send to you – was because it was cheaper at the time.

John Curran: Right.

Martin Hannigan: No other criteria.

John Curran: But if you want to have particular criteria that puts organizations in one versus the other, that has to be in policy.

Martin Hannigan: Hasn’t that always been thrown out with respect to entering those kinds of distinctions in policy?

John Curran: Not at all.

Martin Hannigan: I recall many instances of trying to do things like set fees or declare special categories and policy being rejected by the AC.

John Curran: Fees are different than categorization. If you’re talking about how organizations are miscategorized, which was your first statement, that’s based on how they go into the NRPM and apply for resources.

So if you want it to be that certain organizations are always considered ISPs or are always considered end users, clarity in the NRPM is what you need to make that happen.

Martin Hannigan: Okay. So just so I’m clear, so if Twitch comes in, who are clearly – a media streaming company comes to ARIN and gets addresses to deliver their service, would they be categorized as an ISP or an end user?

John Curran: I don’t know any particular case, but what I’m saying is right now they can apply under one policy or the other. If you want only organizations to be able to apply one way or the other, you need to give us clear NRPM guidance. We don’t tell people how they have to apply.

Martin Hannigan: I just wanted to make my point. Thank you.

John Curran: Okay. So what we’re going to talk about is how the fees are applied to the various categories. If people want to have a discussion about how organizations get categorized, right now they apply, and if they’re qualified, then they become a ARIN customer of that type.

If you want to make it more difficult for certain organizations to qualify one way or the other, find your AC member and talk to them.

So we’ll proceed with this.

I now want to talk about services. So this is the presentation that was given – pretty much the same presentation that was given to the ARIN Board in January.

We have lots of ARIN members and community participants who want to have input into how ARIN determines its services – modification of services, creation of new services, prioritization. That’s a good thing, by the way. That’s a feature.

We have a lot of input mechanisms. Okay? And as folks know, we have to prioritize somehow what actually gets built.

So the ACSP, the feedback button on the ARIN website; the Open Microphone comments that we hear; in person discussion with staff and Board; email; postings to various mailings lists; calls to the help desk line; surveys; the customer satisfaction survey; all these affect what ARIN should be doing next.

We process all that, and there’s some things we have to do, as Nate’s already covered. Legal compliance we have to do. Changes to policy we have to do, reflect. Changes for bylaw changes or process changes we don’t really have a choice in.

But then there’s a few items that are – in fact, a lot of items that need to be prioritized effectively based on all those comments.

We don’t get – actually on the consultation we do, when we send out “here’s what we’re thinking about for next year, here’s a prioritization survey,” which we’ve done, we don’t get a lot of feedback. We get five, ten people responding. And it’s not clear whether the people who respond are summarizing the whole community or not. Very hard to tell. We take that into consideration as well.

We actually don’t need to be the ones to choose this, guys. You can choose it. But you would need to organize, that’s what you need to do, to make that decision and give it to us.

So we can keep doing it the present way. That’s quite possible. We do listen to you. We try to take the things – you heard the transfer panel yesterday talking about the benefits of some of the automation we’ve done to make that more easy, because we’re seeing an increase.

The model works. We could actually create a Services Working Group to help with this prioritization.

Obviously you’d be advising the staff, because what you put together I have to carry to the Board for budget.

But we could do this. You could do the prioritization. There might be some other benefits.

Why we should stay with the status quo? Status quo is good. Stay in line. Thank you.

It’s a proven model. It doesn’t provide a clear way for you to know what the prioritization is other than seeing what actually gets built after the fact. We do try to put the ordered list online.
But that doesn’t help people. Sometimes they don’t realize changes are made to that. They’re not following it.

Folks want to have influence. They want to see the list and evolve it rather than just hearing this is what we decided.

And on the other hand, we’ve added a pretty big surge in engineering resources. We’ll talk about that later. We are picking up on the backlog.

I think I collapsed on the first day when someone acknowledged that we were catching up with the backlog, which is a good thing.

The fact is that with the additional engineering resources, we’re making progress, and it may be the current system works fine.

The current system is lousy. Let’s change it.

Option two. Increase visibility. If we create a Services Working Group, you would have the process, you would know it because you’d be doing the prioritization, for all the things that are optional would be up to you.

Again, we’d still do the regulatory required ones. Anything that came out of policy we’d have to do.

But for all the additional resources, it would be your queue that you would be setting. You’d have direct influence over it. You could develop service documentation that says what these services should do.

We’ve had some discussion of things running around in NRPM that maybe belong in a document. This would be a group that could do that.

The staff could refer suggestions to that group, results of consultation, things we get on feedback forms for their consideration. You’d really need to support it if we do it.

Considerations. You’d really need to make sure – we’ve had working groups that have kind of atrophied and died on the vine. We need to know, if we’re going to do a Services Working Group, that
you would actually run it, lead it, participate. We’d have to give it time at every meeting. You’d have to have involvement.
It still requires harmonization with the development plan. Even if you give us priorities, we can’t promise that we get anything done until we see what’s actually funded.

We’d still need to handle the compliance items. It has proven effective in other communities. It may help with you guys hearing each other’s service concerns.

We need to determine the structure and the operating model. Is it a group of the whole? Do we add a track? Does it have Chairs? How do you guys appoint them? Is it a set of people?

All those good things you guys would have to decide.

Oh, yeah, discussion. Microphones are open. Come on up.

Jason Schiller: Jason Schiller, Google, ASO AC. On the previous topic, because I missed that the mics were going to be closed, this wouldn’t be a Members Meeting if Google didn’t stand up and say I would be happy to pay more for my membership fees if that means I can get more development and features.

John Curran: So noted.

Jason Schiller: So I think a Services Working Group would be great to have to try and focus the list of all the bug fixes and new functionality that people want.

And I think getting the people that are concerned, the people that normally are filing the consultation and suggestions into the bucket, to get them into the room and get them all talking about what features they need and why they’re important, I think that will help as a group for them to coalesce and come to some agreement in terms of what has priority and how much we’re willing to spend on it.

I also think it would be good to have a Board member there as well so that they can keep tabs on the conversation and see if this is ballooning and take that back to the Board so that the appropriate financial decisions are made to support it.

John Curran: Yep. Next.

Lee Howard: Lee Howard. I’m temperamentally somebody who likes change so I rarely argue for the status quo, but I’m going to argue for it at this time.

I think that the Services Working Group probably works well in RIPE because they have a much larger participating membership or body. You go to a RIPE meeting, there’s a lot more people there because they’re also having an operators group at the same time.

As I look around the room – well, here is even lighter than it was yesterday. We had something like 120 people in the room, as I recall the hand counts, and 20 or 30 people actually raising hands to register opinions.

I have a feeling if we do the math we find out that something like half to two thirds of the people in the room are RIR staff, whether it’s ARIN or others, or Board members or AC members or ASO AC members or people who are otherwise recusing themselves from participating which leaves a very small body of volunteers to do additional work.

And I think our existing ASO AC members and Advisory Council members and Board members are busy enough, not to mention the staff. So I don’t think that we’re going to be able to get more volunteers to put in more time for this.

If people want to jump up and say “No, no, I want to be on this working group,” that’s a different thing. We’ve got participants and then we have some density of interest saying that this could work.

But I don’t know that – it doesn’t look to me like it will work. So we’re going to have to keep hoping the surge catches up with demand.

John Curran: Lee, can I ask a question?

Lee Howard: Yes, of course.

John Curran: If 50 people in the community – and I’m going to be careful. I’m not saying members because services affect other people, too. If 50 people in the community show up at ARIN with a petition, says here’s how we want the group to work, here’s our names, we want it, should we have a Services Working Group?

Lee Howard: Sure.

John Curran: If 20 people show up –

Lee Howard: Kind of where you’re going is you’re getting 10 opinions from the same 10 people on the ACSP requests, right? Those 10 people are the people who have registered interest so far. Good for them.

I think you’ve already got it. You’ve used the current process, and people who are interested jump in as you ask.

John Curran: So that’s good input. If 10 people showed up, you’d say we’re sort of hearing the same 10 in a different mode. And if 50 showed up, you’d say we definitely need a Services Working Group.

Okay. So solve for n where n is between 10 and 50.

Lee Howard: Right now – well, I’m not certain it’s the exact same 10 people on each issue. So having an ad hoc consultation per issue, per question means that those who are interested in that particular issue can jump in as opposed to, oh, well, I’m not on the Services Working Group; I need to go find a SWIG member and register my opinion with them.

John Curran: The only downside of that: If you get 10 who feel strongly about X and a different 10 that feel differently about Y and a different 10 who feel strongly about Z, you get let’s do X, Y, and Z, even if we’re only going to be able to do two of the three.

Lee Howard: There turns out not to have been very many engineering projects to which I’ve seen great objection.

John Curran: Okay.

Lee Howard: So yes.

John Curran: Excellent. Back microphone. Owen.

Owen DeLong: Owen DeLong. First a clarification. I’m not only an AC member, I’m also a member of the community. And I, therefore, do not recuse myself from participating as a member of the community, contrary to previous comments.

I’m fine with the Services Working Group. Though I agree with Lee, I don’t see that it would necessarily provide all that benefit.

If you organize it as a track, I have a concern in what you would put it parallel to, because I don’t think there’s a lot in the ARIN meeting that you want to pull people away from.

And if there is, maybe we should take that out of the ARIN meeting anyway.

I also have concern with adding it to an already time constrained meeting. For example, what we have in October, where other priorities have eaten into our meeting time and we’re condensing everything including elections, policy work, and everything else now into a day and a half I think it is –

John Curran: Two days. We’ll take the whole second day.

Owen DeLong: Okay. Adding an additional event to that, not so sure about that.

John Curran: Okay.

Owen DeLong: I don’t think there’s a concern about membership in the Services Working Group.

I think that the Services Working Group, if it’s going to work, should sort of be a designation of a meeting rather than a designation of who is on it kind of thing.

There might be a Mailing List that accompanies it, and you could subscribe to that or not. But that should not control whether you come to the meeting and participate or not.

John Curran: Thank you. Next.

David Farmer: David Farmer, University of Minnesota, ARIN AC. I’m probably not for a standing group just yet. But there’s a certain number of tasks we’ve sort of said, hey, it would be really cool if we had a group to do this.

So maybe we take a couple of those things, try out a working group to do a few of those tasks, try to keep them somewhat focused on those tasks, see how it works.

Works good, maybe we give it some more things to do. If it doesn’t work so good, maybe we disband it.

Just a thought.

John Curran: Back microphone.

We have two microphones. I want to point that out.

Steve Feldman: Steve Feldman, CBS Interactive, ARIN member, not on AC Board or any other thing.

This is actually something personally I think would be an interesting way for me to contribute without a huge commitment.

I agree with all the logistics concerns that people have mentioned in front of me. You need critical mass and useful work to do.

My biggest concern would be that I wouldn’t want the group to be the group of people who want the features fighting each other over which features get implemented but more trying to gauge what the community consensus is as to what ought to be done.

John Curran: Excellent.

Steve Feldman: The latter one I’d be happy to participate in; the first one, no.

John Curran: Thank you.

Andrew Dul: Andrew Dul. I think I would echo Mr. Feldman’s comments almost identically, only noting that there is a limited set of resources of people who are participating and have jobs already.

I am certainly for giving people who want to participate another way to participate if they want to, but I don’t necessarily know that just creating a standing working group and giving them the prioritization to do is necessarily the best thing at this point. I think there is value in staff doing some or most of that work.

I do think that the fees schedule working group performed very admirably and was definitely something that needed some outside of ARIN staff input and the type of thing that I think really worked well to provide additional people the opportunity to bring their own expertise as well as bringing new thoughts to the process.

John Curran: Okay. Thank you. Jason’s laptop, next.

Jason Schiller: Jason Schiller, Google. If we don’t have a working group on this topic, how about just a presentation that goes – runs through the current list of everything that’s open, what progress has been made since last time we talked about it and when ARIN thinks we can get to a solution on that, and simply run down through the entire list regularly at these meetings.

John Curran: We’ve done that irregularly in the past. We could do it consistently. Good suggestion. Remote.

Kevin Blumberg: I don’t have a remote. I’ll be in line.

John Curran: Dancing fingers, go.

Kevin Blumberg: Kevin Blumberg, The Wire, ARIN AC. I think what we’re forgetting is that the people that would be a part of this group – and I do support this concept – are not actually the people in this room.

We have the entire operator community who are very dependent on software features and bugs and iterations who have – I wouldn’t say disdain, but very little interest in the policy of ARIN but a lot of interest in the workings of ARIN.

And to be able to bring that group in with a very limited set saying “We have this great thing that we would like the operators to now be involved in; are you willing to do that,” I think we’d actually get incredible involvement from the operator side of this community.

That’s the first part to it.

The second part is: In many cases we aren’t the right people for our own companies to be handling this. We would potentially push this down to a developer who does work on the ARIN side of things of the house, et cetera.

So I wouldn’t look at the people in this room as being the right people. I would look outside of that.

John Curran: Okay. Thank you.

I am going to close the mics soon on this topic. So if you want to speak, get to the mic.

Front center.

David Huberman: David Huberman, Microsoft. I’m really against this idea. I think we have a professional staff that’s highly capable.

I’ve been involved with this – not you, the people who work for you. I’ve been involved in this community for 16 years, and I’ve never seen large scale complaints about these services and features ARIN provides.

Once in a while there’s a small issue, and you do a really good job of nipping it in the bud. You have a really talented engineering staff and an architect who might not be a nice guy but he’s super talented.

(Laughter and applause.)

David Huberman: You have capable management. You have a Board who overlooks the whole thing.

And there are plenty of avenues for people to express their dissatisfaction. There’s no need for this. You have a pipeline issue. Right now you have a solution for your pipeline issue. You threw money at it, which is a good thing. You don’t have that much of a backlog anymore, or you won’t when the surge is done.

You’re paid to do your job. Keep doing your job. You’re doing it well.

Just my opinion.

John Curran: Thank you. I’m closing the mics. Last chance to approach the mics.

Back microphone.

Sandra Murphy: Sandy Murphy, Parsons. Twice now in this meeting you have pointed to the Services Working Group as a possible answer to some questions that came from the floor.

During the discussion of the removal of the reverse DNS, there’s been a movement in a couple of meetings to take things of operational nature out of the NRPM as not numbers policy but a strong support for the idea of having a separate document that would talk about the network operations of the operational nature of what ARIN does.

