ARIN 36 Members Meeting Transcript - Friday, 9 October 2015 [Archived]

This transcript of the meeting 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 and Announcements

Vint Cerf: In the absence of John Curran, I’d like to get this afternoon meeting started. This is the Members Meeting, and the first item on the agenda is you get a report from Mark Kosters. Mark, I’ll invite you on the stage.

ARIN Reports: Engineering

Mark Kosters: So good afternoon, everybody. So one of the things that’s kind of amazing is I’ve been at ARIN for a while now. And I used to be the youngest kid on the block.

I’m not anymore. In fact, one of my ops guys actually called me Dad.

Audience: Whoa.

(Laughter.)

Mark Kosters: Thanks, Devon.

Let’s go ahead and get started here. So we’ve had a lot of big changes in engineering since the first part of this year. Over the past couple of years –

John Curran: I’m sorry I’m late, dad.

Mark Kosters: Thanks, John.

Unidentified Speaker: Did he call you Dad?

Mark Kosters: Yes, he did.

(Laughter.)

Mark Kosters: I’m not going to say anything.

We’ve had lots of requests for engineering work over the past couple of years. A lot of operations support as well. And consequently engineering has grown quite a bit over the past year.

We have 13 1/2 full‑time employees actually coming into ARIN – five operations people; three developers; one UX person to help with the usability of the website; four systems integrators, which actually used to be quality assurance; a halftime project manager. And we’ve done pretty well on hiring these people.

But as you can see on the following slide, we still have a couple of slots open. In operations, we have 10 engineers and two managers; development, we have 12 engineers, UI expert and a manager. Software integration, we have nine engineers and a manager. Project manager, one full‑time project manager and one part time. And of course myself.

So this is a shameless plug. If you know anyone who is interested in a really cool job working at ARIN, we have two positions open.

So we’re looking for a really good systems administrator, really good with UNIX stuff, and we’re looking for a really good security engineer.

So if you know of anyone, we’d certainly like to hear from them. They’d have to live in Northern Virginia. It’s actually not a bad place to live.

So here are the accomplishments since ARIN 35. Inter‑RIR transfer, 8.4, is underway. Mergers and acquisitions, 8.2, has been released.

And RDAP was rolled into production, which is the ACSP, and we completed a whole lot more since the last meeting. So if you look at this list – I’m not going to read them all – there’s 10 ACSPs on this page plus the one from the previous page. We’ve done 11 ACSPs since the last meeting.

(Applause.)

Mark Kosters: One of the ones – thank you – so one of the ones I’m very happy to see rolled out was Whois‑RWS and RDAP now over SSL.

So that is something that we wanted to do a couple of years ago. But because of v6 compatibility issues that we have with our existing load balancers, we went out and actually have some load balancers that actually do the right thing now and it’s a much better place.

We’ve also fixed PGP to be RFC 3156 compliant. The way that PGP used to work, it was inline in the message. Now it’s a MIME attachment. We’ve had two public‑facing services sites turned up, Seattle and San Jose.

What this means is that your Whois queries, FTP, access, et cetera, may come from not only Ashburn, it may come from Seattle or San Jose. We have redundancy in there. And this includes RPKI, by the way.

We have a lot of fault tolerance improvements that we continue to make. We do a lot of corporate help desk and IT support, ARIN Member Meeting support, including your jabber issues that you may have. Care and feeding of servers and networks and of course OT&E.

What I’d like to talk about is a little bit about OT&E. This is one of the things that sort of drives me crazy, is a lot of people test in production. Please don’t. We have an OT&E environment set up that’s replicated that has almost every service except mail available for you to go do your testing.

And there was, for example, a talk by Chris Morrow at NANOG earlier this week about RPKI. And one of the things he wants to do is work with up/down. And he was working with Randy Bush’s setup, which is a test environment.

But I told him, hey, wouldn’t it be great if you actually played with our OT&E environment as well as dealing with RPKI and make that happen? And wouldn’t it be cool to see if it works, so that when you do go to production it’s just switching a few things over and away you go.

So that’s a useful service that I hope that more people take advantage of. Right now we have over 160 different participants, but we certainly would like to see more.

New features: Two‑factor authentication. Two people – as soon as we went live with this, we monitored the systems to make sure everything is good. Within 30 minutes we had two people other than ARIN staff doing this. And I think one of them outed himself.

53 people at the time were using the system. I think we’re up to 72 as of a few minutes ago. So it keeps on growing, which is great.

RDAP, which is a protocol that’s going to replace Whois, is also going to be used within the ICANN domain industry.

They’re also going to be using this protocol. One of the interesting things, it’s still a small baby right now, there’s not a lot of clients that are available, but one of the things that’s interesting is the people who are using it are using the new improved v6 instead of v4 and it’s order of magnitude higher.

ARIN Online usage. We keep on growing. You can see that it’s pretty consistent year over year, the amount of accounts that are activated. And this is kind of interesting. So you can see that the number of log‑ins, we have this sort of bell curve, but one person either has OCD or had a script that kind of got kind of stuck.

So logging in over a million times, that’s kind of cool, but I don’t know. Here you see our Reg‑RWS transactions. These are the people who – it’s a comparison against SWIP templates. SWIP templates are the graphs in blue.

The RESTful RWS, Reg‑RWS transactions are the ones in red. You can see that it continues to predominantly grow over templates.

DNSSEC. Here are the number of ORGs with ARIN that elected to use DNSSEC for their reverse signing.

There’s 123 organizations. We have almost 600,000 delegations possible, of which 586 are signed. And you can look at the percentage secured as less than 1 percent.

This actually comes fairly close. You can check me if you want, the people that actually signed common net on the forward side. It’s probably a little bit higher than that, but it’s a pretty interesting ratio.

RPKI usage, it continues to grow, not by much. I’d certainly like to see - I think many of us would like to see more participation in this area. One thing that’s interesting is, I mentioned at the last meeting, that we had one delegated participant, of the two that dropped off. The one that dropped off actually came back in. So we have two that are using up-down right now.

Whois queries per second. Anyone see any differences with this graph compared with the last ones I gave?

The comment on the floor is you don’t remember. But the thing that was interesting, and actually this is sad for me to say is the previous graphs showed the line that’s red as climbing above the line that’s in blue. The line that’s in red is the RESTful Whois queries, and the one that’s in blue is port 43 stuff.

We found a bug in our reporting software and we fixed it. We were double counting. I was really sad. I thought here’s a core protocol that we’re changing out and, look, it’s overtaking the established legacy protocol, but it has not. And it brings some sadness.

But on the flipside, look at this, look at v6 traffic. We had actually almost 25 percent of our traffic over v6.

Now for the other news, this is kind of interesting, why did it go up and down? It’s a user who rented a VM from Linnote, who was querying us over v6. Doing quite a bit of queries over v6. And he actually brought the numbers up. So maybe a few more of you can do that, too. Just don’t DDOS us.

The IRR maintainers continues to grow. The growth line seems to be a little higher now. Routes and Route 6 objects within IRR continues to grow at a fairly slow pace. The same with InetNums and Inet6 Nums.

And here’s an interesting slide. It’s the number of organizations that are participating and the number of objects that each organization has. You can see that there’s really two sides of the coin here. There’s a lot of them in the – from five to 50 objects in the IRR, and there’s a huge number.

But it’s interesting to see the number of organizations that are power users at the top of the tree. So there’s essentially 40 organizations that are using the IRR in a big way.

So here’s what we’re working on through Q1 of 2016. We plan on finishing transfers, 8.4 inter‑RIR transfers.

We plan on rolling out SWIP Easy. It’s going to be done in an incremental fashion. This is a Web‑based tool to send in reassignment information.

And we’re going to continue to work on various ACSPs, and we’re working on some fully redundant services like Reg‑RWS. As we go through deployments, you’ll see the notice, we’ll actually go down from eight to 12 hours as we do a deployment.