And I spoke about the Service Level Agreement. If you’re not going to have a Services Working Group, do you have an alternative for developing those other things which are already identified as needed?

John Curran: We would actually have staff slowly develop those and use the consultation process for review. So, yeah, it would be staying with the status quo.

Sandra Murphy: Okay.

John Curran: Okay? Thank you.

So there are some people who have interest in this. And I don’t know whether or not it’s enough to say that there’s progress to be made, but I want to make sure you all find each other.

There is a break coming up. It’s at 10:30. It’s after all the staff reports. We’re going to go get great coffee and snacks.

Those who really believe the services are necessary are not going to go do that. You’re going to find yourself at the front of this room and talk to each other so you can continue to advance the concept, whether that’s prioritization for resources or whether or not that’s a group to help draft service documents and work on taking things out of the NRPM.

But at break, you don’t get a break. You come up here, you talk to each other. You find each other so that we can get a more community-based proposal. We’re willing to hear that, the staff and the Board. But it literally has to be the community saying “We want to do that.”

So at break, all of you come forward while all of us go get coffee.

Okay. So that’s all I have. Thank you. There’s been helpful discussion.

I’m now going to turn it over to the ARIN reports, and the first one is Susan Hamlin doing the Communications and Member Services.

ARIN Reports: Communications and Member Services

Susan Hamlin: Good morning. So thank you. Quick update of what we’ve been doing. And just this is the team. Hopefully none of them need introduction except Mary Ryan on the top far right. She is our new additional meeting planner who came on board the first of the year.

But I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Hollis; Einar; Dé; Jason; Mary; Jud; Jennifer; Sean; Erin Sellers, our graphic designer who is at home; and Sarah; as well as the ARIN staff here, particularly our operations staff, for your efforts in planning and executing this meeting.

So please join me in thanking all of them.

(Applause.)

As John mentioned the other day, we recently published the 2014 Annual Report. You can find that under About Us, Corporate Documents. So I would encourage you to please take a look at that.

We also, in February, conducted a Public Policy Consultation at NANOG, and we will continue to host these. The next one will be at the June NANOG meeting. And we are putting on this meeting. So first quarter, CMSD met all of their operational objectives.

We continue to grow our Outreach program. I think most of you are familiar with our ARIN on the Road program, which is a one day event we take out to the community in locations where we’re probably not going to hold a larger scale ARIN Public Policy and Members Meeting.

So this is just a look at what we’ve planned for the rest of the year thus far. If any of you are from an area where you think there are folks out there who would like to see ARIN come, please drop me a note or something to info@arin.net.

We sort of cast around looking at where we have a pot of members, but we’re willing to come to any area. So just let us know. And we’ll be planning eight to ten of these events next year.

We also continue to focus some additional outreach in the Caribbean area.

This is just a quick look at some of the activities where ARIN will have a presence this year.

We also continue our Outreach with IPv6. You all saw the Get6 banner, and I’ll talk about that in a minute. We continue to go to some trade shows, but we’ve backed off of that a little bit.

We feel like we’ve gotten the “need to get v6” message out to the ISP technical community. We’re doing a little more outreach in the Internet governance area.

We like to send Cathy Handley, John out places to represent ARIN. And we also send other members of staff when requested.

So this year we’ve widened our Get6 campaign. As I said, we feel like we’ve done a good job over the last eight to ten years reaching out to the technical community.

So we’re going out with a new message of looking – aimed at enterprises, trying to talk to people about taking a first step to enable websites over IPv6.

It’s been an interesting message to develop. We have a public relations firm we’re working with on this. We’re aiming this at CEOs, marketing people, trying to get them to understand the importance and then go talk to their technical people.

So this is recently launched. You’ll find some new information and pages on TeamARIN.net. And part of that is we have a forward thinker’s page. You’ll see right now two videos there – one Vint Cerf and one our own John Curran.

We’re looking for folks who have implemented v6, many of you in the room who would like to share a quote, share a video.

The purpose of this is we want to point people outside of our community to these pages so they get a better understanding. Maybe if we get enough people on the forward thinker page it will build some peer pressure.

So if you’re interested in participating or helping us with this campaign and have ideas, please reach out to us.

And on the TeamARIN site this morning you’ll see an album of photos. Many of you were kind enough to pose with and have fun the Get6 banner.

We work daily with all the departments in the building reaching out and hearing from the community about how we can give you the information you need.

So some of the things we’ve done most recently. In fact, last week we put up a new page on the website to talk about getting started to get your resources from ARIN.

And you heard earlier this week that we are seeing many first time customers coming to ARIN. These are small ISPs, maybe typically downstreams who can no longer get space from their upstream. They’re coming to ARIN.

It’s a little intimidating. When you go to the page, there are a lot of acronyms. There are a lot of processes. There are a lot of things you have to do before you can actually request resources.

So working with Registration Services Department, we’ve come up with some new documentation, and we’ll be doing more of these types of things to help you and help the community interact with ARIN.

Last year we developed a Requesting Resources video which guides you through the submission process, gives you an early indication of the type of information you’re going to need. And we’ve had in less than a year about 5,000 hits on it. So I think people are finding it and using it.

So website project. We took to heart and listened to the comments we received last year in the community survey. There were several areas that talked about the need to improve navigation, make things easier to find on the website.

So unlike RIPE, who just finished their project, we are starting to discuss and plan ways to make improvements.

One of the top things we’re looking at now is a way to simplify a lot of the terminology in ARIN process and procedures, make them understandable. Points of contact perhaps simply could be contacts.

So we’re identifying these areas, and we’ll start addressing those. We’ll be doing a section by section content review. And after that is done, we’ll be looking at navigation and be doing some user testing.

Okay. Want to spend a couple of minutes talking about election process and voter eligibility. So a few years ago we moved off of our legacy in-house election voting software, went with BigPulse, which has been was a good option. And last year we developed a way for eligible voters to come in, log in through their ARIN Online account to get access to their ballot.

So we have a goal in 2016 that we hope to require everyone to vote through this process. It’s a better, securer system. So we’re going to be working on that.

We also are working to get rid of the term “Designated Member Representative,” DMR, and replace that with the term “Voting Contact.” This goes to an effort to simplify our terminology.

Anybody have a problem with that? Excellent. Okay.

We also are looking to, in the transition this year, relax a little bit of our DMR /voting contact email eligibility rules.

Up until now, the voting contact has been required to use the person’s name, initials, and a domain that matches their organization name. We are relaxing the domain name part of this for this year.

You’ll be hearing more about it. That should make several hundred organizations now eligible to vote if they keep the same voting contact.

And, again, the goal through all of this is to simplify the process, to bring the voting access in through ARIN Online, with a goal of having every member organization have an eligible voting contact on record.

So transition steps for 2015. And here I’m talking about preparation for the elections for the Board and Advisory Council. The actual voting takes place in October, and nominations open in July. And there are some processes along the way where there is voter eligibility cutoff.

But we have some cleanup to do. So on the staff side, we’ll be looking at the voting contacts now on record who will become eligible with the relaxation of the email rule. We’ll also be looking to see – for many organizations who do not have a voting contact on record, to see if there is an organization point of contact on the record who might be willing to serve as the voting contact.

So we’re going to be doing some cleanup. And if your organization falls in that category, you’ll likely be receiving emails or phone calls from us.

It’s a lot of cleanup to do. Last year, in the 2014 elections, 71 percent of eligible voters were able to access their ballot through ARIN Online, which means we have a large percentage of organizations whose voting contact right now either does not have an ARIN Online Web user account or isn’t linked. So we have a lot of communications and work to do this year and next year if we’re going to reach our goal.

Any questions on that before I – okay.

Our next meeting is in Montreal in the fall. We have a Fellowship Program, but I’m happy to announce a change for the fall program. Fellows who are interested and want to take advantage of it will now be able to come to the NANOG meeting. ARIN will cover the cost of NANOG registration and hotel for those extra days. So Fellows will be able to enjoy the full week of the NANOG/ARIN meeting in the fall.

And that’s all I have. Take questions and encourage you all to participate.

Cathy Aronson: Cathy Aronson. I just wanted to say to everyone here, as a member of the NANOG Fellowship Committee, that we don’t get nearly enough applicants. And we’d really, really like to get more applicants.

And I don’t know how the ARIN Fellowship pool is, because I’m not on that committee, but, boy, your odds are super good of getting a NANOG Fellowship if you apply.

Not people actually in this room, but students you know. I mean, hugely high probability.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that.

You might want to speak to what your uptake is.

Susan Hamlin: Thank you, Cathy. I would say the same for the ARIN Fellowship Program. You all, because you’re attending a meeting, are not eligible, but please go forth and spread the word. We would like to have more applicants. It would be a great problem to have to go to the Board and said we need to increase the number of Fellows. Let’s work towards that.

Lee Howard: Lee Howard. Related question. I’m disappointed that I haven’t actually gotten to bump into and chat with any of the Fellows at this meeting.

I’ve read their bios online and went: Cool. These are great people to get input from.

And bummer. My bad for not going out and shaking hands with more people.

Susan Hamlin: You Fellows, I see several of you here. Do you want to stand up? They’re all here. Go find Lee at the break.

(Applause.)

Lee Howard: And I can absolutely imagine Fellows at the next meeting being on the small ISP panel that I proposed. That would be a great way to get some participants there.

Fellows are not eligible to be a Fellow again; is that true? Once you’ve been a Fellow, you’ve been to a meeting now.

Susan Hamlin: That’s correct. Five years.

John Curran: Actually, we can have that doors closed – in our closed door discussion that apparently you telepathically read, we noted that – the Board noted the other day that it might be beneficial in order to help build capacity if we could allow fellows to – from a region to attend multiple times if they’ve expressed interest and been good participants.

And so that is currently something being discussed, and it will be – the Fellowship Committee will spend some time on it.

Lee Howard: I don’t know how to solve it, because you don’t want to just pay for a permanent scholarship fund, but, yeah, one and done seems –

John Curran: Having them attend a few times helps them build the capacity and level of interest that will let them find their own support back home to do so.

Lee Howard: Good.

Albert Daniels: Hi. My name is Albert Daniels. I’m the ICANN Engagement Manager for the Caribbean. I would like to recognize the important work that Susan and her team and ARIN has been doing in the Caribbean.

I don’t usually see a large number of Caribbean participants at your meetings. So I would say this on their behalf: The capacity building work that you are doing in the several territories is very important because there are a lot of new companies, new users to your processes, and your capacity building is very important, not only in the area of applying for resources, but also in other areas like IPv6, DNSSEC, and so on.

Secondly, I’d like to compliment ARIN on ensuring that in your Fellowship Program there’s always a space for one person from the Caribbean.

And I definitely know our Caribbean Fellow this time has been at all of the meetings and he’s been fully engaged. So we’re hoping to see good things from him.

And, finally, I also want to recognize the collaboration between ARIN and LACNIC in the Caribbean region.

For those who don’t know, the Caribbean is approximately maybe 28 to 30 territories – two thirds of the territories covered by ARIN; two thirds of the population, 42 million, covered by LACNIC.

So there are instances, for example, where you have companies which have territories from both providers. And there’s several other complexities. For example, the geolocation with the Dutch territories, getting numbers from LACNIC, but trying to go to Holland and so on.

So the work that both of you are doing. And we look forward to having Mark Kosters at CaribNOG at the end of this month on a stage with LACNIC because it’s important for both of you to work together, to continue to work together to serve the Caribbean region.

So thank you on behalf of the Caribbean, and please keep it up.

Susan Hamlin: That’s a good reminder of something I wanted to add. We are looking now on location and dates for our April 2016 meeting. I’m sorry, we’re not there yet. But we are looking in the Caribbean.

So hopefully we’ll see a lot of participation by our members and community there next April.

Albert Daniels: We’ll be happy to have you all in the sunny Caribbean.

John Curran: Any other questions for Susan? Thank you, Susan.

(Applause.)

John Curran: Okay. Next up we have the Engineering Report with Mark Kosters.

ARIN Reports: Engineering

Mark Kosters: Good morning, everyone.

Audience: Good morning.

Mark Kosters: Should I say it again? Good morning, y’all.

Audience: Good morning.

Mark Kosters: I’m going to have a couple of jokes in this presentation. If you want to laugh, that’s fine. If you don’t, I guess you’re sleeping, but that’s okay.

So as you know, we’ve had a lot of requests for development support. And the Board’s heard you, and the Board has said, hey, ARIN, we need you to grow.

So I’m saying cool, time for high carb and low exercise regime. But I don’t think that’s exactly what you guys wanted, was it?

Mark Kosters: Okay. Shoot. I need to practice that a little bit better. Not good.

So we’re growing by 12.5 FTEs here within engineering – five operations guys, three developers, four systems integration/QA people, and one part-time project manager.

Let’s go through this and see how we’re doing so far in our efforts to populate the engineering team.

Operations. Unfortunately we’ve had – not yet had very much success in this area. If you know some good systems administrators, network administrators, security dudes, hey, we’d love to see some resumés. So if anyone is interested, please come join our really cool crew.

On the development, we’ve had a lot more success. We have one more slot available. We’ve filled two of them. And that’s going well.

And also within software integration, we’ve actually grown by four and have one slot open as well.

So you’ll say to yourself, if you look at the previous slides, wait a minute, I thought that you had only four SI people as part of the search. Well, we had one contractor that was open slot that actually moved into a permanent slot as well. So that’s been working out really well.

And what’s important here is that this is starting to pressurize our development queue, so you’ll see more development effort coming out of this.

One of the things we’ve learned through this process is it takes about three months – three to six months for engineers, a developer or SI engineer, actually to get into the process and become fairly effective.

Project management. Deb is actually our really capable project manager, and she’s getting some additional help based on the additional workload as well.

And of course me. The only way that this is growing is my tummy.

(Laughter.)

So let’s talk about – thank you for laughing.

(Laughter.)

So let’s talk about what we’ve done within ARIN so far. One is we’ve added pre-approval support and some transfer work. And one of the things I thought was pretty cool about the transfers panel discussion is that it’s become easier for them to do their work.

Now, we still have more to do. But this is something that we’re trying to automate the best we can as we go through this. And, frankly, we’re learning a lot as we go forward in this process.
We’ve made various improvements to the Specified Transfer Listing Service as well. Mainly give some more organizational visibility in the process.

Here’s one thing that’s interesting, PGP. Has anyone noticed that we’ve changed how we did PGP? One. Okay. So PGP used to be in line, which was not an RFC specification. Now it’s actually RFC compliant, which means that that’s actually an attachment. So you will see your signatures as attachment. And we’re going forward with this.

Some you will see are signed, some are not. Actually what’s really important for this, and this has been mentioned before, is on POC validation. So everything that comes from ARIN dealing with POC validation is PGP signed.

We’ve done some other things in terms of improve membership support for Susan’s team.

And we also have moved a good bit of our facilities, production facilities, from our headquarters in Chantilly to our colo site in Ashburn.

And, finally, our SAN, we’ve replaced that as well. We’ve moved from EMC to NetApp, and that’s going well, too.

We continue to make fault tolerance improvements. There’s various things that we’ve noticed as we go through this that we have single points of failure, and we’re trying to fix that as well. And we have various other operations that we do as well.

So OT&E. One of the things – I mentioned this in the last report, and I encourage you to go back to your teams as well here. Here’s a great place for you guys to play. And we have basically everything except mail here in this environment.

And we have 161 networks that are actually registered in this environment. To play here you have to register.

If you look at the OT&E website, you’ll see that it looks like production, but it’s not really because it has a little banner on each side and says OT&E on it.

But this is important for you guys to actually do some testing. And this is a great place to do it. You don’t have to do it in production.

You can see we have Reg RWS, our RESTful API provisioning system there; our Whois RWS system there; our Web interface, of course, ARIN Online; RPKI suite, which is important, especially if you want to do up/down testing; and soon RDAP. We’ll put that in the system as well.

IETF participation. Andy and I go to the IETF all the time. We go to these various working groups along with Cathy. We don’t quite get the funny quips that she does, but that’s all cool.

SIDR is one of the big ones we participate in. RDAP is now closed based – since the specifications are done. I’m sure there are more things to do there.

ICANN, I’m part of the Security and Stability Committee, also the Server System Advisory Committee, and a Technical Advisory Group, which always continually surprises me.

Operational concerns. We’ve had a much, much quieter period this time. The last time, you may recall, we had a UPS incident where our UPS failed, and that was bad news. We had various ISP connectivity issues that were bad, mainly because of a construction on a nearby highway.

We’ve since sat down, for example, with our ISP, with Cox Communications, and sat down with their management and said, hey, you’ve got to do a better job letting us know when you have planned maintenance.

They’ve been extremely helpful since that point in time. They’ve let us know when their service is affecting us as well as potentially service affecting. And that’s been very useful.

We’re also adding a second vendor to our facility, which is great. So we should have better and more redundant connectivity to our office.

We are having some issues with our West Coast public-facing services site. Now public-facing services sites are like Whois RWS, our FTP servers, our IRR, etcetera. They’re all out there on these public-facing services. We have one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast.

And the West Coast facility is kind of interesting. It’s going through some transition. We’re looking to replace that. We now have an RFP out there, and we’ve had actually tremendous number of responses from vendors wanting us to take advantage of their facilities. So this is cool. So we’re going to be moving that this year.

We’ve had 100 percent uptime with our public-facing services essentially since I’ve been there.

Whois services include Whois, Whois RWS, DNS, our Mailing Lists, and FTP.

We’re also doing the same thing with RPKI. The service that RPKI uses as its way of getting your RPKI information from us through the repository, that’s been up 100 percent of the time.

And we’re striving to do that. And through the Service Level Agreement, whenever it comes out, that’s something that we’ll be committed to do as well.

Now, giving you some statistics what’s going on with ARIN Online. We almost have 100,000 users in the system. What’s interesting here is that it’s pretty consistent in terms of number of accounts that are put in on a yearly basis.

If you look at the number of logins, there’s a lot of people that are just like one and done. They’ve done their thing and they’ve moved on. But there’s a lot of power users, from the 11 to beyond 16 times, the number of people, the number of people who have logged in.

So I think that’s kind of interesting. A lot of people are effectively using ARIN Online.

This is also exciting stat in terms of our use of the RESTful provisioning service. You can either come into ARIN with your reassignments using SWIPs, which are essentially templates, or you can use the RESTful interface. You can see that the RESTful interface has really done an outstanding job from a cumulative basis on growth.

So this is really cool. DNSSEC. How many people here have DNSSEC on their reverse zones? One, two, three. I saw three. Am I going to see four?

John Curran: Do I?

Mark Kosters: You count. Five. No. Okay. So, anyways, there’s a number of organizations, 107, that are actually participating in this. And we encourage the use of DNSSEC.

RPKI usage. Now, what’s interesting here is we’re growing. Number of people assigned over the line party agreement continues to grow. The number of organizations participating in this is now 187.
ROAs, it’s growing. It’s not to the RIPE number yet, and we’re going to have to work on that. We have 430 resources that are covered now, networks that are covered. And what’s interesting here is we have our first up/down delegated customer.

(Applause.)

I wanted to report that we have two. But one joined in and then pulled themselves out. I’m going to talk about that here in a little bit.

So Whois queries. Here’s our average number of Whois queries per second. Andy had sort of an aggregate number, but here’s the average.

So, Andy, you can use this graph next time, if you want.

So you can see that the RESTful queries have overtaken Port 43 and continues to do so, and the gap is increasing.

And next time I’d be really excited about doing RDAP and actually see that sort of dichotomy actually grow even more. Whois over v6. Now, this slide really shocked me. And it really shocked me because we actually got up to 12 percent of our total traffic for Whois actually over v6.

It kind of goes up and down. I don’t understand that. But, what’s interesting, v6 is growing compared to v4. And this is cumulative traffic. I actually looked at our Excel spreadsheet to make sure I got it right. So it is growing, and which I find very interesting.

IRR. We have slow growth there. Actually after the consultation occurred, opened up, we had pretty much a surge of number of maintainers coming in the door.

Routes and Route6 objects, that continues to slowly grow, too.

IRR InetNums and Inet6Nums slowly grows as well.

One last thing I want to mention about the IRR. I know a little bit about the people, as well as the ARIN staff, about the people who are using this. And a lot of the people that are using this are proxying on behalf of the network owners.

As we go through this, we need to figure out how they’re going to be able to play in this. And John’s actually brought that question into the consultation as well. So I know that a lot of you are very interested in doing this. But we also need to realize that a good number of the customers that are actually using this system right now are not the holders, but people are doing this on behalf of the holders.

And that’s something that’s not well supported yet, and we need to figure out how to do that.

RPKI up/down is available. Two takers. One removed themselves. One side effect of this is the one who did remove themselves, actually they went down. And one of the things that this looked like is the whole regional registry went down from their validator’s perspective. Actually, that’s something that needs to be fixed.

So because if a delegated customer goes down, that doesn’t mean the whole system went down or that particular tree went down; it just meant that the one customer went down. So we definitely need to look at fixing that.

And that’s not only the various validators out there, it’s also our own monitoring system. Actually got alarms on this as well saying, oh, my gosh, things are down. This is not good. But turns out we were fine.

RDAP has become a set of RFCs, five, maybe six, depending on if you talk to Andy.

We have code written and tested. We’re going to have this in our June 20th release.

We also have open source software that Andy has talked about in projects. I encourage you, if you have any tools that you want to make available, that you use that tool at that site.

Other regional registry and domain holders are also using this site, which I find really, really fascinating.

Now, most of the domain registries, they do this. It’s really a contractual obligation that they have. And ICANN is actually putting this in their contracts, as far as I understand.

So RDAP is going to supplant Whois at some point in the future.

So we’ve created a lot of APIs. And I’ve talked about this as well. And we encourage you, if you have tools, to utilize these APIs. And it makes life much easier for you guys.

And the projects.arin.net site, I like to promote this use. So ARIN does have an engineering team, and we love to do things for you. But also if you have things that your teams have done that you think is cool, please bring it into the repository, because there’s other people that probably would like to use those tools as well.

We’ve had two takers since ARIN 33, Whois stats, which is a stats parser that scrapes Whois RWS, and also .NET client for Windows users.

So here’s what we’re planning on working on through Q3 of next year, in terms of what we’re going to be doing.

We’ve got further automation of transfers going on. We’re going to add links to Whois queries responses and change Whois output for certain /8 records. That is going to be out here on – I believe it’s in the May release. Is that right, Andy? Yeah.

We’re also working on two factor authentication. We’re just going through that right now. We’ll use Google Authenticator as a foray into this service.

We’re going to be moving RDAP into production, and that’s going to be going out on the June 20th release.

We’re going to start SWIP Easy. One of the things we notice is when we do a deployment, we look through and make sure everything is running well. And one of the things we look through is look through the mail flow, because that’s one of the more complicated things we do in ARIN.

And one of the things we notice, as we look through the mail flow, is a lot of people are handcrafting templates they send to us.

The way we can tell this is we see that something comes in and it gets rejected because something was wrong. And then we see something come in, that same reassignment coming in again, and something else isn’t quite right, so it gets rejected again.

Finally it comes in as being correct. And what’s kind of sad about this, this happens on a Saturday morning. So that means you guys are really working hard, which is cool, but maybe we need to come up with a better tool for you guys to use to actually make this happen.

We’re working on various other ACSPs, and we’re going to start really sort of pressurizing that, and I look forward to the next meeting having a whole list of these that we’ve completed.

We’re also working on making our public-facing sites more redundant. We’re wanting to put multiple transit providers in per PFS site. Not only we’re going to be moving our West Coast site, we’ll also be adding on a transit from various other ISPs onto these particular sites as well.

We’re putting in new load balancers. We have them in-house. We’ll be pushing them out. They don’t support offloading in https, which means we have some issues dealing with Whois, our Whois RWS, soon RDAP.

We want to get this fixed so it supports – so we have SSL offloading for both v4 and v6 for these new load balancers. I’m excited about that. I’d like to see it go out the door.

Also working on a security audit like we did last year, and of course we’re also working on our technical backlog.

What I’d like to share with you there is that we’re currently running on Java 6. Java 6 came out in 2006. It was end of life in 2013, February 2013.

It’s something that we’ve got to move beyond. And that’s something that you won’t see but it’s something that we need to do to make sure that we don’t have security vulnerabilities, that we stay fairly sort of nimble with new software packages as they come out the door.

So any comments or questions?

John Curran: Microphones are open.

Kevin Blumberg: Kevin Blumberg, The Wire. Glad to see there’s lots of stuff going on. I had one question for you. I was sort of perusing through my emails looking at ARIN scheduled maintenance. You seem to send out notices on a Wednesday for work on a Saturday.

And I wanted to confirm: Is there anywhere which actually specifies what ARIN’s maintenance schedule is, both scheduled and unscheduled? And secondly to that, if you could increase the amount of days of notice to one week at least, it would be really appreciated.

Mark Kosters: Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough.

John Curran: Center mic.

Rob Seastrom: Rob Seastrom, Time Warner Cable, ARIN AC. About 75 days ago I sent in – maybe 85 days ago I sent in an ACSP request for supporting HSTS where possible.

And about 63 days ago I got a response that said, yeah, looks good, we’re going to look into it. We hope we can roll it out in the next 60 days.

And so I was wondering if you could give me an update on that.

Mark Kosters: We’ve looked into doing this. We need to deploy it. It’s actually fairly simple for us to do. We’ve got it. I’m looking at my ops guy back there. And Pete – so we’ll get that done.

Rob Seastrom: It’s a good thing.

Mark Kosters: I agree.

John Curran: Any other questions for Mark? Thank you, Mark.

(Applause.)

John Curran: Next up we have Val to give the Financial Services Report.

ARIN Reports: Financial Services

Val Winkelman: Good morning. I’m Val Winkelman with the Financial Services. I’m the director of that group.

I would like to talk about my staff. They are myself, and Tammy Rowe is the accounting supervisor, and below her are four other employees. We’ve got Tanya, Amy, Lindsay Norman, and Amaris Wang. Lindsay is our newest addition; only been there four weeks.

These are the people that send the invoices, apply the payments, take care of the RSAs. When you call the billing help desk, you’ll speak to one of these four people.

Tammy has been here since Sunday on the registration desk. So I hope you’ve had a chance to go by and talk to her. And she’s here, and the other four are holding down the fort while we’re here at the meeting.

Our financial audit for 2014 has been completed, and it’s going through the regular approval process that we have at ARIN. And we’re currently starting to work on the 990 filing, which is an IRS form for nonprofits.

Payment types. The checks that we receive, the number of checks is much lower than the credit cards, and credit cards have actually really increased this year.

But the dollar amounts from checks still is the highest. So it must be mostly maintenance payments coming in through the credit cards, and the wires are very minimal.

Invoicing structure. We sent out a lot of invoices for ASN and maintenance, as you can see, versus the revenue. And the v4 and v6 again is the lion’s share of the revenue of invoices we send.

Registration revenue by mix. Basically it’s fairly steady still through this year. A little slight increase in the maintenance and decrease in end users.

But steady as it goes. Any questions?

Martin Hannigan: Marty Hannigan, Akamai Technologies. When do you plan to accept ACH payments? Isn’t that why you get so many checks, because people don’t want to do wires?

Val Winkelman: We do receive ACH payments.

Martin Hannigan: Did you include that category in wires? Because I’m very surprised at the number of checks –

Val Winkelman: Yes. That’s why there’s an ACH. We definitely have a little more wires than ACH, but we do get about 20 or 25 total a month.

Martin Hannigan: Okay.

Val Winkelman: Okay. Thank you very much.

John Curran: Thank you.

(Applause.)

John Curran: Next up I’ll have Erin come up and give the Human Resources and Administration Report.

ARIN Reports: Human Resources and Administration

Erin Alligood: Good morning, everyone. I’m Erin Alligood, and I’m the Director of HR and Administration for ARIN. I’ve been with ARIN for almost two years, and this is my fourth meeting. So time flies by when you’re having fun.
And it flies by when you’re busy. I think I speak for all of my coworkers here at ARIN: We’ve been extremely busy over the last few months.
And I’m pleased to introduce my team who has worked very hard to support our HR and administrative efforts.

So first we have Denise Alston, who is our receptionist. Denise is the first person to greet you when you come into the ARIN office, and she does a wonderful job at distributing our mail, ordering our office supplies, and she keeps the front part of our office running. Most of you may already know Thérèse Colosi. She’s been with ARIN for over 13 years as our executive assistant. She supports our executive team along with our Board and our AC. Next we have Sarah Ba, who is our Administrative Coordinator. Sarah is actually here attending her first official ARIN meeting. Yay.