And what we’d like to do is actually have more deployments but not impact you so that your expectation of our services while we do these upgrades. So we’re hoping to do some rolling deployments going forward. We have some work to do to make that happen. We plan on doing another security audit, and we have a fairly significant technical backlog that we’re working through as well.

One of them I mentioned at the last meeting, I’ll mention here again, is the movement from Java 6 which has been end of life to Java 8, changing upgrading OSs, et cetera. All these things like everybody else does we have to do as well.

So any comments?

Kevin Blumberg: Kevin Blumberg, The Wire, ARIN AC. In regards to IPv6 Whois little blip that you had, many Whois services now restrict due to abuse, the queries per second. And when I see that kind of spike, it looks to me like that is abuse that they’re getting an end run around signing an agreement for access to the bulk data.

Is that something that you are looking at?

Mark Kosters: Actually, we, at one point, had some sort of rate limiting restrictions on there. And we still do to limit DDOS potential. But if you go back a bunch of slides, one of the things you’ll see here – you see that spike we had, we have a lot of horsepower there.

And actually our cluster could handle quite a higher amount of queries per second than actually what you see in this graph.

We’ve actuality built in a lot of power to actually service up these queries. Unless we see some sort of spike on CPU, we’re just – we’re not paying attention. Now, if it’s something you think we should do, then I certainly would love to see an ACSP come out.

Kevin Blumberg: Like I said, I believe that sounds like abuse to me which should be dealt with internally.

The second question was, you mentioned a number of internal projects that you’re using to upgrade stale technology, unsupported technology. From a customer facing point of view, when I am at an ARIN meeting, I am using my mobile phone to access your website.

And the public facing website is extremely difficult because it is a nonresponsive website. It’s stale, outdated, old school HTML. And while submitting an ACSP would probably get it in your thing, keeping things like the website current without us having to submit to keep it current would be a suggestion.

Mark Kosters: So noted.

John Curran: Can you be more specific about which content is stale?

Kevin Blumberg: The code is stale. It is nonresponsive. So it’s designed to work beautifully with a browser on a desktop or laptop computer, but it’s not designed to scale automatically.

John Curran: Got it.

Mark Kosters: I’m not sure who came first. Owen, go ahead.

Owen DeLong: Owen DeLong, Akamai, ARIN AC, I’ll somewhat echo what Kevin said. Just because it doesn’t kill the server does not mean we should be ignoring people that are trying to get bulk Whois without the bulk Whois agreement. That’s a very well problem for those of us in the real world whose contact information lives in the database.

Mark Kosters: I agree. I agree.

Michael Joseph: Mike Joseph, Google. I’ll second that, that while we can all put in ASCPs for that, we probably shouldn’t have to, on the bulk Whois abuse issue.

On the OT&E environment, small point, you may find more people will use it if you reduce the friction to use it by allowing automatic registration.

Mark Kosters: Excuse me?

Mike Joseph: On the OT&E environment you pitch more people using it – you may find more people using it if you remove the friction to use it by having to open a ticket and request manually people to add records if you just make it automatic.

Mark Kosters: Okay, so that’s good information. So we put that guard in place to make sure that people who sort of realize that they were actually playing in OT&E, but that’s a really good suggestion. We’ll take that, and take the filters off.

Gary Giesen: Gary Giesen, AKN. Are there any plans to enhance the IRR functionality? I would mention that RIPE has an excellent IRR with both a fantastic Web interface as well as traditional email templates, and I think that should be something that ARIN should consider.

John Curran: Do you want me to take it? I’ll take it. So there was consultation with the community, four months, five months back. We got comments from the folks about what they thought about IRR. I brought some of those comments to the Board, and the Board indicated that we should include IRR enhancements and refresh in next year’s operating plan. So you’ll hear about that later on today a little bit. Yes, we are heading that direction.

Gary Giesen: Excellent. One more comment to Kevin’s comment. I notice if I Google ARIN elections, it takes me to a broken link. I don’t know if there’s anyone in this room who can fix that.

Rob Seastrom: Rob Seastrom, ARIN AC, Time Warner Cable, ACSP submitter. Back in January, I think, I put in a request to support HSTS where practicable, and I really appreciate you guys moving that through at record speed, and it’s on www.arin.net, but somehow the RESTful interface seems to have been overlooked.

Now, whether there are any clients talking through RESTful interface that actually honor the http strict transport header is left as an exercise to the reader. But if you don’t support it, there’s no impetus for them to support it either.

Mark Kosters: Good point. Thank you.

Rob Seastrom: Thank you.

Mark Kosters: All right. Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

John Curran: Let’s keep going, and next one up is Richard Jimmerson to give the Registration Services Report. And folks might have noticed I didn’t open the meeting. I was busy yacking in the lunch area, and I do apologize for that.

There’s an item here that says ARIN Services Working Group. You didn’t get the presentation not because I wasn’t here but because we included it in yesterday’s report. We are doing a Services Working Group. You’ll see the charter go out for the community to look at and the Board will be looking at that for January to impanel it. So there wasn’t anything to miss there.

Okay, Richard, Registration Services.

ARIN Reports: Registration Services

Richard Jimmerson: Thank you, John. My name is Richard Jimmerson. I’m the interim director of Registration Services at ARIN. I’d like to first introduce you to the Registration Services team that have been working over the last six months on your behalf, working our way through depletion, reviewing your requests for transfers and otherwise.

We have Cathy Clements, is our transfer services manager; Lisa Liedel, resource services; Jon Worley, technical services manager. We have two senior resource analysts, Eddie Diego and Mike Pappano. And you can see our other resource analysts there: Misuk, Doreen, James, Jonathan, and Shawn.

RSD’s core function, the work that we do for you, is we review IPv4 requests, v6 requests and AS Number requests. We also review quite a few transfer requests and related services to transfers, like the STLS transfer preapprovals.

We do database record maintenance, and we provide customer support. The telephone help desk is open 60 hours per week at 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Eastern time. And we respond to email, of course, at hostmaster@arin.net. We also do internal support functions, that Registration Services team works in the policy development and implementation area and doing the staff assessments and implementation plans based on the policies that you pass as the community. And also we work with our engineering team when they have questions about the registration process, as they’re developing requirements and doing their testing.

In the communication space, we often are helping out with the guidelines, documentation and announcements, ACSP implementations and other things that go on our website to inform the community. And we help out with a good deal of the outreach, too, in the ARIN on the Road events, some of the trade shows and presentations that we do. And of course we help out with the monthly stats and other community requests for data over time.

The number of organizations that we serve at ARIN through the Registration Services Department, you can see here, there’s just over 37,000 organizations that we service as an organization. Of those, just over 5,000 of them are ISP subscriber members of the ARIN organization. 15,000 are nonmember customers. These are organizations that we provide services to on an annual basis. But they’re not members. They do pay fees to the organization. They’re either end‑user organizations, organizations that have AS numbers and so forth.

And there are just over 16,000 organizations that are still considered legacy. We provide services to them, the Whois services. We update their records. We do various other things for them. They are there and they’re just over 16,000 of them.

Now, the question often comes up about Registration Services agreement coverage, with the IPv4 address space that we’re managing at ARIN. This is the coverage that we have. This is a snapshot of about a week ago.

You see we’ve got 6 1/2 million total /24s in the database. 2.9 million of those /24s are covered by standard RSAs, about 44 percent. About 46 percent have no RSA coverage at all. And about 9.1 or 9.2 percent are covered under a Legacy Registration Services Agreement.

Now, we’ve reported that data a few times over the last few years. So I want to show a little bit of a trend with RSA coverage over the years.

Back in 2012, we reported this information twice. And we did it twice again in 2015. You can see that the amount of IPv4 address space in the database that’s covered by a standard RSA went up from 38 percent to 44 percent over that period of time.