(Applause.)

She secures our employee travel and is our facilities coordinator. And both Sarah and Denise are new to our team, and they do an outstanding job for us.

So what have we been so busy with this year? Well, first we implemented a new performance review system. I talked about that a little bit in our Baltimore meeting. So we were using an online system that was in place for quite some time. So we were really ready for a change. Most employees and managers don’t like reviews. I think probably a lot of you can relate to that. But this system is a bit different in that it’s more of a conversation. We call it a performance discussion or in the HR field an “open review”. So this new approach was well received by both our managers and our employees, and we look forward to using it again later this year.

We also implemented a Roth 401(k) option. This makes our 401(k) plan more current as compared to other employers’ 401(k) plan. It allows the employee to contribute to the 401(k) post tax. When they withdraw these particular funds at retirement, they’re tax free, which is a nice benefit.

The trustees of our 401(k) plan also went through a bid process for potentially adding new 401(k) administrator vendors or compliance vendor. We’ve been using our same 401(k) vendor for quite some time. As a fiduciary responsibility, we should reevaluate this every few years as trustees of the plan. Just for your information, the trustees of the plan are myself, Nate Davis, and Val Winkelman. So at this time the trustees decided to keep our current 401(k) vendor, but we will be reevaluating this again next year.
And as you heard from Mark, we were definitely in recruitment mode this year. We had 15 slots to fill. So that kept us very busy onboarding those new hires and also recruiting, which leads me into my next slide on employee statistics.

So we are currently at 68 employees. Ten of those were new hires just in this year. I’d like to point out that almost half of those new hires were employee referrals. And this is a sign, from our perspective, that we work in a very healthy organization and have a very strong company culture. This demonstrates that our employees truly do value ARIN as an employer, and I think so much so that they’re recommending their colleagues to come and work at ARIN. So I think that this really is a great thing for ARIN. And I also want to thank those employees that made those referrals. So they definitely helped with the recruiting efforts on my end. I also think this reiterates why our employee retention remains strong at over 95 percent.

So this next slide represents a good snapshot of our employee demographics in terms of tenure. As you can see here, and I think this has been a trend over the last few meetings, that almost half of our staff have been with ARIN for six years or more. But similar to my Baltimore report, you can see that we have a very strong, healthy pipeline of new talent at 24, whereas my last report it was at 16, and obviously that increased with those new hires. So it’s nice to see that we have a balance of both tenured and new employees at ARIN.

So what will we be doing for the rest of 2015? So as Mark stated earlier, we do have some more open positions, specifically in engineering. So we have about seven to fill. So hopefully we’ll fill those within the next few months. Hopefully by the end of the summer, if sooner, if we can.

To help with these recruiting efforts and most importantly to maintain that strong employee retention, we’re going to be conducting a salary survey later this summer. And this will help us stay competitive in the DC metropolitan job market area and ensure that our employees are compensated both within the demographics in which we live and also in terms of their specific roles at ARIN.

So as you can imagine with these new hires, we are getting a little crammed at our current office space. So we’re looking at all of our options at this point. No decisions have been made, but we’re potentially going to secure additional office space and/or reconfigure our current office space. So we should probably have some more decisions in the next few months, and hopefully I’ll have more to report at our next meeting.

Regardless of what’s decided on our current facility, we will be doing some security upgrades to our current building. Probably just adding a panic button in terms of entering into the building, to upgrading our Tyco system we’ve had for a while, to make it a more safe and secure working environment for our employees. And thank you so much for your time, and I hope everybody’s enjoying their meeting.

John Curran: Any questions for Erin? No. Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

John Curran: For our final report before the break, I have Richard Jimmerson to come up and do the Registration Services Report.

ARIN Reports: Registration Services

Richard Jimmerson: Thank you, John. I’m Richard Jimmerson. I’m your acting director of Registration Services at ARIN. I’m going to give you the Registration Services department report.

First slide, we have a team of 10 very skilled, dedicated, and hardworking people inside the Registration Services team: Principal analyst, Cathy Clements. Senior resource analyst, Lisa Liedel. Principal technical analyst, Jon Worley. And resource analysts: Doreen Marraffa, Sue Dobert and Mike Pappano, Eddie Diego and Shawn Sullivan and Misuk Kwon and James Ricewick.

I’ve been working with this team for the last six weeks as the acting director of the department. I can assure you that they put in very hard work for you, they take the policies that you have put in place, and they’re very serious about implementing those on your behalf as the registration services staff at ARIN.

I’d like to give a round of applause for this team.

(Applause.)

We have some information I’d like to share with you guys, just real quickly, through the core functions of RSD. Of course review requests for the IPv4 address space, v6, ASN requests. The transfer requests. Do database records maintenance. We do customer support. We have an Ask ARIN box. We have a hostmaster email box. And we review lots of different types of traffic that come in there.

We also have a telephone help desk that’s open 60 hours per week. And we take all kinds of different calls from you on that help desk throughout the weeks, throughout the years.

Some support functions in RSD. We work very closely with the other departments inside the ARIN organization in the area of policy development, software development. We do requirements work and testing with those teams, with communications and the outreach, and also in the area of statistics and database analysis with the statistics and the other things that we report out to you as an organization.

Our current focus, where we’re sharply focused right now inside the registration services department, is, of course, on IPv4 depletion planning. We’re working hard on maintaining a two day SLA turnaround time for your requests.

It’s not always been possible for us over the last year. We’re working hard to bring that into alignment. We’ve been very close or inside the two day SLA over the past several weeks.
We’re preparing for the first waiting list request. There has not been an organization that has come to ARIN to request IPv4 address space and has qualified for a specific block size according to policy and not been satisfied up to this point in the history of the registry system inside ARIN.

We expect that to happen for the first time in the coming weeks. We will receive a request, and an organization will qualify for a prefix size. We will not have that size to allocate or assign out to that organization.

This will be a first. That organization will either elect to take a smaller prefix size that is available, or they will elect to go on the waiting list.

And we will certainly be announcing out to you when that does happen for the first time.

We’re also very focused on 8.3 and 8.4 transfers. That traffic has increased significantly over the last year. And we expect that to increase even more in a post depletion environment.

And, of course, we’re working very closely with other internal ARIN staff and the community on our work with enhancements to ARIN Online with new requirements and prioritization there as we move forward into the coming years.

John Curran: If you would go back one slide real quick. So I just want to point out to the community, that depletion planning, when we announce that someone qualified for space and we did not have it available and they were put on the waiting list, that will be the first.

But it’s the first of many to follow. Eventually all requests will effectively be requests to get put on the waiting list because there will be no remnants left.

And so if people are waiting for the press release that says ARIN is out, there’s probably never going to be one, because there will always be a remnant somewhere that’s sitting in the inventory.
This event, when we say ARIN doesn’t have enough resources to match the requests and someone has gone on the waiting list, is the closest you’ll see to a runout event.

So I just want people to understand because we’ve had this discussion. A lot of people do these pretty graphs that go down to zero, and the reality is they may never touch zero. But they will get to the point where effectively everyone goes to a waiting list.

Richard Jimmerson: Changing dynamics. IPv4 depletion is in a fourth phase of depletion. We have team review of all IPv4 requests. We’re being very careful to make sure that every v4 request that comes in is reviewed in the order that was received and responded to in that order.

And the reason why that is important is because in the coming days to the coming weeks, we will have enough IPv4 requests in the pipeline being reviewed that one organization is destined for a prefix size that they’ll get qualified and approved for and they will get the prefix and the other one will not.

And they’ll be faced with either going on the waiting list or selecting a smaller prefix size.

So we are very carefully making sure that we’re reviewing your requests in the order that they were received.

And it is taking some time to keep that in order. And it’s slowing things down a bit. But we, of course, are still working hard to stay inside of our SLA for you.

We have an increase in IPv4 request traffic, but less than anticipated. The large increase in request traffic for v4 really has to do with the fact that we’ve extended this allocation and assignment size down to a /24.

We’re seeing many requests from organizations that we hadn’t seen before coming in to request IPv4 address space. This is a new customer profile that was talked about earlier.

ISPs are directing their downstream customers to ARIN for IPv4 address space now where before they had actually had given it to themselves. Multi homing customers that they might have given a /24, they are now directing to ARIN because they know ARIN will assign a /24 to organizations.

So it’s very interesting, and we are spending more time and education on the telephone with them and in our email communications with them to get them acclimated to the ARIN organization and our processes to review the request, because some of them, quite frankly, have just never heard of ARIN before coming to request that /24.

There’s an expected workload increase in the Registration Services department at ARIN. We see that more legacy holders will become active in 8.3 transfers post depletion.

This is a very big deal for the organization. With 8.3 transfers, the recipient side of a transfer is pretty much the easiest part of the transfer. We’re doing a 24-month needs assessment for that organization.

The most work intensive part of an 8.3 transfer is the fact that many of them will include having to do an 8.2 transfer first, merger and acquisition transfer, to bring themselves in alignment.
And there’s an enormous amount of work in the chain of custody vetting; where we have one organization who became a registered organization in 1992 and their organization has changed several times over the year up to 2015, and that’s increasing our workload significantly.

Inventory. .24 of a /8 remaining. We have some other inventory you should know about. This was reported if you were at Leslie’s presentation on Sunday at the tutorial. We’ve got about 19 /16 equivalents held in quarantine right now. Most of what’s in that quarantine is organizations that become late on their payments for the registration services fees.

At a mark of about 127 days, we discontinue our services to those organizations. What we do is we remove the registration records from the database.

When we do that, we place those registration records in a quarantine. They stay in that quarantine for 60 days. After that 60 days, the organization reach a point of being past due with the registration fees. According to the Registration Services Agreement, we can revoke their resources.

And so that’s what that address space is.

Most of those organizations do come back in after we remove the registration records from the database, and they do find the invoices and all of the communications that we had sent them, and they do pay their fees. And those do get returned in the database for them.

We have some reserve space. We’ve got the /10 held aside for 4.10. We’ve got about 218 /24s remaining in the micro allocation pool. And we’ve got about eight /16 equivalents needing further research.

These are addresses that have been reclaimed over the years that we’ve taken back in, and we are in the process of doing a research project right now to see which ones of those that we returned back into the free pool.

So, for instance, a point of contact may have came to ARIN three years ago and said I am returning this /16 to the ARIN organization, and we reached out to them and we asked them for documentation from an officer inside the organization saying that it’s okay that this happened.

We did get a piece of paper, but we’re going to do some further research, and we’re going to make daggone sure that that organization does not need that address space before we place it back into the inventory that’s being worked right now.

John Curran: The bottom of the barrel is the most interesting taste.

(Laughter.)

John Curran: There’s things down there that get very colorful.

Richard Jimmerson: The other question on that item, I’ll leave it up on the screen.

Jason Schiller: Jason Schiller, Google. Would it be helpful if some of the providers here in this room offered to route some of that space for you, to blackhole it, to make sure that if something is going to break, we could break it sooner for you?

Richard Jimmerson: It could be.

John Curran: Let’s think about it.

Jason Schiller: If that would help you, I’m sure we could do it for you as well as other people could.

Richard Jimmerson: These are the prefix sizes we have left. The people in the community who could qualify for a /11 are probably in this room right now. Two of you submit a request today: One of you will get it; one of you won’t.

Same thing for a /12 after the /11 is gone and so on and so forth.

Unidentified: Cash donations accepted, right?

Richard Jimmerson: No cash donations accepted. I won’t even joke about it, sir.

The position that we’re in right now is that in the coming weeks, at the most, to the coming months, on the short side of months, we will be at or below the /16 level. We’ll have nothing larger than a /16 to issue to your organizations.

Once we hit the /16 level, it is a fast burn to the /24s. Once we only have the /24s left, those will go pretty quickly. We’re receiving a lot of request traffic for /24s inside the organization right now. It is very likely, by the time we meet again in October, ARIN will have no inventory other than the /10 that we have set aside for IPv6 transition.

It’s happening now. It’s finally happening.

IPv4 RSA coverage. Someone asked us to actually provide this slide.

Here’s current RSA coverage for all the /24s in our database.

Standard RSA, 43 percent of the /24s in our database are covered by that RSA.

LRSA, 8.9 percent of everything in our database in /24s is covered by an LRSA.

And the rest is not covered by an RSA at all, and it’s largely what’s called a legacy resource space inside our policy discussions over the years.

Total organizations served by ARIN. It’s important to know that we’ve got just around 5,000 ISP subscribers or members of the ARIN organization.

We have about 15,000 organizations in addition to that who pay fees to the ARIN organization each year but are not considered members. There are approximately 20,000 organizations who pay fees to the ARIN organization each year and that we service on an ongoing basis.

And in addition to those, we have nearly 17,000 organizations who hold legacy resources in the ARIN database that we also service on an ongoing basis that simply do not pay fees to the organization.

So we are servicing thousands of organizations per year.

John Curran: One more note. Note that as we get to runout, many of the organizations that have legacy resources are transferring them in the process of getting them to someone who needs them, which is why that piece of the wedge is dropping over time, because when it gets transferred, it ends up being one or the other categories.

Richard Jimmerson: IPv6 address space issued, you’re always interested in this. Note that it’s fallen down since 2011. There were a lot of things that happened in 2011.

We got our last blocks from the IANA. People were very interested in v6 that year. We had World IPv6 Day and lots of other outreach events. That probably caused the spike in 2011. But you can see it’s fallen a bit over the years. We expect to see that turn back around here again soon.

Paul Andersen: Actual allocations or –

Richard Jimmerson: These are IPv6 initial allocations ISPs and IPv6 assignments issued to organizations regardless of size.

If you’re interested in seeing another view – Leslie used this slide in the tutorial on Sunday. For those who didn’t see it, I think it’s a interesting slide. Dark blue: IPv4 only members. Light blue: Organizations who have v4 and v6 who are members.

That is climbing. And soon we’re going to have more organizations who have both than only have one.

Transfers. We’ve only got one more slide after this one. I want to spend a minute on the transfers.

Of course we do inter-RIR transfers between the ARIN region and the APNIC region right now. We have completed 63 of those to date. Transfers from the ARIN to the RIPE region and vice versa will begin very soon. The policy has been passed in the RIPE region, and we’ll begin those once they begin the implementation on their side.