Legacy RSA coverage went up from 8.6 percent to 9.1 or 2 percent of the total IPv4 address space in the database. And those resources that are not covered by any Registration Services agreement, that are considered legacy, went down over the years from 52.7 percent down to 46.6 percent.

So we are seeing a lot of the space that is considered legacy moving under an agreement, either because organizations are signing a Legacy Registration Services Agreement or because of that legacy IPv4 address space being transferred to other organizations through 8.3 or 8.4 transfers.

When that happens, the recipient organization does sign a Registration Services Agreement, and that space is now covered under an RSA.

Some of the changing dynamics over the last year that we found, and I wanted to talk to you about, and we did talk a little bit about this last time. IPv4 depletion, we saw that the request patterns had changed all the way up to that. We had the wait list, and we had the preapprovals that were coming in. And we saw a lot of increase in records maintenance that was going on.

People were starting to pay a lot more attention to keeping their records up to date, and we see a lot of new activity in that space. We had seen a new customer profile over the last year, and we continue to see that. ISPs are directing their downstream customers to ARIN for IPv4 addresses, or they had been up until two weeks ago.

They were no longer willing to issue those /24s to their downstream, for instance, and wanted them to come to ARIN since we now had a policy that would allow that.

So we saw a lot more requests from new organizations that have never interacted with ARIN before. They had primarily been delegated address space by organizations in the past and it takes a little bit more time and a little bit more education to work with them through the process because they’re so unfamiliar with it.

And of course we’re seeing a lot of legacy IPv4 holders, organizations who only have IPv4 address space, now coming in to register their IPv6 address space.

Now, we have an expected workload increase inside the Registration Services Department over the next six months. We expect to see a lot more legacy holders become active with transfers.

One of the things that we’ve seen just in the last two weeks, since the depletion event, that was two weeks ago from yesterday, is that we had a sudden surge in organization recovery requests at ARIN.

What that is is organizations that have a presence in the database with IPv4 resources, but they haven’t been maintaining their records over the years.

And when they come back and they start to do that, we want to make sure that we’re dealing with the right organization and the right individuals. So there’s quite a bit of vetting that has to go on. It’s one of the primary attack vectors for hijacking in the ARIN system.

So there’s a lot of work that goes into that, and we’re seeing a lot of new ORG recovery requests. We fully expect that these ORG recovery requests are the result of depletion. And we expect that they’re going to result in organizations that are preparing their space for transfer to another organization.

So we’re seeing a lot more of that, and we’re seeing a lot more of the point of contact recoveries as well, which we also consider a change of authority that require additional work. And we’ve seen a bit of a spike in IPv6 requests over the last two weeks, and I expect that you can see that in our statistics that are posted online once the end of this month has come.

So a little bit of what it’s looked like this year for us in registering IPv4 address space to Internet service providers and end users. You can see there was a significant drop‑off that happened going down from the height in June down to July into August.

And, of course, the reason for that is we had reached July 1st and the waiting list for unmet requests had started, and we no longer had large blocks of address space to issue to organizations. Now you see a temporary spike pop up there in September. That’s the result of the IANA distribution that ARIN received, and we received a 15 and two /16s from the IANA. That satisfied 13 organizations on the waiting list for unmet requests.

And that’s what’s reflected there in September. IPv6 assignment requests from end‑user organizations is steadily picking up as we move forward throughout the year.

Around the same time that IPv4 became unavailable through the request process, the number of requests for IPv6 address space picked up a bit from end users and also from ISP organizations.

Tracks pretty closely with the depletion events that have happened over the last few months. When it comes to transfers, particularly with the 8.4 transfers, we have completed 83 of them between ARIN and the APNIC region so far.

This started in late 2012. Two of those now have been ARIN region recipients. Up until recently they’d all been going from the direction of ARIN to the APNIC region. And now we have at least two, and I think we have a few more in the hopper, that are going to be recipients inside the ARIN region. Transfers between the ARIN and the RIPE NCC region are newly started. And in fact we’ve received our first request for a transfer from the ARIN region to the RIPE NCC region just in the last couple of days. And we expect that to pick up steadily in the coming months.

Completed, specified recipient transfers on the 8.3 side, you can see it picked up over the years. In 2011, we did 24; 2012, we did 23; 2013, we did 24. It was almost two a month – solid for three years. Then in 2014 it almost doubled. It went up to 42. And so far year‑to‑date through the end of September it’s already 105.

The transfer traffic is starting to pick up significantly. We can see it. You can see it in the statistics. And I can tell you in the last two weeks the amount of transfer traffic that we experience on a regular basis is about doubled just in the last two weeks, from what we normally expect.

I think that by the time we get to the end of the year you’ll see a significant change in the statistics there.

We have a telephone help desk, again, open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. If any of you are ever having trouble with the request process, if you’re not getting the response that you think you deserve, or you don’t understand clearly what was requested, please pick up the phone and give us a call. We’re there. We’re usually picking up in a ring or two. And you can speak to one of the analysts there that can help you through the process. It’s their job to help you do that. And they’re happy to do so.

The number of calls we get per month is about 700. It went down just a little bit this year from from earlier this year in this second period.

Most common call topics that we get – point of contact validation, what’s my request status, information about use of ARIN Online. We now have a lot of users coming online. And a lot of transfer‑related matters nowadays. We get a lot of calls about that. And before I end here I just wanted to say one thing.

Working in the Registration Services Department over the last six months has been very interesting. We’re going through the depletion event. I know it was very interesting for you, too.

We spent a lot of time with it. We paid very meticulous care to it. And here we are, we’re two weeks past the depletion event. I do want to tell you at the ARIN staff level, not just inside Registration Services but in the executive group, inside engineering, communications and the other groups, we encountered some issues over those last years.

We were coming up to depletion, and what we found every time that we encountered an issue and we looked to the Public Policy or the NRPM, we found that this community had predicted almost every single issue that we would have encountered. And it moved us.

We had the tools that we needed to actually get through the depletion event. And we safely come out of the other side of that where two weeks later we’re still exercising policies, doing some things for the first time. But one thing I do want to say it’s been a pleasure for the Registration Services team over the last six months, working on your behalf, and I want to thank the Advisory Council, this community and the Board of Trustees for the excellent work that you’ve done over the last five years setting this up the way that you did, because it works.

Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

Ralph Bischof: Ralph Bischof, SAIC. Mr. Jimmerson, I just wanted to mention, there was a slide, near the beginning of the presentation, that lists the members of the Registration Services team.

In my years of working with ARIN, they are the front line. I have done just almost 100 percent of my time with those people. And I for one applaud that whole team and yourself for the awesome service and support.

Richard Jimmerson: Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

Advisory Council Report

John Curran: Thank you. Okay. Very good. We’re now going to move on to the ARIN Advisory Council report. And I’ll have Dan Alexander come up for that.

Dan Alexander: Hello again. So by now hopefully everyone has had a conversation in the hall or at the social or somewhere with one of these wonderful AC members regarding all topics of consideration, because we’re charged with managing the Policy Development Process. And everyone is familiar with that process so I won’t really go through it here.

But what that wrapped up into for our work so far this year is that we’ve actually advanced three recommended drafts to the Board, which have all been adopted.

We’ve abandoned four different drafts. We have 11 new proposals that are currently on our docket. We’ve also been to two Public Policy Consultations, and this is now the second Public Policy Meeting.

So we’ve been pretty busy. But in addition to the policy work that comes in from the community, one of the other things that we’ve also started focusing on quite a bit is Richard gave a Policy Experience Report yesterday regarding the staff feedback on some work that has to be done.

The previous one that was given in April ended up resulting in what is currently 2015‑4. So his feedback actually resulted in some policy work that you all discussed over the last two days and will probably reflect in or result in a change.

The topics that we discussed yesterday, the new topics of issuing prefixes longer than a /24, the v4 address block swapping and the 8.2 transfer “return” language, are now new topics that we’ll take on as a group and see if we can evolve into potential policy language based on the feedback from everyone here.

In addition to the policy work that we’ve been doing, a lot of the AC members are also involved in a number of outreach events. And also as some of you have been working with them as far as fellowships, they serve as mentors. So they actually put in a fair amount of time even outside the Policy Development Process, helping out ARIN staff and new members and mentors getting acclimated with the environment.

We also had a number of conversations with NANOG, because as a lot of you know, we have these policy consultations at the NANOG meetings where we discussed policies outside of a PPM that happens twice a year. The point of it or the reason we created them was kind of a mechanism to be able to potentially speed up the Policy Development Process. So we wouldn’t have to wait for April or October in order to move something through. It was very helpful the last couple of years, but there was some feedback regarding this week, when we have joint meetings – did we necessarily need them. And I think the conversations were pretty constructive because it brought the program committee of NANOG and the Advisory Council together more than in the past and we’ve come to a better understanding of what each other is thinking and what our goals are. And one of the results was, as you noticed, there was no policy consultation during the NANOG meeting this week because we did away with it during the joint meetings.

But the likelihood that we’ll continue them during the nonjoint meetings is something that we’re going to utilize.

We’ve also, as you heard the last couple of days, we’re experimenting with new means of community feedback, one of which is the digital polling. I think it’s been a pretty good effort so far, and it’s resulted – we got some comments that some people actually aren’t getting the emails. So we now have a bug list on our first attempt at this. Quick show of hands, has anyone not gotten that email, soliciting the poll?

Scott Leibrand: And went back and looked and had day one but never saw it. I don’t know where it was. But I had it.

Unidentified speaker: (Inaudible.)

Scott Leibrand: Okay, thanks.

Dan Alexander: One of the other things that we’re working on, and you really saw it yesterday and today, is the topic of NRPM simplification.

Now that the free pool is depleted, you see a number of proposals regarding which sections are needed, which ones are no longer relevant, what approaches should we be taking to certain policies.

That has geared up a number of conversations within the Advisory Council, and we’ve been having ongoing discussions on what approach can we take to this, whether it’s going to be one or many omnibus proposals, whether they’re going to be multiple individuals or whether we’ll have several large proposals that will evolve into further consolidation later on. That’s why we’ve been asking for your feedback throughout the week because any information is very helpful to us.

Finally, I wanted to thank Heather Schiller. She did not run for re‑election this year. So her term is ending, and when I stopped and thought about it, I’ve actually now worked with Heather in this voluntary capacity for more years than I’ve actually worked with some people in my day job, and that’s actually a very large commitment of time and energy on her part.

And I really just wanted to say thank you because she’s done a great job.

(Applause.)

And thank the rest of the AC for all their help because they’re actually making my job quite a lot easier than they could be. And thank you all for your time.

Financial Report

Paul Andersen: I can introduce myself. Sorry, I’m bringing my laptop for notes. I’m Paul Andersen, the ARIN Board Treasurer, and I’ll give you the financial update in just a second.

Magic. So, I won’t go very long. As Treasurer I also chair the finance committee, which also includes Board members, Aaron Hughes and Bill Woodcock.

The activities we’ve been doing since we were last seen is we did the usual work in reviewing the 990 filing document that has to be filed with the IRS every year.

We’ve done some rebalancing of the investments based on guidance we get from our investment advisor, Morgan Stanley. And we participated in some work with staff on the fee schedule, which you saw the efforts of yesterday.

A bit of a last minute insert into these slides. This has previously been seen but we had some questions about what are we spending on.

So I thought I’d quickly go over again this is the budget that was proposed for this fiscal year. So the bulk of our expenses are personnel. You see the main line item there, but in fact there’s also probably about half the depreciation you see about halfway down the page, or at least 40 percent of it also has them.

The reason that is, some of the salaries are down there, is we capitalize a lot of the software development we do, and Mark’s team does a lot of software development.

So those salaries have to be depreciated over a five‑year period. So some of the salaries from the engineering team are actually – have to be down there.

Communications is obviously a lot of the work that Mark’s team does, he just kind of went over that, the two sites that they have, both their primary colo and DR at the office, as well as various nodes for DNS around the country.

We spend quite a bit in outreach. A lot of the ARIN on the Roads. Cathy Handley’s team doing a lot of ARIN International work for the IGF and such. We spend a fair amount on legal reviews for this, cases that come in that we have to deal with from bankruptcy court and such, come out of there.

And we also run two very large meetings a year, which are quite costly. We support NANOG’s webcast, which we’ve done for many traditional years. It’s been our support of NANOG. We do quite a bit of, obviously, travel, to get everybody to these meetings, and some of the other RIR meetings. And staff go and do a lot of outreach at a ton of events, many of them that you see. Many that you hear. John is constantly speaking to tons of people.

And we also commit a lot of funds for our share of both the NRO, our share of the ICANN fees and other support that we do for stuff like IGF, for example.

So that comes just this year to just a little over 20 million, which is much higher than last year, not much or significantly. And that was, as previously said, that we decided to go a little bit into the red this year to significantly increase engineering resources to try and do that ASCP catch‑up and to basically find a better steady state.

So how are we doing through financials this year? We’re pretty much on track for where we think – registration revenue being ISP subscription, revenue being the bulk there at about 8.3 million, and all the other requests coming in.

We are expecting to be under budget, even though I did just go over that. That’s mainly because we had anticipated not moving but opening up a second office space or adding some space in our existing complex.

That doesn’t look like it’s going to come to fruition. I’ll let Vint talk about that in a little bit in the future. And we also have not been able to yet fill all the engineering slots as quickly as we had hoped as well.

Investments this year, in my many years of doing this, I’ve not had to deal with a red but we do have a bit of red. Anybody who has been watching the market news as of August, you probably know why there’s been definitely some jittering - Registration revenue has continued to increase over the years. We did kind of anticipate that we would see that, as we’ve seen lots of new people enter the ARIN doors for whatever reason, as the request – couldn’t imagine why, but, yes, there was obviously a flurry of activity. We’ll be curious to see where that steady state is now.

And as a mix of where the money comes from, the bulk of it is our registration revenue from ISPs. However you’ll notice that maintenance is actually – transfers and contributions which is miscellaneous, it’s actually only increased about 5 percent. When you think that’s $500 a head, as opposed to the thousands you pay for some ISPs, there’s a lot of transfers going, so we’ll probably see that continue to increase.

We do keep financial reserves. We keep them in – so I thought this time I would just kind of do a quick breakdown for those that don’t know. We actually keep three reserve funds.

We keep a legal defense fund, just in case ARIN has to get into any major action, that we would be able to support that. We keep an operating reserve, which is more short‑term funds in case there was an unforeseen event that we had to very quickly go through some cash. And then a long‑term event which is far less liquid where the bulk of the reserves are.

I’ll leave it up there, and kind of – this breaks down the type of investments. Some people have asked me, what are we actually putting the money in. As I mentioned earlier, the finance committee and staff work with Morgan Stanley, and we have an investor we’ve been using for many years.

They do make – look at staff on a monthly basis, the Fin Com on a quarterly basis, giving us a review of the breakdown of where the funds are and where they recommend to rebalance.

Again, the legal defense fund, mostly very liquid, along with the operating reserve, also in very liquid funds. Not much in the terms of the equity, whereas the long‑term fund, where the bulk of the funds are, we have them, the bulk of the funds, in the United States. We’re not trying to get into any currency hedging.

Good thing we didn’t put any in the Canadian region, I tell ya. All my American friends, enjoy your spending power while you’re here.