Last month we approved 65 transfers at ARIN, if you consider all types. That is the most that we have approved in a month with transfers in the history of the ARIN organization. The number of transfers we are receiving are going up.

Future for transfers. RIPE region experienced a large sustained spike in transfer request traffic following depletion. We expect the same will happen in the ARIN region.

Just one more thing about transfers. Each year – or every two years the ARIN organization has an auditor come in and audit RSD practices and procedures. We’ve done that twice. We do it on odd years. 2015 is a year that we have the auditors coming in again.

They’re going to audit the Registration Services department practices and procedures. We have specifically asked the auditors this year when they come in to pay close attention to what we do with transfers.

They’re going to take a detailed look into our transfer practices and procedures this year. So wanted you to know about that.

My last content slide, telephone help desk. We staff this from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. five days a week. We get about 750 telephone calls each month. And the most common topics that we get on the telephone are point of contact validation as described in the policy experience report this week, of course, request status, ARIN Online use, and contact updates.

With that, I’d like to thank you and take any questions that you have.

John Curran: Center mic.

Lee Howard: Lee Howard. So I can imagine – John, you said that when the first organizations qualified, have been approved for an allocation but there isn’t one, that they’ll be put on the wait list and ARIN will make a big to do about that.

I can imagine the organization declining the offer to be put on a waiting list because they have a need for addresses that ARIN can’t meet, and they’re going to take that request and flip it over to the transfer market and say, well, let me go get addresses there.

They may, in fact, say never mind, let’s start over, get me preapproved for a two year allocation rather than three months you approved me for.

I would hope that ARIN would still let us know when that happens.

John Curran: I think that already had.

Lee Howard: Really?

John Curran: Yeah. I believe organizations have already looked at the pool and said: That doesn’t meet my size requirements, thank you.

Lee Howard: I was also going to say that I think that from very large organizations I know of at least one, I think two, that are no longer going to ARIN because they’re going to the transfer market and no longer qualify for three month allocations. That’s kind of interesting.

John Curran: I’m telling you, it has happened. Congratulations.

Lee Howard: Okay. So ARIN’s out. Good.

John Curran: We’re approaching – depending on your definition of “out,” we’re somewhere in that zone.

Lee Howard: I would also like to ask that as each of at least the /11, as we work our way down from /11, /12, /14 – I guess when we break up the /12, we’ll get some more /13s – but do a tweet or let us know when the largest – the next bit, not – all the way down to /24s is probably fine.

But I do think that we probably will get down to the last /24s fairly quickly, maybe not in a straight line that I’ve been showing as one of the people who shows those lines as going to zero, maybe not on a straight line, but since you are getting so many more end users coming in asking for /24s. So there will still be the “ARIN is out” party.

John Curran: If you ignore the /10 for transition, “ARIN is out” becomes an interesting event because you still have things that are coming back in pretty routinely for lack of payment. And those
come in.

We also have – the IANA for some reason has a lot of space it’s giving back to us after we gave back to them. And that’s part of global policy, and that will be coming back.

So if you actually ask about the long tail, it’s zero, may not happen as of a clear event. If it does happen, it may be immediately followed by more space back in the queue. Multiple times.

Lee Howard: So I need an event that is “ARIN is out.” I don’t care what the definition is. I need an event that can hit the press that says that.

John Curran: The most important one you’re going to see is someone saying: ARIN didn’t have enough resources for us and I’m on the waiting list. And we will do a major announcement, press release, the whole thing.

As Richard said, yes, I’m glad it hasn’t happened this week, but it’s weeks away at best.

Lee Howard: And not many. Thanks.

Richard Jimmerson: Thank you. Center mic.

Sandy Murphy: Sandy Murphy, Parsons. My thanks to whomever it was that requested the slide about the legacy space, because it’s something I’ve always been interested in.
Looking at the two figures that the last time this was presented was in October of 2012 and now, the legacy resource picture has not really changed much and it’s not –

John Curran: Talking about in space covered or in organizations?

Sandy Murphy: Space covered, number of organizations, and people who signed LRSAs.

John Curran: Recognize, again, you won’t necessarily see an LRSA signature, because when the party is doing a transfer, if there’s nothing left, there’s no reason for them to have a LRSA, and we can accommodate that.

There’s no new legacy resources being minted, and transfers end up moving them to the other category. So it will deplete as the transfer market takes up.

Sandy Murphy: That was one thing I wanted to ask about. You and I may need to consult about the figures because in October of 2012 you reported 15,559 – what do you call this? – organizations, I think. Yes. Total organizations served by ARIN. And now there’s 16,890 legacy. I didn’t think there was such a thing as minting new legacy, as you said. So there’s some statistic –

John Curran: Send me that and I’ll take a look at it. There is a situation that can occur where organizations are – our count of organizations becomes more accurate as we learn more about what’s happened to the legacy space over time. But that should be tens, not hundreds.

Send me the accounts, please, and I’ll look.

Sandy Murphy: But just in general, it was 50 percent; now it’s being quoted as 45 percent. That’s a huge amount of the address space in the North American region that isn’t under a regular agreement and isn’t subject to some of the services that ARIN provides.

There doesn’t seem to be a huge uptake in joining up. This transfer market is the only hope we have that the address space is going to become –

John Curran: The transfer market is the only hope we have. That’s correct. If you think about it, the Board opted to provide services to legacy holders, and the vast majority of services they need are provided for free without an agreement.

So there’s not a lot of motivation unless they want to participate and join in.

However, it was recognized that transfers would happen, and as people say – you heard the transfer panel yesterday – they’re all seeing what they anticipate to be a future growth. We just noted we’re going to get to the end.

So the engine is ready and running. It’s just a question of what happens as all these addresses get somewhere.

The reason it’s such a high percentage, of course, is because many, many addresses were issued classful and that means that there’s a lot of organizations – the legacy panel identified the other day that there are organizations that did actually – legacy organizations that have done transfers, and then what they’ve done is they put the rest of their transfers on hold waiting to see what the market will do.

So there’s a pending demand we need to see.

Richard Jimmerson: We have a question from jabber.

Kevin Blumberg: Chris Spears, OARnet: Do you know how many legacy resource holders are also ISP or nonmember customers covered by RSA; that is, how many legacy ORGs are really in the fold already?

John Curran: The count – go back, Richard, on your slides. Okay. That’s organizations. So that one. That’s the count by /24s. Go forward. That’s the count by organizations but not RSAs.

Neither of those give me what I want.

If you go back one, we’ll get it by /24s. That’s the coverage by number of /24s. But in terms of agreements, it’s approximately 500 agreements. It isn’t a very large number.

So the stats on membership actually are on the website. It’s about 500 of our organizations compared to 5,000 ARIN members.

Sandy Murphy: And if the October report and the stats that are presently on the website are comparable – not clear – it’s gone up by two in two years.

John Curran: Number of RSAs, legacy RSAs?

Richard Jimmerson: We just recently signed two legacy RSAs.

John Curran: Yeah, you’re not going to see very many because, as I said, that when they come in the transfer market, they often transfer the entire block and don’t leave one.

Richard Jimmerson: Right. And that Legacy Registration Services Agreement is no longer active because they’ve transferred the resources to someone who signs a regular Registration Services Agreement. So it’s going to fluctuate like that over the years.

Sandy Murphy: It just shows that there’s not much of a market for the LRSA.

John Curran: Next, Owen.

Owen DeLong: Owen DeLong, ARIN AC. I think the question you answered is not the question I understood Chris to be asking, which was to what extent are there organizations that have both a legacy relationship with ARIN and a nonlegacy relationship with ARIN for the same organization even though they have different ORG IDs.

Richard Jimmerson: We can find that data.

John Curran: That we’ll need to find out. But thank you. We’ll presume that’s the question, and we’ll research that.

Richard Jimmerson: The case certainly exists, and we can find it.

Owen DeLong: As to one of the reasons that there are not a lot of new adopters of the LRSA may be that the recent fee structure rather dramatically changed what it cost to sign one.

John Curran: Next, Sandra.

Sandy Murphy: Sandy Murphy, Parsons. I had another question and comment concerning transfers. With the hat on of being a member of the SIDR working group in the IETF, the transfer process is something that is not defined with sufficient detail to decide what the RPKI impact would be.

And so if people here are beginning to define within ARIN what the transfer process would be, the SIDR working group would be really very interested in hearing the details.

John Curran: As you know, I’ve been a huge advocate for documenting how transfers would work on SIDR. I do know that there’s still work being done in the engineering.

Note: There’s some differences in a possible models for how to represent transfers in RPKI. It depends on where you want to have the – what do you want to have in the manifest and where you want the swing points to occur.

So the RIRs are working on that, but that’s joint. It’s not something ARIN can advance on its own.

Sandy Murphy: Just knowing the process without the deciding how to represent it in RPKI would be of significant benefit.

John Curran: Could you ask in terms of process like the administrative steps they’re going through?

Sandy Murphy: Essentially.

John Curran: We have some of that, but let me see if we have better documentation of that.

Each RIR documents their process. I don’t think there’s one process. But you’re wondering about ARIN’s. I can send you ARIN’s transfer process.

Richard – we have – we actually have training that walks people through the process. But, again, each RIR is going to have its own permutation.

Richard Jimmerson: Just real quick. The Registration Services staff would be very unhappy if I walked away from the podium before doing this.

I’m the acting Registration Services director right now. As many of you heard earlier this week or in an announcement a few months ago, Leslie Nobile moved on to a new position inside the organization. But before doing so, she served more than 15 years as ARIN’s Registration Services director.

Let’s give her a round of applause. Thank you.

(Applause.)

John Curran: Well deserved.

Okay. With that, we are now going to go to break. We are running a little late. So we’ll let people have until 11:15. So refreshment break. Everyone, coffee outside.

If you’re interested in services and you want to talk to other people interested in services, come up here, gather near the front and talk to each other.

Again, we’ll resume at 11:15.

(Break.)

John Curran: We’ll resume our meeting. We have a couple of reports. We have the ARIN Advisory Council Report, the ARIN Financial Report, the Board of Trustees Report, an IRR Consultation item, and then Open Microphone.

So starting right off, I have Dan Alexander – yes, I do – to do the ARIN Advisory Council Report.

ARIN Advisory Council Report

Dan Alexander: Hello all. Welcome back. By now hopefully you’ve all had at least one or a couple of conversations with some of these people pictured here.

These AC members are here to help the Policy Development Process, and hopefully you’ve given them all sorts of feedback and opinions to consider, because our main role is to facilitate the PDP, and we have a couple proposals that we’ve discussed this week.

And our day has just started, because after this meeting is over, we all have to get together and review everything that was discussed the last few weeks or last few days and determine the next steps for each of them.

There were 22 proposals submitted last year. Seven were adopted. One’s currently pending adoption. Nine were abandoned, and there’s currently four recommended drafts with one draft and one new submission this year, which those were the six that we discussed over the last few days.

Actually, looking through the emails, one good outcome of a lot of these discussions is that one new proposal so far in 2015 is now about four. There were several proposals just submitted this morning.

So the workload has increased. It’s interesting being only in this Chair position for a few months now. John Sweeting gets a tip of the hat for – when you look at the amount of work that he helped the AC move through over the last couple of years, I’m probably one of the few people who can truly appreciate everything he went through. He’s not in the room. He had to leave, but –

John Curran: We can applaud John.

Dan Alexander: He gets a tip of the hat.

(Applause.)

Dan Alexander: In addition to the Policy Development, we also help out with the Fellowship Programs. I wanted to say thank you to those Fellows who are here.

It’s nice to have you participating, and hopefully the AC members were here to help you out and answer any questions and made it a really good meeting.

The AC helps out with the Outreach Program which Susan mentioned earlier. We don’t participate in every outreach event, but we’re basically at their disposal when they need AC members to help with the education or to participate in the different events.

We participated in one. I think it was in February. Heather Schiller helped out in Orlando. And we’ve got five more currently scheduled.

And we do other work with nomination committees, and we’re basically at the disposal of the Board for whatever work they need us for.

And I just wanted to say, for all that work, thank you to those AC members. It’s definitely a lot of work. And since they are all volunteers, it is appreciated.

And thank you to all of the members for letting us serve. And I’d be happy to answer any questions.

(Applause.)

John Curran: No questions.

Okay. Next up we have Paul Andersen to give the ARIN Financial Report.

ARIN Financial Report

Paul Andersen: I’ll try and keep it quick. Just waiting. I know I’m one of the last people between you and flights.

So usually I go through a lot of the budget and items and all that on this presentation. For those that were looking forward to it, I’m not going to do it except just to give you a quick snapshot of how we ended last year.

As you can see, we came up, from an operating perspective, just shy of a million. And then when we add the investments, it was just a little bit over two million.

If you’d like to jump into any of the numbers, the full report is available on the ARIN website right now circulating. So feel free to go poke up on that and drop if you have any questions.

I thought as a bit of a change we’d jump into a few of the things that we don’t always get into.

For instance, it’s been brought up several times we’re in a bit of a engineering surge. This was something that Board and staff have worked really hard on last quarter to put together.

I thought Mark did a great job trying to describe what it looks like from a technical level and to give you an idea that’s what it’s going to be costing to the organization. It’s a fairly significant cost on an annual basis.

The majority is adding salaries. As many of you know, engineer is not the most cheapest in the land. And we hire very good people.

So that, and then a lot of other related expenses such as travel. Erin mentioned we have to build out some more office space. And of course equipment and such for them. That’s one of the things I wanted to highlight.

What that means, what we’ve been trying to do for a few years I think we’re going to finally accomplish in that we will be actually drawing down from the reserves this year.

We are currently projecting a $1.2 million draw on the reserves. We made this decision – we obviously could have raised fees to compensate, but we heard the message that, because this is a surge, because we will hopefully – it will be for a few years and then it will drop down a little bit, but this would be a very good use of the reserve fund as opposed to just seeing that reserve grow year over year.

So thank you to the members who supported that.

If you want to get into the full budget, it’s online: ARIN, About Us, Corporate Documents, and Budget.

I thought I would highlight, which we’ve not highlighted in a while, what we do actually have in those reserves.

So we keep three different reserve funds at ARIN. One is a legal defense reserve, which is set aside in case ARIN was subject to a major legal action that could – of a certain size that could draw down – sorry, was there a question? No. We keep that at approximately two million.