The bulk and large cap, a little bit in the international, a significant in fixed income and then a small amount and small alternate investments. And with that, I’ll take any questions you may have.

Once, twice?

(Applause.)

Board of Trustees Report

John Curran: I will now introduce Vint Cerf, chairman of the Board of Trustees, to give the Board report.

Vint Cerf: Thank you. Did it work? It worked. Okay. So first of all, just to make sure you understand, the Board mostly works as a result of what you do, so – or possibly requests coming from the CEO. So when we’re not passing gas, we’re trying to pass resolutions.

(Laughter.)

Vint Cerf: Let’s get a little shot at some of the things we’ve been doing. I can’t read these things. How is that? Am I audible? It’s all right. Thank you. Okay.

So several things we did. First of all, you may have noticed some slight changes to the election procedures. Those are intended to make things a lot more clear about when does voting start and when does it stop.

We also adopted and seated the nomination committees. So it’s a charter and seating of the committee. We adopted the election vote counters for the purposes of executing on the election coming up.

We adopted the 2015 fellowship selection committee charter. So we now have a charter and people to seek nominees for fellowships.

And as you can see from this meeting today that we’re very determined to bring more people in, have more diversity at these meetings.

Another thing we did was to go through the financial audit, which I can tell you, it’s clean as a whistle. It was very impressive what the team has done at ARIN, including the financial team.

There were zero questions coming from the auditor. It’s among the best that I have ever seen in the times that I have dealt with nonprofits in the past.

We looked for opportunities to improve the governance of this organization, diversity being one of the things we were concerned with.

Two things, one was increasing the fellowship activity. And the second one was considered but not taken any action on one was wondering whether we might consider appointing someone to the Board in order to increase the diversity representation on the Board.

We talked about how we would handle external funding and contribution requests. Some of these come to ARIN directly and some come to the aggregate of the RIRs and there needs to be some coordinated response to that, and so we talked about how to achieve that objective.

As Paul mentions we reviewed the Form 990, which the IRS requires, and also the financial – FS stands for something, and I don’t remember what it is. Paul, do you remember what FS 713 stands for? Financial something or other.

Paul Andersen: That was the declaration for –

John Curran: Foreign activities.

Vint Cerf: Foreign activities. That’s because we had made contributions.

John Curran: There’s a list of countries that, if you spend money in, the United States government would like you to declare that because you’re engaging in businesses in countries that might be embargoed. We sent people to a conference in, might have been Dubai, that qualified as such.

Vint Cerf: Paul mentioned also that the office facility has now run out of space. Talk about running out of space. So there’s a number of different options we looked at. Right now we’re pursuing one which would involve a new space into which everyone could move.

So the president has been given the authority to proceed to possible negotiation for new space over a very long period of time, ten‑year kinds of time spans, as a result reducing the cost per square foot below where we are today. Not by much, but it’s pretty significant that you could do that at this stage of our lives.

The other thing that we looked at was possibility of insurance for ARIN as an operating entity and for directors and officers and the like, might need to be increased given the fact that we’re entering into a period where the complexity of transfers and questions about who has what authority over various address space assignments could lead to financial questions and litigation and everything else. So this is an important thing that the Board is trying to protect the organization from – risk.

And, finally, we reviewed and updated the strategic plan, which by this time has been published, which you should have access to.

We also, as you heard, discussed the Services Working Group. I expect that John is really looking for quality feedback about services, and as he said he was feeling a little lonely on the Mailing List, so I hope you’ll be able to fix that.

We also reviewed the results of the IRR community consultation, and we directed the president to include those services in his planning activities.

With regard to Number Resource policy, we adopted things that you recommended. The NRPM editorial changes, we adopted coming from the AC. We adopted a Draft Policy, 2014‑6, to remove the operational reverse DNS text. We adopted Draft Policy 2014‑21, that was a modification of the CI pool size, per section 4.4. And finally, with regard to the Internet number registration system and Internet coordination, we’ve been discussing like everybody else the IANA stewardship proposals which continue to evolve even as we speak and will evolve even more presumably in the Dublin meetings at ICANN or the ICANN meetings at Dublin.

We appointed an interim Number Resource Organization representative to fill an empty slot. And finally, that’s it. That’s actually all that I can report to you at the moment. Happy to answer questions if you have them. Otherwise I think we’ll go into open mic.

Kevin.

Kevin Blumberg: Kevin Blumberg. Just one question in regards to the diversity appointment that you’re considering.

Vint Cerf: Kevin, can I ask your indulgence for a moment. I’ve now proven to myself that the audio doesn’t work for me. So hang on.

Fire when ready, Gridley.

Kevin Blumberg: The diversity appointment that you’re looking at – my first question is I’m hoping that the nondiverse Board that is looking at a diverse Board would not be appointing the diverse person for the diverse Board. That would be a little more diverse in terms of trying to pick its selection.

Paul Andersen: I don’t actually understand what’s the concern.

Vint Cerf: I think, if I could interpret Kevin’s point, the point is that you would want input from more than the not‑very‑diverse Board on the appointment of a person to satisfy diversity. Have I correctly understood your point, Kevin?

Kevin Blumberg: Very much.

Vint Cerf: Your point is well taken.

Kevin Blumberg: The second question was diversity is a very generic team. Are you talking in the case of ARIN, geo diversity, racial diversity, political diversity, I’m not certain of –

Vint Cerf: Okay, I know these guys want to respond. I will get to you, but I reserve the right to respond to the question directed at me, John – as John levitates in and out of the seat.

So one answer is we think there should be more geographic diversity on the Board than there is now. And we’re not trying to force anything. We’re just saying that’s an observation.

And I also observe that there are many white males on the Board. And for me, coming from Google, where we’re intensely aware of diversity needs, this strikes me as a deficiency, which I hope we can remedy as well.

You may have other definitions of diversity that you think would be appropriate. But we are looking to make ourselves a lot more like the community that we are supposed to be serving.

Kevin Blumberg: For the ARIN organization, having at a minimum geo diversity is critical to support the region. So I look forward to seeing what comes out of it.

Vint Cerf: It, by the way, also will increase our credibility as an organization when we assert that our community supports what we do.

Okay. Are there any other questions? John, you were levitating, so it’s your turn now.

John Curran: So I’ll just say, given the size of the Board and the number of possible interests for diversity in terms of composition – geographic, racial background – it turns out to be fairly problematic because you can’t really allocate without having all sorts of strange things happen.

So at the end of the day the Board’s very aware of the desire of diversity, but thought a good first step would be to consider the ability to have an appointment of a seat.

Because of our bylaws, you folks will actually see that process, meaning when I draft it for the Board to consider, it first has to go to the community to suggest how that will be done because it’s a bylaws change. I’ve been directed to draft that. That will be in the next two months, you’ll see it, and the Board will see it in January.

So the question of what process – you’ll have an open opportunity to comment, what you think should be in the bylaws as a process or what should back stop the process before the Board makes the appointment, because this will be coming up for consultation in the next month.

Paul Andersen: Paul Andersen, I lead the governance committee as well. Certainly, as Vint mentioned, we’ve started the process to allow the Board to intervene and appoint someone. But I think our hope is that it can be organic.

And we’ve looked at some other ways that we can increase that, including, at least as far as the geographic, we’ve tweaked the Fellowship Program significantly so that we’re hoping we can get more people here and more involved, because as you know once you get people here a few times, we get them hooked, and hopefully we can expand the base that way as well.

Vint Cerf: So letting the normal processes of nominations and elections solve the problem.

Paul Andersen: Yes.

Vint Cerf: Take one more question from –

Cathy Aronson: Cathy Aronson. My suggestion to that would be perhaps having more criteria, perhaps, that the Nom Com might use to select candidates for the Board, because that seems to be nonexistent and ambiguous at best. Perhaps maybe that would help.

Vint Cerf: So I actually think that we try to provide to the nominating committee each year criteria that we think would be helpful to their task.

Cathy Aronson: But also for the public that’s voting to know what that is. So that as they’re choosing their candidates, perhaps you need someone with more financial background or someone from another region, or you know some sort of – because that’s not known to the people who are voting, so people tend to pick the people they know.

Vint Cerf: Thank you. That’s a great idea and I will take that on board as a recommendation. Thank you.

Paul Andersen: I think that’s also – it’s an idea that’s been looked at, whether or not there is feeling for the community that the community would like the feedback from the Board or what to the voting membership itself.

Because I’ve also heard the view: We don’t want any influence; we just want to pick on our own criteria. But if there are people that support that, that would be great.

Vint Cerf: I think Cathy’s idea is a really good one. Go ahead on Microphone 1.

Roosevelt Lewars: I must say this is democracy at its best, and I’m loving it. I’m from the Caribbean, University College of the Caribbean. I had concerns as well as it relates to diversity, and the scope in which ARIN, the distance in which it covers, as a global body. And so diversity definitely is good.

The word “review,” though, I have a little issue with that. Review, just to look over or just to see, yeah, in terms of implementations. Well, Mr. Curran, you had addressed that, all right. You’ll be putting forward a policy.

Vint Cerf: Which would be then examined by this community.

Roosevelt Lewars: Okay. That’s –

Vint Cerf: Because as he points out, in order to introduce anything, in particular, if the Board were given the power to make an assignment for diversity purposes, that would be a bylaw change. We haven’t discussed that with you yet. You will certainly get a chance to comment on that if that’s the path forward.

Roosevelt Lewars: That’s great. Thanks a lot, thanks a lot for the opportunity to be here as a fellow, of course. Good afternoon, everyone.

Vint Cerf: Thank you very much. Louie.

Louie Lee: Hi, Vint. Thanks. Hi, everyone. Louie Lee, Equinix, last day.

Vint Cerf: Really, no kidding. Where are you going?

(Laughter.)

Vint Cerf: Go ahead.

Louie Lee: Whatever you might ask or display for diversity for a candidate you might also want it in your questionnaire to say how you might want to differentiate yourself in terms of div – you know. That way you don’t have to try to capture every category. Let them express themselves.

Vint Cerf: Yes, a very good idea. Thank you very much, Louie. All right, I don’t see any other questions. So, John, let me turn this back over to you.

John Curran: Thank you, Vint.

(Applause.)

Open Microphone

John Curran: We’re coming to the end of the meeting. The last item is the open microphone. The microphones are open for any other topic you’d like to bring up. Yes.

Vint Cerf: It’s Vint again from Google. I just had an idea that someone else suggested over lunch. I had kind of facetiously said why don’t we have one of those things where you pull a number so it doesn’t matter what microphone we’re on.

What if we did an app on the mobile that lets you say I want to talk. And the thing will click through and tell you when it’s your turn – you don’t have to wait behind the microphone.

John Curran: We can do that if everyone wants to use a mobile.

Cathy Aronson: It’s a great idea. They tried to do something similar at IETF and somebody hacked into it and then took it over.

(Laughter.)

And it was really entertaining. So if you want, maybe we can make it so that doesn’t happen. But it was super funny.

John Curran: Good to know. We will look into queue management. I’ve never found the queue management to be particularly difficult. In fact, the numbers this time around were extremely helpful. I don’t know who came up with that.

But if folks want a more formal basis, we can explore that. Certainly it’s been asked about before.

Brandon Ross: Brandon Ross, Network Utility Force. I’ll also point out there’s one for poll – there’s an app out there like that for polling, too, and I suspect it’s just as susceptible to hacking as well. But in case you want to look into it, instead of keeping your hand up for so long. They seemed interesting but it definitely seems like those things can be gamed.

John Curran: There’s also an empowerment question. I just want to point out we do have people who participate who may not have access to a smartphone, may have a disability, may have a challenge, and we can’t all presume all of us have the same background, same tools, same equipment. So we need to have a balance in what we do.

Okay, the microphones remain open.

Sandy Murphy: Sandy Murphy, PARSONS. Well, I’m here and I’m at an RIR meeting. So I feel compelled to request a statement about the status of a Global Trust Anchor for the RPKI.

John Curran: Wow, that’s a great question. So let’s talk about that briefly. As people know, each of the RIRs for RPKI have their own Trust Anchor. It would require all five RIRs to agree to participate in a Global Trust Anchor to have a Global Trust Anchor.

We’ve had discussions in each of the RIRs. And in some of the regions it’s been noted that this is a particularly challenging item, politically, because it creates a single point that if everyone were to utilize the Global Trust Anchor, whoever operated it has the ability to create operational impact depending on how everyone configures their RPKI and whether or not you actually do follow best practices. To the extent that people don’t, you would have one party that literally has the ability to dramatically influence the Internet.

Last time I checked, the RIPE region had not concurred with the establishment of a Global Trust Anchor. So I do not believe any work’s been done since a year ago December when that discussion came up.

Sandy Murphy: Okay. Has there been any discussion of doing something like a four out of six signature scheme instead of making it a one key - I don’t know if that would solve the political problems.

John Curran: When you said four of six, yes, M of N. I guess one of the questions that comes up with the Global Trust Anchor it is a little bit of a shimmer, a little bit of a goal that may actually not be worth the effort. If you’re establishing RPKI, the effort to establish the five Trust Anchors for the RIRs is not that much different than the effort to put in one Global Trust Anchor.

I’m not sure what the benefit is compared to the single point. But I think right now since we’re on hold we’ve been told that’s probably not going to advance in the RIPE region, it’s probably worth bringing up is there some M of N count much like the trusted community representatives the TCRs used for the DNS key. It’s also true – I believe it’s a great topic to bring up – about three months after the NTIA IANA Stewardship Transition, because it is true that right now that creates a certain overtone to the conversation might be different in a post transition environment.

Sandy Murphy: Appreciate that answer. Thank you.

John Curran: Front and center, microphone two.

Michael Joseph: I have a couple of points. I’ll do the first one then switch off. First thing I came up to speak about, I really appreciate a lot of the development effort that’s gone in. I know you’ve heard me here before in the past lamenting the lack of development effort, particularly software development effort, and the ridiculous backlog for the ASCP process. It still is backlog, but improving. So thank you for that.

I also note that we’ve had a recent discussion on fees. And it’s obvious that these topics are inexorably linked, because those fees contribute to ARIN’s revenue and therefore fund this type of development, ARIN’s ongoing operations. So on that point I’ll reiterate something I’ve said something in the past, which is I’m happy to see a continued effort along those lines.

And our message to the Board I think is by all means continue to fund this, and if during the examination of fees our fees go up, if that’s necessary to fund this work, so be it; we’re happy to pay more to see this type of work go forward. And based on your presentation, that seems quite likely.

John Curran: Good to know. Thank you.

I have a micro SD card. It contains the crown jewels. Come get it from me.

Mike Joseph: After the lost and found break, I’ll come back to my second point. On an unrelated topic, I’m happy to see that there was no PPC at this week’s NANOG, because that was absurd. But I am still saddened by the format of the PPC as a concept.

It was never proposed, at least when I had heard it, as a mini PPM. But that’s certainly what it’s become.

It’s become now we have four PPMs a year, technically down from five, during which two of them have no mandatory Board attendance, no mandatory AC attendance, and about half the turnout of a real PPM, and yet it’s a forum at which policy is discussed and advanced. And I think it’s a detriment to this community.

We don’t need too many PPMs. And I don’t think there’s any value served by trying to embed a mini PPM inside of NANOG. Quite frankly, if you look around the room, most NANOG people don’t show up. It’s just a subset of this room with a couple of people who trickle in.