An operating reserve, which is there for just short term, to fund our short term operations.

Those two funds are mostly invested in fixed assets, very short term CDs or other items of a high degree liquidity. And, of course, the bulk is in a longer term reserve fund.

What does it actually break down to a bit? As you can see in the kind of top to bottom, the last two items are where you’ll see the two first reserves. And then we have a majority of assets that are mixed, mostly in funds. And all those funds are managed through our investment manager, bonds and other alternative investments.

That kind of just gives you a breakdown of what the actual percentages of – the breakdown of what we invest.

The left is what we actually had as of the end of December 31st, and the right is kind of what our target is that we ask our investment manager to keep it in.

The reason there’s obviously variance is because the market moves quite consistently and we don’t buy and sell every time it goes out. We look on generally a quarterly basis, a process that involves our investment manager working with senior staff and then senior staff working with the FinCom to recommend rebalancing as appropriate.

To give you an idea, returns are still quite strong. We have continued to see good growth in the reserves. And I also asked if Jim Meek, who is our investment manager with Morgan Stanley – if he had any words he would like to impart on you. I asked for a sentence or two. Got a little longer. But what the heck.

But just to give you an idea that he is quite happy with the performance over the last quarter; that we are still seeing a market; and that we are, in general, hitting our performance targets.

And with that, I’d take any questions.

Former treasurers first.

Lee Howard: Lee Howard. First question, when was the last time you had a question at the treasurer’s report?

Paul Andersen: More regularly than you think, but I’m glad to have them.

Lee Howard: I applaud you for showing a deficit budget. I tried for years to run a deficit. I was never actually able to make it. What’s your level of confidence in able to actually achieving a deficit for 2015?

Paul Andersen: I’m going to – I’ll say – I’ve already seen the POs of many of the equipment, and we’ve seen from the last slide that Mark has already hired the staff. And I’m assuming they’re expecting to get paid. So quite high.

John Curran: If directed to spend, I shall spend.

(Laughter.)

And I have been so directed.

Paul Andersen: Quite seriously, I know that we’ve had previous problems where we’ve said we were going to draw and did not.

And I think that was where we – those I think fears where we were trying to put the – we would have the budget either quite – from an operating perspective either quite even or a little bit of a deficit, but we’ve always traditionally significantly underestimated what we would get from an investment term. We’ve always been quite cautious.

But over this time is so great because we’re not just talking tightening the budget, we’re talking a significant addition of staff.

Lee Howard: Not $200,000, it’s 1.2 million.

I haven’t looked at the budget in detail because it didn’t occur to me to do it before you were talking.

I remember back in the day there was always a set aside for contingency expenses, contingency reserves, and those frequently ended up not being spent. Sometimes they were just budget items to be there in case they were needed.

And that was – because those were often not spent, you therefore – they were included as expenses but didn’t actually occur, and therefore the projected deficit budget wasn’t a deficit.

Are there still line items like that and would that – maybe John’s contingency fund.

Paul Andersen: I see staff. I brought some data, but it’s not on this one. I believe the direction we’ve been given is to slowly lower and remove that contingency, because I think it was throwing off budgeting.

I wouldn’t want to say absolutely it’s gone, because they’re not in front of me, but the direction we’ve given is to remove that contingency from the budget.

John Curran: We are at the point – in the past we had – for several years we came in 12, 15, 8 percent below budget. We’re getting much more precise in terms of budgeting and we’re coming in 1, 2 percent in either direction.

So the actual planned budget we’re getting much closer at, and that means we’re actually lowering the contingencies we have within the budget as well.

Now, when we actually provide an estimate, it’s a pretty good estimate, which means when they say let’s do additional investment, take down the backlog, we can do that and give a very good prediction of what that means.

Paul Andersen: We’re generally budgeting based on looking at what our projected actuals are as opposed to budget to budget, which has helped that out as well.

John Curran: The place where we still end up putting on the reserves we can’t anticipate is that we are generally doing budgeting only to member receipts. And so the reserves, whatever we do, they keep growing on their own. So even –

Lee Howard: Because Jim’s too good at his job.

John Curran: That’s a good thing.

Lee Howard: Probably a related note, have you budgeted for office expansion, not knowing what you’re going to do about it yet?

Paul Andersen: Office expansion related to the surge or potential relook at the office itself, I’ll let –

John Curran: We have a small number in that would cover planning efforts. But it is quite possible that, depending on the direction we take, some of the numbers that come back, if we reconfigure space and get some adjacent in the same building, we could be talking hundreds of thousands.

If we move, we end up with a lease change and this lease contingencies. Those will flow in when we have a recommendation into future budgets.

Paul Andersen: To answer your question, no, with the exception of the engineering surge, but the process would be as outlined.

Lee Howard: Good answers.

Paul Andersen: Two questions. This is a record.

Heather Schiller: Heather Schiller, Google Fiber. Could you go to the slide with the reserves, legal reserves – that one.

Where is the RIR Stability reserve?

John Curran: That RIR Stability Fund doesn’t actually get moved out of our reserves. We pledge, and the Board directed that we pledge, $250,000. And I’m in the process of formalizing that, sending a letter to the NRO. We pledge to have those funds available.

Now, since we are not going to use them until they’re needed, they’re definitely in a reserve. We probably wouldn’t identify them as the legal defense reserve. So we are either going to say $250,000 of the operating reserve or $250,000 of the long term reserve is earmarked for the RIR stability fund. But we don’t actually move funds. We all maintain them in our own accounts.

Paul Andersen: To add to that, first of all, these funds are looked on an annual basis, and that fund has created itself since our last budgeting process.

I think to answer the question is I don’t think we create a separate functional account for it because of the amount is – while significant, probably doesn’t warrant that. But we might adjust the operating reserve funds because we want a liquid amount.

Heather Schiller: From the minutes, it sounded like a separate reserve would be created. But maybe it’s just how I read the minutes.

Paul Andersen: I think it was more we were earmarking funds. But I think from pure administration we would keep in the operating reserve fund.

Heather Schiller: My other broader question about the RIR stability, was anyone going to mention it or discuss it here, and sort of –

Paul Andersen: You’re one presentation ahead of yourself.

Heather Schiller: Okay. Well, maybe my question –

Paul Andersen: I know that because I’m giving the next presentation.

Heather Schiller: Okay, then I’ll wait until your presentation.

Paul Andersen: If it’s not finance related and you’d like to talk, probably best to clear those out.

Martin.

Martin Hannigan: Since you pledged it, it’s a liability, right? I mean, it’s not in the reserve. It’s a real liability, right?

John Curran: It’s actually – it’s monies that are committed. It is not a liability, because it isn’t incurred until it’s needed.

Martin Hannigan: Not to be pedantic, but you pledged cash from the balance sheets of the NRO. I mean, in a letter. I mean, you officially committed to the funds, right?

John Curran: Right. So the funds are available. They’re sitting in the reserve. They don’t actually leave our accounts until they’re drawn.

Martin Hannigan: I understand that.

John Curran: In terms of balance, they would show up in this line rather than the operating expenses.

Martin Hannigan: They’re part of the deficit as well I would assume, right?

John Curran: They’re part of the deficit. But we’d have to have the accounting people put it in the right column, yes.

Martin Hannigan: Thank you.

Kevin Blumberg: Kevin Blumberg, The Wire, ARIN AC. Love the reporting you guys are doing. Really appreciate it.

Paul Andersen: Want to spice it up. Been doing the same slides for a while.

Kevin Blumberg: Two quick things. The first: Is a $1.2 million deficit in a surge enough? Are we looking at doing that again next year? Are we looking at bumping it up but from a – you know, percentage of what the reserve is, it’s actually not a huge percentage and there’s a huge backlog. So just a comment on that.

We started complaining about the reserve politely when it was at $25 million. Or even less than that. So just to mention that. And, secondly, there’s been a number of times over the past couple of days where there have been comments about the amount of work that is going to go into the verification of resources and the massive increase in – potentially in some cases using outside resources to be able to go out and verify entities.

Have you sort of factored in the additional costs, especially once the transfer market really kicks in?

Paul Andersen: We’re only dealing with this fiscal from a budgeting perspective. While we expect some degree of ramp up on that, from a long term perspective, I think, to answer your question, that is one of the unknowns and one of the reasons we’ve always stated, while we’ve heard the criticisms on the reserve balance and we’ve shared it as a Board, is that we were always hoping to get past this runout phase so we start to see what the next phase of ARIN looked like.

As you stated, we could see significant impacts on staffing resources to deal with if we continue to get the same number of requests but now we have this other extra workload because we have to do verification, it could change both the composition and the amount of workload.

John Curran: The two data points that we don’t have is first recognize we brought in all this engineering talent and we’re doing work, and you can see some of the progress. You heard some of the people talking about the things that have been getting done already.

Mark tells me all the wonderful – Mark and Nate tell me all the wonderful things we’re going to get done, but I actually want to see the run rate before I know whether it’s necessary to sustain the surge for more years.

So the actual run rate of completion of requests in the backlog and how we do that over the year is a key indicator we’re going to look at in August and September when bringing the budget to the Board for the coming year.

On the RSD side, we’re kind of the same way. As Richard said, we’re a couple of weeks away from a pretty major event, and then it’s going to be transfers and a lot more chain of custody work. I’d like to see a few months of run rate of that in order to predict what 2016 looks like.

So the answer is we have a budget for now we’re comfortable with. We believe we’ll be able to operate in it. But depending on what happens, when we do the runout and see what’s going forward, we may easily be in a circumstance where we look at RSD and say because all the requests involve chain of custody we need more staff. But we don’t have a run rate to extrapolate from.

Kevin Blumberg: I guess what I’m saying is, from everything that I’m hearing, we’re going to be in a surge potential in the middle of this year, very potentially. You look at the number of remaining blocks, and you could suddenly see a massive increase this year. So do you have for this year a surge?

John Curran: If the service level degrades on turning around requests, I will go to the Board and seek more resources regardless of what the budget says.

Kevin Blumberg: Thank you.

Martin Hannigan: Marty Hannigan, Akamai. Since we’re talking about treasury, I wanted to just bring this up at this point. We talked about ACH and if we do – if we don’t earlier. My accounting
department thanks you because you do.

But your Web page, your payments Web page, says you do not. And that may be why you have such a low uptake on ACH.

I want to point out that it makes things go much faster and it’s much cheaper to do ACH.

You also have ACH categorized under wire transfer, and ACH is not a wire transfer. Wire transfers cost money and take more time.

Paul Andersen: And reduces fraud, which is also very important.

John Curran: We will get that updated on the Web page and then –

Paul Andersen: I can see the note being written down. It says “ACH” with exclamation marks.

Any other questions before we close the microphone?

Before I do that, I’d like to say as always this is always fun to do because it’s made so easy by the fact that all the hard work is done by Val Winkelman, Nate Davis, and John. Thank you to those three that really do a great job making my life super easy. So thank you.

However, I’m not going to sit down, and I’ll just do a dance as we switch, because unfortunately Vint cannot be here today as he had to travel out on some business. So I will be giving the Board of Directors Report in just mere moments.

I’ll start by saying as we wait for the slides that the Board has thanked over the last few months – I just think it’s good to say that we recognize and congratulate both Oscar and Alan on their appointments to both LACNIC and AFRINIC.

So probably just a moment to recognize and wish them the best of luck on behalf of their communities.

(Applause.)

ARIN Board of Trustees Report

Paul Andersen: Since we last saw you at ARIN 34, we have been busy. A lot of it is more some of the administration stuff and some of the stuff that we do see year to year.

As we point out, we’ve had some good discussions on what we’re going to be looking in terms of reserves, and staff have started to do some research in terms of that.

We did do the engineering surge which is part of the budget. We have done our annual review of the CEO performance but also done a contract renewal for two years.

So we’re very happy that John will be staying with us. So thank you to John for that.

We’ve done – the one thing that we have changed that you might want to look at is that we have started to – after feedback from many members is to change our minutes. So we’ve tried to add more details.

More importantly, which I think is quite useful, is, while not all, the majority of the documents that are given to us as part of the briefing are there in the online version. So you can click and actually see the background documents.

So we’d love to hear feedback if that’s useful.

(Applause.)

Paul Andersen: I think that’s positive feedback. It’s very new for us. We’d love to hear the feedback down the road if you find that information useful.

We’ve appointed, of course, our ASO representative again for the year. We recreated all the committees.

We are looking at ways we can increase both address gaps in both skill and diversity. We looked at the Board and the AC. One of the nuggets went out earlier that we are looking to see if we can tweak the Fellowship Program to build more capacity by allowing people to come back, because sometimes one fellowship meeting may not be enough to get someone engaged.

We appointed the NRO EC Observer. We modified the AC travel policy, which we now have two AC members covering the meetings, and we’re going to be watching that at an annual basis.

We’ve started the 990 filing process which will be coming up soon, and we accepted our audit which was determined to be clean.

The Fellowship Report has come out, the fee consultation we discussed earlier, and also the Services Working Group.

Number policy action has been only quite quiet, just the one policy. And as mentioned earlier, we discussed and have approved participation in a Joint RIR Stability Fund. And there was this thing, we discussed it a little bit, IANA stewardship. It was a small topic, took no time whatsoever.

And with that, discuss.

Heather, I invite you first for your question. Better hurry. Owen is trying to beat you.

Heather Schiller: Go back one slide, because it was there. So my question was about the Joint RIR Stability Fund. The overall question is can someone talk more about exactly what that is. And, more specifically, the Board minutes indicated that kind of money had been – what was the word you used? It wasn’t promised. It was – pledged. Pledged.

But the details of like how anyone was to get the money sort of hadn’t been hashed out, and that seemed kind of funny to me.

John Curran: We will get more information out. It’s an NRO EC project. We have been working with Boards off and on since about November, the various RIRs, to see if this is something of interest.
And we wanted to make sure it was of interest and that RIRs would actually commit to supporting it before we actually could say we’re announcing it.

Well, RIPE, I know, made a commitment to it. ARIN just made a commitment. I haven’t told the NRO EC. Axel, we made a commitment. So I just told the NRO EC.

So now that we know there’s a couple of RIRs involved, we’ll produce some material.

The basic thought is that the RIRs would all – each who want to get involved would pledge a certain amount of funds to have readily available. If an RIR suffered an adverse event, an event they couldn’t recover from, and it was something that could be assisted with financial resources or personnel resources, that this would be ready to be drawn down.