So I think there’s more we can do to make it interesting for NANOG and also keep us on track as a community. I think we can do things like have you go back to giving a talk at NANOG about both the On Docket Policies and how to contribute to ARIN policy work that’s an operator focused talk, you or somebody else.

I think we can have a more ad hoc forum to take input from the operator community. We can talk about themes, but not specific policy proposals.

If we insist on doing some type of mini PPM then we should evaluate it in the context of making it a full PPM, but I don’t think that’s the right answer.

John Curran: I’ll ask two very precise questions.

Mike Joseph: I’ll give you two vacillating answers.

John Curran: Right. So your first question, you indicate it’s not a full PPM. And it’s not. But you somehow imply the lack of the full Board presence or the lack of the full AC presence invalidates it as a forum for considering policy.

And that’s a judgment that the Board has to make as to whether or not, when the AC sends us something, it’s last been through a NANOG PPC, whether we weigh the measurement of consensus that’s there.

You believe that’s not a valid measurement of consensus?

Mike Joseph: No. My input to the Board would be to disregard that kind of input. But I don’t think it’s that simple, because quite frankly you can’t disregard that input.

You can’t hold a meeting in which a policy is held up and discussed, in which a vote is taken, although I lament the lack of vote on drafts in general now, but when a vote is taken on something and then pretend that that didn’t happen and pretend that people are going to ignore it, whether it’s the Board or the AC.

And as a member of the community, and somebody who has participated here, somebody who has had employees come to ARIN, it is very difficult to justify sending people to so many events per year just to make sure that we have active participation in the policy process that we care so deeply about.

And I think it’s a detriment to particularly the smaller organizations who may not even have the budget to do that.

So I don’t think it increases inclusiveness, I think it makes it more difficult for those who have an interest in continuing to perpetuate policy development to actually do so in a meaningful manner.

John Curran: Understood. In particular, you don’t find remote participation in the PPC to be valid or equally valid to sending someone?

Mike Joseph: Without slighting the remote participants, one of which is my colleague, who is I think the most active remote participant this cycle, I would say that I think there’s a very limited involvement you can get from remote participation. I think we’ve seen that in terms of why we so many people in this room as opposed to jabber.

John Curran: And the final question is: The AC actually controls whether we have a PPC, what goes before the PPC, that’s content and so on, and has indicated in the past they’ve found it extremely valuable for getting work done in between these meetings and advancing policies.

Would you say they should not do that because of an equity issue of participation or it shouldn’t be held at all? I guess I’m trying to respond to the AC that says they find it valuable. Maybe less valuable this week when we’re meeting, but for the other two, they’ve found it valuable in the past.

What would you – what is your concern with them having the forum if they find it useful for advancing policy work?

Mike Joseph: To be blunt, the interests of the AC advancing their docket is not necessarily consistent with the interests of the community weighing in actively on policy development.

I appreciate the hard work of the AC. They work very hard, and they do represent the community, but the AC also has an interest in making sure that their docket moves forward, that they get policy either through or abandoned quickly.

And while that’s great as an agenda for the AC, as a member of the community, I care a lot more about making sure that there’s active participation in the ability to participate in a meaningful manner in these forums, which is why I speak at open mic and hopefully falling on the ears of the both and the AC.

John Curran: Very clear. Thank you.

Microphone No. 1.

Matt Petach: Matt Petach, speaking as a one time member of the program committee that spoke out very vehemently having a PPC the same week as the ARIN meeting was ludicrous beyond belief. I’m very happy we did not have a PPC this week.

However, I will say that to your point of travel being challenging for people, the October joint meeting is the ARIN meeting that I attend because it is the joint meeting.

I have inquired in the past about whether there would be the possibility of making two of the meetings joint. And I understand that somehow having two different prime numbers line up is a challenge.

I would love to see the two communities actually come to perhaps better alignment than picking two adjacent prime numbers. But doing away with any discussion of ARIN policies at NANOG at the other meetings, I think, would be a disservice to the community, because you would get a segment of the community that speaks up once a year, and I don’t think that would serve the community well.

I also think to the point of having multiple policy meetings in a given year – one topic that was mentioned earlier, with some trepidation is, oh, my God, it’s going to take way too long for us to actually get movement forward and it will no longer be of any use to the community. The world would have moved on by the time we actually get this policy moving forward.

Given that attitude and those statements at the microphone, I don’t think it’s fair to say that we were having too many opportunities for policy to move forward.

I think this community is in desperate need of being able to move policies forward relatively rapidly. The world changes quickly. And if we slow down the pace of policy, ARIN runs the very real risk of being left behind as the world simply says business is happening, business is continuing to happen, your policy may catch up in two years and you may tell us that we did the wrong thing, but guess what, as businesses we have to make decisions and move forward.

So I would support having some level of policy input at the other NANOG meetings, figuring out the right way of doing it, I personally am in favor of doing like a one‑day ARIN On the Road sort of thing at the end of NANOG rather than trying to like wedgy it in for those who are interested.

But this is something for you guys to work out. But I disagree strongly with Mr. Joseph on the “It’s too many, let’s get rid of them. "

John Curran: Thank you. Dan, you wanted to respond?

Dan Alexander: I just wanted to clarify that the one comment stuck with me about the goal of moving proposals through quickly. And that is under no circumstances one of the criteria that we use to evaluate policy proposals, because we’ve had proposals on our docket in my memory for two years in some cases that have gone on and on in discussion.

We did in the past have complications with the previous version of the Policy Development Process, where we ran into complications about bringing certain topics to a meeting because of the state that the proposal was in.

But with the current Policy Development Process that we’re operating under, we don’t have any such constraints, and moving things quickly is definitely not a goal.

John Curran: Got it. Okay. Microphone center front, two.

David Farmer: David Farmer, University of Minnesota, ARIN AC. While I agree very much with my colleague that moving things quickly isn’t necessarily a goal, we have been criticized in taking too long in the past.

So there’s a balance, and the PPCs have allowed us to move things forward when there is clear community consensus and allowed us to validate that consensus. And so I think they’ve been important and they’ve played a role.

Do I think we’ve got it right yet? No, but we’re trying. And please help us. It’s good to get feedback that we don’t got it right, but give us some ideas on how to make it better too and we’ll give them a try.

John Curran: Microphone 2, Kevin.

Kevin Blumberg: Kevin Blumberg, The Wire, ARIN AC. I think the part of the problem is the whole notion of advancing policy through the PPC. I want to talk about it for one minute.

Going from a proposal to a draft to a recommended is really on the AC. But as part of the process, we have to go from recommended to last call, and that is the biggie.

I would be very happy with the current format and the current state of the PPCs to not take – this is me personally speaking – to not take anything from recommended to last call, but I believe that the in-person discussion that goes on between the PPMs at the PPCs is invaluable.

There’s a hierarchy of discussion. An email is the lowest form of hierarchy. Having people in a room, in person, allows for three to six months of email discussion to be condensed into 30 minutes.

And that discussion and that ability to move drafts, not forward, but move the content into something that is malleable and palatable to the community is critical.

John Curran: Understood.

Microphone one.

Roosevelt Lewars: Roosevelt Lewars, UCC. Passing policies, that’s good. I have heard what my colleagues have said. However, my concern is the level of the percentage ratings in which these policies go through.

I’ve seen two votes thus far on two different issues and the percentage has been below 50 percent, yes? Been below 50.

Even if you minus the Board from it and staff members, you’d have around 60 percent at max.

I think we need to know what is happening with the other members. Is it that the ones who vote have that particular interest only or is it that these policies are supposed to benefit the entire community? If not, what is it that the remaining percentage has to say?

John Curran: Each party who comes forth is supposed to think about the value of the policies to the entire community. There are times when someone will be affected directly by a policy, and we do actually – particularly when the AC does its discussion – there’s actual conflict of interest discussion, where, if someone says I’m going to benefit, they take the effort to say that to their other AC members to make sure that’s clear.