Because we all have a interest in having one complete registry. We don’t want to have a fifth of it fall off all of a sudden.

It’s a modest amount. It would only be for stability. Meaning if an RIR was really in a situation that was adverse and permanent, they would need to develop a plan to solve that. We couldn’t solve it, but we could keep them running or help them over through an event for enough time for them to do the planning and figure that out.

We have had cases where we want to be able to know, and it could be adverse judgment. It could be a case of an organization that ends up with a bad financial event. We wanted to make sure that was there.

ARIN has certainly got the reserves necessary. RIPE has already committed. I don’t know about the other RIRs. But if we have – it might only be a million or two million total pledged standing by.
It would provide something that we can tell the rest of the world it’s not just each RIR on its own; we have stability that would also help if an adverse event happened.

So we’ve got to wrap this all up, give it to our communication team and get it out there. But we wanted to make sure there was enough support by the Boards before we did that.

Heather Schiller: I think my concern was more like it sounded – and it may even sound more so now – like the amount is kind of arbitrary or nominal, but without knowing what was – I was sort of looking to say, like, if you didn’t have information about what would be needed, how did you come to the decision about how much you needed to set aside.

John Curran: If you look at the run rate of an RIR, a million dollars US total available would allow an RIR that’s somehow – let’s say an RIR suffered a gross theft, a bank disappeared and its funds happened to be there or whatever. A million dollars would allow an RIR 30 to 60 days of paying expenses so it could build its recovery plan.

So we were aiming for that. However, RIPE committed funds beyond that on their first commitment. So we’ll probably end up between a million and two, depending on what the pledged amounts are.

Paul Andersen: The reason I mentioned it was from the short term fund is that we do see this as it would be a catastrophic event that would need immediate attention. I think if – the more longer term plan we might have to see ourselves funding higher as that RIR got back on the ground.

Hopefully a “never going to happen” event, obviously.

Owen DeLong: Owen DeLong, ARIN AC. I want to applaud the Board for the expanded minutes and additional materials being made available. That’s very useful, and I encourage them to continue to do so. More openness, good.

Paul Andersen: I agree.

Owen DeLong: Second. On the stability fund, is there any sort of agreement that the other RIRs maintain reasonable contingency funds before they invade this fund?

I know ARIN is very responsible in that way. I don’t know what the policies in the other RIRs’ governing documents are.

John Curran: Right. One way to handle this – Paul, can I interrupt your presentation to give a presentation on the Stability Fund?

Paul Andersen: I’ll yield.

John Curran: This requires that I mail someone that. So, Einar, are you ready? So it’s presentation. It’s referenced in the draft Board minutes, but they don’t get put in until it’s final.

So just give me a moment, and I will –

Paul Andersen: Lee, did you want to ask your question? Because if it’s unrelated, we’ll come back to it. We’ll keep things moving.

Lee Howard: Thank you, because I didn’t want to ask about that. I want to ask a completely different question.

While we’ve been sitting here, I’ve been going back and reviewing the minutes from the meeting this year. They’re great. I love to see the additional level of detail. I love to see the items posted.

I note seeing in at least one meeting notes like “one Board member did not return from break” and one Board member said “I have some work to do; I’m going to be distracted for a little while now.”

I notice we are missing some Board members, and some of the Board members who have been sitting at the table have look distracted.

How is our level of engagement of our Board?

John Curran: Are you asking the Board or asking me?

Lee Howard: I think I better ask the Chair.

Paul Andersen: Unfortunately the Chair is not here. Probably not helping the argument, is it?

Lee Howard: Yes. So, I’m sorry, Mr. Vice Chair. I encourage John to answer, too, but I think –

Paul Andersen: I think to a certain degree, yes, I know that Board members do have to step out from time to time, as I’m sure many here –

Lee Howard: You’re volunteers.

Paul Andersen: You’ve volunteers and occasionally things do call. When you have all day meetings, you have to step out. And we like to make sure those are noted.

I really think it’s actually a good thing that we detail that as opposed to just discussion occurring and you not knowing who was there and potentially weighing in.

So from the terms of Board meeting, I think we have high engagement from our Board meetings – sorry, Board members while they’re at the meeting.

John Curran: I love my Board. My Board members are wonderful.

If you actually look at –

Lee Howard: Especially compensation committee members, yes.

Paul Andersen: If I could echo John on that. I encourage you – your Board members are at these meetings as well, and if you see them – have reviewed these minutes and see concerns with that, please raise them directly with them.

John Curran: If you saw the list of Board activities that his presentation started out with, that very long – that was all the stuff that got done.

They’re remarkably productive. And, yes, it is true that they’re also remarkably productive in everything else they do and occasionally have to step out or have to be at a speaking engagement, but the level of Board engagement is extremely high. They’re very productive.

Paul Andersen: I don’t know if, Aaron, you wanted to add anything – my apologies, by the way, and of course this is not helping. Unfortunately a few of our – I know that Bill Woodcock and Vint had to travel – it was actually on activity for ARIN – and are on their way to The Hague to attend a meeting currently. So that unfortunately detained them.

Did you want to add anything, Aaron?

Lee Howard: So you’re saying my perception of distraction is not preventing Board members from doing their jobs.

John Curran: Not at all.

Lee Howard: Thank you.

Joint RIR Stability Fund

John Curran: I want to give a quick stability – so real quick, this is what I briefed the Board on stability.

Financial stability of the RIR system is a good thing. RIRs are subject to a variety of conditions. The NRO EC has suggested funds from healthy RIRs should be made available if necessary. Should only be provided when absolutely needed.

We all pledge amounts. They remain within the RIR. They would not be moved but would be ready. Would remain on the balance sheet. Funding the RIR may need to occur. In our case we said our Board would need a briefing of why is this being drawn.

We need to know what the recovery plan is. We’d release. We propose a funding commitment of 250k. It’s not a complicated thing. It just says make sure you have money sitting aside and make sure you told the RIRs it’s available if needed.

Questions on that.

Owen DeLong: So that addresses what the fund is, but it doesn’t address whether we’ve reviewed the level of emergency planning or contingency planning in the other RIRs prior to creating such a fund, which was the question I asked.

Paul Andersen: He’s wondering what preparation we’re doing to avoid using the fund is my understanding –

John Curran: There actually is work underway right now among the RIR, the NRO EC to document risk management framework for each of the RIRs. Go to the NRO EC – I don’t know if we have that up yet.

Axel, do you know if we have the risk management comparison matrix? Backups and – no, we’re working on that now. Evaluating offsite backups, evaluating personnel recovery, evaluating audit processes. And you’ll see that. We have the governance matrix up. We will have a risk management matrix up shortly.

Martin Hannigan: To follow up on my question related to this particular topic earlier, are those funds restricted?

John Curran: I’d have to ask the auditors.

Martin Hannigan: Could you publish the agreement you signed somewhere on the Web so we can take a look for ourselves?

John Curran: Could you repeat that.

Martin Hannigan: Could you publish the agreement that you pledged the money to the NRO somewhere that we can take a look?

John Curran: There is no agreement. The pledge is a statement by the ARIN Board.

Paul Andersen: At this point it’s just a statement by the Board –

Martin Hannigan: Okay. So the funds aren’t restricted. You just said, okay, we’ll give you money if you fail or if somebody fails, but it’s not a hard commitment. It’s basically – you can withdraw that commitment and there’s nothing –

John Curran: That’s correct. Any of the RIRs could change that.

Martin Hannigan: So there’s no agreement that you’re locked into and there’s no restricted funds –

John Curran: That’s correct.

Martin Hannigan: Okay. Thank you.

John Curran: But we will ask the auditors just in case, in case the motion they consider impairs the funds in any way.

Paul Andersen: For clarity, this was just a sense of – a motion that – I think it actually was a motion that just occurred, and now the NRO themselves are putting into the logistics of how it would work a bit more detail.

John Curran: Any other questions for Paul?

Paul Andersen: Thank you very much for your time.

(Applause.)

John Curran: Okay. So we have now two quick presentations. Your agenda shows one. I’ll actually save some time. Can I put the IANA Planning slide deck up?

IANA Stewardship Transition Planning Status

John Curran: Very good. IANA Stewardship Transition Planning Status. As folks know, we had a CRISP Team Update. CRISP was the team that does the – has been doing the coordination of the community input to the IANA planning effort. They came up with a CRISP plan. You saw the panel and their presentation.

We’ve had a few requests of ARIN of, well, that’s the CRISP team; what is ARIN’s position with respect to what the CRISP team is saying?

So the Board actually had an opportunity in their ample free time – which doesn’t impact their performance in any way – to sit down and discuss this, and I have the following statement.

ARIN advocates that the CRISP draft Service Level Agreement be completed promptly, with fidelity to the CRISP principles, and made public immediately.

We believe any comments or objections to the draft Service Level Agreement or its underlying principles be provided publicly on the CRISP Mailing List, whether those comments originate with the RIR organizations themselves, ICANN, or others in the community.

We believe the feedback received should be collected by the CRISP team, and the CRISP team should facilitate discussion of any proposed changes using an open and transparent process.

We reaffirm in particular the necessity of CRISP Service Level Agreement outline Principle 6, which is in regards to termination of the contract in the event the IANA Numbering Services Operator fails to perform or cure in accordance with the terms of the SLA.

So that’s where we stand on this. We think the CRISP team is doing a wonderful job, and we want to support their efforts. And hopefully we’ll – I have staff working for me, as do the other RIRs. We’re busy working on a draft agreement.

As soon as we have a draft agreement which matches these terms, we will get it out there very promptly for people to look at.

Questions on that?

Owen DeLong: In the CRISP proposal and in much of the community feedback, there were actually three important termination principles that were discussed. I note here that the Board called out only one of them, the other two being termination with notice, which I consider useful but not critical, and periodic review of the contract with possible competitive bidding, which I consider vital.

John Curran: Understood. So the challenge we have is that it’s very hard for the Board to say in advance we understand the necessity of any given term of a contract that is still being drafted.

But because there was some confusion on whether or not termination needed to be there at all or not, at least to this principle the ARIN Board has taken a statement on.

I believe when the draft comes out, everyone should provide their comments about the other termination clauses that might be appropriate.

Center microphone.

John Springer: John Springer, Inland Telephone, ARIN AC. I believe in Clause 2 you’re missing a “should” or a “must” or something. Editorial change.

John Curran: Which one?

John Springer: Clause 2: ARIN believes that any comments or objections to the draft Service Level Agreement or its underlying principles – “should,” “must,” “may” – be provided publicly.

John Curran: That’s a good word. Let’s get that in there.

Okay. Any other questions on that?

Now we’ll move on to our last presentation before open mic, the IRR Consultation.

IRR Consultation

John Curran: So IRR – not RIR, Internet Routing Registry – Consultation. For those on the ARIN Consult Mailing List, you saw an announcement about this. We’ve had a number of suggestions come in about doing enhancements and development to Internet Routing Registry in the ARIN region.

For people who may not be aware, there’s just a few Internet Routing Registries out there. And that means that we want to make sure we understand the community before we put further development into ARIN’s.

And in particular some of the suggestions involve linkages to the Number Resource registry activities we do.

So we kind of rolled those up and said we need more community comment on this. We had people approaching us individually and at the mics.

So the question that we’re looking for input on is: Should ARIN begin a new project to enable our IRR route object validation to the ARIN registry database?

Also, if we do embark on such a project, should it be coordinated with other RIRs? Because many people are saying it would be helpful if there was some cross registry authentication going on.

And should this also support third party IRR route object authentication? Because sometimes you have parties who have to put in – as Mark was noting, have to put in routing information on behalf of others. And if you don’t provide for this up front, it gets convoluted very fast.

So this consultation was closing Friday. We decided not to do that. It’s now closing a week from Friday. That will allow us to discuss it a little over the next few minutes and then have people further follow up with comments.

Let’s see. That’s everything. There’s probably a discussion. Oh, no, there isn’t. Wow.

Some background, things you may or may not know. We have an old version of our IRR code. It’s based on the old version of RIPE. It’s not supported, because they’ve moved on.

It would be significant work if we embark. We’re not going to be enhancing our code base. We would be doing some development or working with other RIRs on their development.

And it should be noted that if we do something on our own, we don’t get the benefit of cross registry authentication, and that seems to be valued.

And, again, the question about whether or not we put something in that would allow third party access. It also affects the scope of work.

Now discussion. The microphones are open.

Kat Hunter: Kat Hunter, Comcast, but speaking for myself.

First a suggestion, actually. And I’m actually early because it’s the discussion for this…

I’m going to wait until the open mic.

John Curran: That’s fine. We have a session here. So it might be good – okay. That’s fine.

Go ahead. Middle mic. Kevin.

Kevin Blumberg: Kevin Blumberg, The Wire, ARIN AC. I was the latest person to add in an ACSP on what looks to have been something that’s been going on for many years.

In many of the other regions, the operator community and the RIR community are very tightly intertwined from a meeting perspective.

That isn’t the case. While we have very good rapport with NANOG, NANOG is a separate organization, and many of the operators that rely on utilizing RIR data are not in this room. They are not going to be using ARIN’s ACSP process until April 24th.

John Curran: They’ve been notified, though.

Kevin Blumberg: John, it’s the passive versus active.

My suggestion is we need to go to the NANOGs. We need to push this. We need to understand from them.

Because when I was at the last NANOG and the reason for my ACSP was there was some very good presentations on the need for validated IRR data, how critical it was becoming. And there were lots of operators who were very willing to talk there; will not be talking on public forums within ARIN’s purview.

So just please go to the operators.

John Curran: Kevin, I’m now going to push back. I’m very receptive to input. But I want to be very clear. They could be talking about IRR data anywhere. If they actually feel that they need IRR data that has linkages to registry data and therefore involves ARIN and it’s important to them, they’re going to use it and they’re going to set up teams that do it and they’re going to incorporate that in their processes, I would recommend they spend five minutes to respond to the ACSP. And I’m very sorry. If they don’t, I cannot actually invest ARIN funds.

Kevin Blumberg: So have we posted this on NANOG saying that –

John Curran: Yes.

Kevin Blumberg: Thank you. That was the key point, then.

John Curran: We often cross post these things, but they don’t generate a response. If someone really wants to have something that involves linkages to our data, it behooves them to get involved. I’m very sorry.

Kat Hunter: Kat Hunter, Comcast. I’m actually going to bounce off of his point, and I was going to wait for the open discussion for this, but I’d kind of like to recommend as a non AC Board or Advisory Council member that we get the extra half day back in the fall.

I think it would help get a better communication with the NANOG community. I know I have my own interpretations of it because I was here when that used to be a joint meeting, and there’s a very strong disconnect between the NANOG meeting and the ARIN meeting.

And if we could get the half day back, to even get a couple of people from NANOG – I know there’s some people here that are from NANOG, but it would be very useful to have maybe some extra people from NANOG that happened to be in the room from the previous meeting so we could ask questions, things like that.

Cathy Aronson: Can I just –

John Curran: Let me respond, and then you can respond.

NANOG actually has a program committee that is really easy to get ahold of and talks to people and sets up sessions.

If the community believes we need to have NANOG input on this, I would ask some people who believe that this is important to submit a session to NANOG and have a panel about IRR data and what do you want and bring the results back. That’s fine.

You can engage NANOG. You don’t have to wait until October and you don’t have to wait for an overlapping meeting. They have sessions and a program committee dying for good tracks.

So, I mean, folks, you own this engagement. And so engage with NANOG. Engage with other parties if you think it’s important. Engage with law enforcement. Engage with anti spam or whoever you think needs to get involved.

ARIN cannot go do that on your behalf. It really is this community.

Cathy Aronson: I wanted to add to that. This is Cathy. If you’re a NANOG member and you want the meetings to be more intertwined, then the NANOG members need to actually start saying stuff about it to the NANOG Board and stuff. Because it’s only going to happen if it comes from the NANOG community. And right now it’s not going to happen. So…

John Curran: Okay. Middle mic. On the IRR consultation.

Sandra Murphy: Sandy Murphy, Parsons. One of the comments made on the ARIN Consult List came from Tony Tauber, and he asked if there are standards that govern this.

RIPE has been following – perhaps not precisely, but following IETF Standard 2725 called the Routing Policy System Security something. Truth in advertising, I’m listed as an author. Truth in advertising, I contributed this much. A tiny amount.

So that’s one standard that governs this sort of thing. It doesn’t provide for the delegation of authority to someone else.

If you go download RADb, Level 3, SAVVIS, ALTDB, whatever, and you look for the string “proxy registration” in comment fields, you come up with like 35 to 45 percent of the registered objects are proxy registrations.

And that’s not a formally, securely delegated thing. It’s a big problem, and it’s not covered.

John Curran: And so the question that comes up, and this is – actually, I’m glad you brought it up. Solving that aspect to really make it formally delegated and a good thing would be very worthwhile but is heavy lifting, okay, whereas achieving what’s been achieved in other regions of just having a validated database and people end up sharing their authentication with whoever needs access is not as much work.

So that’s why we really need to understand if we’re going to get involved in this, what are we – what’s the victory goal. Thank you.

Sandra Murphy: There is another specification currently under development that uses RPKI based signatures on RPSL objects in order to provide some authentication, and that’s coming from some people in RIPE and some others.

John Curran: Is that a draft right now or –

Sandra Murphy: It’s a draft.

John Curran: It’s in the SIDR working group?

Sandra Murphy: Yes. It was presented at the last meeting after a long hiatus due to other duties as assigned kind of absorbing some people.

The third thing that you asked for in the consultation was the ability to support non RIR based IRRs.

Thank you very much to those who chose those two different three letter acronyms.

That’s even harder. And unless you get into public keys sorts of things –

John Curran: Who will see authentication for the non IRR RIR – for the non RIR IRR authentication needs, right.

Sandy Murphy: See? You can’t even say it.

Yeah. That’s an even more complicated security story.

John Curran: Right. We have no problem investing to do something here, but we do not want to invest to do something here if the community doesn’t want it or if what the community wants is something that’s not understood or beyond what is technically capable.

Center microphone.

Jason Schiller: Jason Schiller, Google. Jared Mauch would like ARIN to have an IRR that is closely coupled to the registry data. And AS sets also working would be good.

John Curran: That’s what Jared wants. What does Jason want?

Jason Schiller: If it’s closely coupled with the registry data, if when someone is issued a prefix or a prefix gets reclaimed or returned and that is automagically reflected in the IRR, that would be a great thing.

I also think it would be a great thing that if only the owners of the objects could manipulate the data in the IRR, that would be a great thing.

In terms of third party, if it’s downstream of a prefix that’s under your control, maybe you can proxy register it on behalf of your customers, that would be fine.

But I think putting in information for a prefix that’s not yours from another provider to make things work is a bad idea. And I think mirroring or interoperating with databases that do that is a bad idea.

John Curran: It would be helpful if you could put that as well as Jared’s remarks into the consultation in the next few days. That would be helpful.

I ask literally everyone, if you are not the person in your organization who knows about this, there is someone in your organization that has an opinion. Find them. Teach them email. Point them at the consultation. And get a comment in.

Because this is something that we do – we do not want to ignore the community. But we have reasonable trepidation when some projects are suggested. Okay?

Jason Schiller: Thank you.

John Curran: Anyone else want to approach the microphone, talk about any of these questions? Really?

Okay. Consultation remains open. Please provide comments. Thank you very much.

And I now have the open microphone. You want to moderate that?

Open Microphone

Paul Andersen: Yes. Microphones are now open for open microphone. Anything you would like to discuss, please approach a microphone with due speed.

Oh, geez. We’re going to be – I was going to say if there’s no questions – I’m trying to slow down so as not to –

Andrew Trudgeon: Andrew Trudgeon, ISP Canada. We just figured we’d all come up at once as the fellows and first timers to say thanks, appreciate the program with the Fellowship.

I know I was overwhelmed with information. I’m sure everybody else was. But I’m glad I was able to be a part of it. And hopefully we’ll come to more meetings.

Appreciate my mentor, getting me started with everybody, let me meet a couple of people and got me some good information right off the bat.

So lots of things to take away.

John Curran: Excellent.

Stephen Ives: I would like to echo what the previous speaker just said. And I volunteer for one of the working groups, so I intend on being an active participant in the future.

John Curran: Thank you very much.

Jon Aitchison: Not to belabor the point, but I’ll associate myself with the gentleman’s comments before me. I am with the government of Canada, and this has been very informative for me just in terms of general interests. And I fully intend on participating in the future. I’ll see you all in Montreal.

John Curran: Excellent.

Andre Graham: Andre Graham, Jamaica. I want to thank you for the wonderful experience. I’ve met some wonderful people. And I’ll be taking back all the information back to Jamaica. Thank you.

Michael Schloh: I’m Michael Schloh. I was the winner of the partial – I need to raise this – of the partial fellowship. Milton did a great job as my mentor, so I’d like to thank him.

And I’m fully thankful for the partial fellowship. I do some work with industry on IoT, so there’s some gray areas there between numbering and resources, which I’d like to explore from an engineering development perspective.

So thank you for the careful consideration.

Paul Andersen: Thank you to all.

I’d like to give a round of applause not only to all the mentors but the members of the Fellowship Committee and all the staff. They’ve put a lot of effort into making this program work.

On behalf of the Board, let’s give a round to all of them.

(Applause.)

Kat Hunter: Kat Hunter, Comcast. I wanted to make a general suggestion. Maybe for the next conference during the policy discussions – I know we did it before, and it’s kind of been mentioned a little bit in each policy, but some people aren’t part of the emailing list. They should be. But some of them aren’t. And a lot of the times they only hear the opinions of the people that come to the microphone.

I think it would be nice, even if there was just a slide per policy of positive points for the policy and negative points against the policy so people that were not part of the emailing list could get an idea of what the community was thinking.

And you used to have this slide –

John Curran: We used to have the slide – I’ll speak to this.

Paul Andersen: I’m not going nuts. We had it before.

John Curran: I have good news and bad news. What do you want first?

Kat Hunter: Good news.

John Curran: You’re one of those people.

The good news is we know what you want. It is possible. We have something similar. Poor Einar. There he is. Poor Einar used to actually cull through all the email –

Kat Hunter: I understand it’s hard to read it all.

John Curran: – and pull out selected comments.

There’s a couple of challenges with that. First one is selected comments are selected comments and aren’t representative.

Kat Hunter: Agreed.

John Curran: So we know what you want there. It’s nearly impossible to scale and to be fair. Now, that’s all the good news, is we know what you want.

The bad news. I actually think that it would be best if the ARIN Advisory Council consider what you suggested –

Paul Andersen: You read my mind.

John Curran: I did, actually, because the shepherds can decide how much to put in. And it might actually be useful for them to put in a sort of pros and cons we’ve heard on the Mailing List. They own the discussion, and that might help get juices flowing.

So they’re meeting really soon now.

Paul Andersen: We actually have – it’s better. Hey, Dan Alexander, who’s sitting up here, do you have any thoughts on this issue?

Dan Alexander: Noted.

John Curran: We’ll raise it with the AC and see if they want to put it in their presentation.

Kat Hunter: I think there’s a lot of concern since the voting is done publicly and since it’s a raise of hands, some people, sometimes first timers, couple timers, will look at who has voted on what, and I think it will make people a little more comfortable if they could look at what other people had thought before they get in here.

Paul Andersen: Great advice. Thank you.

I see we have a queue, but I would say please approach a microphone if you have a question because we will close the microphones soon.

Next speaker, please.

Lee Howard: Lee Howard. Following on what Kat was just saying. I notice, it seems to me, there’s a significant overlap when presenting Draft Policy Proposals between the staff presentation and the AC presentation. We frequently hear a summary of the proposal twice, and I think we could probably do a little bit better use of time by harmonizing those two sets of slides into a single deck that says the same thing once.

I was going to –

John Curran: I’m happy to reduce the staff introduction, which I read for each one. I think that would be a wonderful idea, too.

Is there consistent information you always want to see that you want presented by the staff?

Paul Andersen: Or not just presented by the staff, presented?

Lee Howard: I don’t think you necessarily need to read the staff and legal review. If you think that’s important, that’s fine, but maybe that should come after the AC introduction of what the proposal is. Or before it, here’s the comments on the thing that you’re about to find out what it is, doesn’t quite make as much sense.

John Curran: There are circumstances where it would be inappropriate for the community to discuss the policy proposal without hearing the staff and legal review.

Lee Howard: I think it needs to be there.

John Curran: We can talk about that on the AC.

Paul Andersen: Dan? Dan, noted?

Dan Alexander: Noted again.

Lee Howard: So the other thing is I was going to provide that feedback in the meeting survey, but I couldn’t because you skipped past that URL too fast in your slide’s closing last night, and I couldn’t find it.

Paul Andersen: But as we answer questions, we’ll get the meeting survey URL up.

Next speaker.

John Springer: John Springer, Inland Telephone, ARIN AC.

As a shepherd of a recent policy that’s been on either side of that pro and con business – in Baltimore I had some pros and cons, and it led to an extensive, time consuming discussion that was generally considered excessive. And here I kept it out of pros and cons, and we were able to stay within a timeframe.

So there is a tension between having controversial topics get all of the airing out of the pros and cons and the necessity to remain in a time slot.

Paul Andersen: Thank you very much for that.

Kevin Blumberg: Kevin Blumberg, The Wire, ARIN AC.

I’m going to go back to what Kat said, and I’m going to ask an impossible question: Who here is not allowed to publicly state an opinion, via a show of hands?

Paul Andersen: Could you raise your hand.

Kevin Blumberg: Could you please raise your hand.

So my next question is – it is a serious question. Who here is not publicly allowed –

Paul Andersen: Could you raise your hand if you feel that you could not raise your hand when I call for questions during a policy proposal, you are prohibited for some reason.

Unidentified: Going to get the tabulating machine?

Kevin Blumberg: No, no.

Paul Andersen: This is just a quick eyeball for your input; we will not be tabulating it.

Kevin Blumberg: Thank you.

My next question, then, is: Who here could report anonymously through a device where they’re publicly not showing their opinion but are privately being added to a counter?

Paul Andersen: Such as Confer?

Kevin Blumberg: Such as – well, people don’t know about –

Paul Andersen: Only if they didn’t listen to Paul Wilson’s report.

Kevin Blumberg: I.e., who could anonymously show support or nonsupport in this room and would you?

Thank you.

Paul Andersen: Thank you for the input.

Just as a quick thing, is the meeting survey – we’ll put that up for a moment. And just to remind you that now would be a great time to pull it up while Louie is giving his question or comment.

Louie Lee: Louie Lee, Chair of the ASO Address Council. A couple of us had an informal chat with IANA staff, Naela and Selina, and we thought that it might be a good idea to incorporate a policy experience report either within the IANA report or the NRO Number Council, ASO Address Council presentation for global policies.

Audience: Yes.

Louie Lee: People like that? Anybody think that’s a terrible idea? Okay. Great. Thank you.

Paul Andersen: And you can win a pair of – can I win?

John Curran: No.

Paul Andersen: Next question.

Owen DeLong: Owen DeLong, ARIN AC. To follow on to John Springer’s comment about tension between airing the pros and cons and staying within a timeframe, I understand that we need to keep the discussions from getting completely out of hand, but I think that it is important as a deliberative body that we get as much community feedback on as many of the different aspects of a policy as possible.

So where that tension exists I think we should err to the greatest extent possible in favor of airing the pros and cons.

Paul Andersen: Thank you.

Last call for – you’re all too busy entering the survey where you can win a drone.

Closing the microphones. Going once, twice – Kevin, it’s your last chance – three times. Remote? Closed.

Thank you very much. That ends open microphone. I’ll hand it over to John to end.

Closing Announcements

John Curran: Excellent session. Okay. One more time, thank our network connectivity sponsor.

(Applause.)

Folks at Webpass. Very nice.

And our broadcast, our webcast provided by Google.

(Applause.)

And our caffeine and cookie suppliers, Fastmetrics, ServerHub, and IPv4 Market Group. Very good. Okay.

Meeting survey. Okay. Fill out your meeting survey. You have by April 22nd to be entered into the lottery. You’ve got a little bit of time, but not much. Better to do it right now before you leave.

Okay. And please recycle your name badge. Recycle these. We use them again. We save them. We don’t end up with them in trash cans and all over the environment.

Okay. Thank you for being part of ARIN 35, and we will see you in Montreal in October.

That closes our meeting.

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