But when you’re out here, you need to really be thinking about the fact that you represent an entire Internet community. And so that’s what you should be thinking about when thinking about the value of the policy.

Microphones remain open. Microphone No. 2.

Matt Petach: Matt Petach, quick follow‑up to that. Some hallway conversations have indicated that there are representatives from large entities who do not necessarily feel it would be appropriate for them to be doing a visible show of support for or against a policy without having discussed it carefully with their company.

And very often, when we’re discussing it in the room, we’re talking about potential changes to drafts.

I’m actually very curious to see what the results of the electronic, anonymous no one can trace back that it was my hand in the air, will turn out to be.

That’s point one. Point two, while the smartphone app idea sounds really cool and all, I would have to object, because it would totally invalidate my ability to just hop to the emptiest mic possible. That’s my view.

John Curran: So noted. The queues remain open. No application is required.

Kevin Blumberg: Kevin Blumberg, The Wire, ARIN AC, I really enjoyed the longer date for this meeting, having it go until 3:00 p.m.

The one piece of feedback that I’ve gotten from a number of NANOG participants was: Oops, didn’t know. Flight already booked. So I think personally for next year, I would love for you guys, irrespective of the number of draft policies, fill up, have a full day, it’s been great, but letting people know would like be really letting them know.

John Curran: Excellent point.

Number two front and center.

Brian Bullard: Brian Bullard, Wells Fargo, speaking for myself.

I agree the mobile app sounds really cool. I have it myself, but not everybody has the means and even the access to do so. So if they’re on a corporate device, they may not be able to install apps and do things of that nature.

So I vote we keep it old school, raise your hands, and stand in line.

John Curran: That’s your view even if it had in‑app purchases that lets you jump to the head of the queue.

(Laughter.)

John Curran: Thank you. Allows in‑app purchases. Okay. Queues remain open. No app yet. Queue No. 2.

Devon Trautwein: Just more of a question for you guys. What have you taken from these meetings? What have you taken from these meetings? What have you people from our discussions and any insight.

John Curran: Let me answer it respectively. The AC actually gets the discussion notes and the show of hands, and that’s going to shape what they do, and they’re going to be doing that in about an hour. So they get a lot immediately and fresh.

The staff ends up with a pretty extensive feedback, the surveys - remember to fill out your surveys - your surveys plus what we note during the meetings. We do a debrief after the meeting.

I have a note card of all the things that the Board said they’d follow up on, and those all get all rolled into proposed agendas for the Chair and Vice Chair.

So in terms of specifically, I don’t know, is there a specific topic you want to know what we took away on.

Devon Trautwein: More was there any standout moments during these three days or that –

John Curran: I think it’s been a great meeting.

Vint Cerf: Just to respond to this from my point of view as Board chair, these meetings are incredibly helpful, because they give me a much better sense of what people are concerned about, how they think we might want to deal with issues arising and I have to say the shifting views of how we manage and allocate IP address space has been very revealing. I think especially at this meeting.

So for me this is really important temperature taking activity in addition to just listening to specifics that people raise about particular policies.

John Curran: Excellent. One other thing you should know is that we actually have shifted how the Board meets during these meetings.

It was noted at one of the last meetings that we take the Board and we exile them away from you so you can’t talk to them at all. We’ve changed that. We do have a breakfast where we do get together.

But we’re trying to make sure that the Board is able to get out and during lunches and during the morning breakfast to the extent possible be able to talk to more people, too. It’s important to have that contact and hopefully that gets more away from the meeting.

Devon Trautwein: With the policies and everything, do you feel like it was just a little snippets of information that were helpful, any larger chunks?

John Curran: It’s all been invaluable. I think we’ll see what the AC does with the policy development work.

Thank you. Microphone No. 1.

Leah Symekher: Hello, my name is Leah Symeker, and I’m with ICS, Internet Systems Consortium, and also the San Francisco Bay ISOC chapter. I’m here on the fellowship sponsorship award and I want to thank you ARIN for that opportunity. And I just wanted you to know how you follow up with the Fellows after we go back to our own homes.

I’m lucky that I’m here. I’m in the US, and working with ISC and being president of that chapter in Silicon Valley I have maybe greater access, and also having had a great mentor, Cathy Aronson, I’m sure we’ll be friends for like forever. I can always bug her for assistance and follow‑up.

But for other Fellows, how do you help them continue sharing and maybe implementing and applying the experience here. That’s my question.

John Curran: We encourage all the Fellows to take what they’ve learned here, make other people aware of what’s going on in the process. If any of the Fellows would like to get up say what they are going to do after the meeting and how they’re going to share, that’s great, and a great opportunity to do that now.

I can’t compel the Fellows to get up.

Generically I recommend all fellows reach out to those people who might have some awareness of ARIN and explain what they saw, what they did, hope flip get more people interested.

We’ve dramatically expanded the Fellowship Program to help get more people interested and aware of what we do. Hopefully that means if not you, someone you talk to will be applying for next year’s Fellowship Program.

Leah Symekher: I would say Susan Hamlin and Richard Jimmerson have given me ideas and an opportunity to talk to them.

Susan Hamlin: If you have specific ideas and recommendations of things we could do to follow up, I’d be interested, so send me an email.

Leah Symekher: Absolutely I will and the other Fellows as well. Thanks.

Vint Cerf: Just one thought occurs to me. We try to help fellows come, and compensate the cost of their being here. But it’s my hope that once you’ve been here you’ll find it valuable and you’ll find ways of coming back similar even if we’re not able to defray all the costs.

John Curran: Thank you.

Leah Symekher: Absolutely I agree with that and I would definitely find my way back.

John Curran: Excellent. Microphone 1.

Roosevelt Lewars: If I may add, you’ll be in Jamaica for next ARIN meeting. And I can tell you from now that everything that the Board has presented I would love to be there to hear how it is that it has moved forward, and hopefully I could see you in Montego Bay.

John Curran: I’ll note the Fellowship Program we made a conscious change not only to expand it but there are times the person best to come to a meeting may be the person from the same region. You can actually reapply and may be chosen for a Fellowship again. It’s not precluded. It used to be under the guidelines but the Fellowship Selection Committee asked us to open it up.

So if not, if you can’t make it, someone else from your community. Or no one else from your community you can be again.

Roosevelt Lewars: Another thing, being that I’m from a university college, it would be good if I could have some of my IT department, the members, even the students to join in.

John Curran: We would love to see them.

Kevin Blumberg: Kevin Blumberg. So I have suggested in the past to a number of operators in much smaller communities who had dealt with ARIN but had no clue on the fellowship to send in their application, especially lamenting the small number of people that even apply in the first place.

And I would suggest that while I appreciate ARIN sending out all the emails talking about the Fellowship Program and putting it on your website, this room is the biggest proponent of the Fellowship Program. And everybody here should think long and hard about one or two people every year that they can suggest applying to the Fellowship Program.

Unfortunately, I’ve been on the Fellowship Selection Committee, and I’ve seen some wonderfully bad, have nothing to do with our community kinds of applications, and I’ve seen some beautiful applications. I’ve seen some wonderful fellows over my years mentoring.

So, please, everybody else in this room think of one or two people, especially in smaller regions or smaller sectors, and let them know that they’ve got – if they were a betting person, it’s good odds.

John Curran: Understood. If you can’t think about someone to nominate for the Fellowship Program. If you don’t know anyone at all, come talk to me. We’ll talk about your neighbors, your friends, your coworkers. I’ll help you choose someone to nominate. But, please, everyone knows someone. So let’s get more volunteers for the program.

Microphone 1.

Glenn McKnight: Thanks, John, I’m one of the fellows as well, and I’m taking you up on your suggestion.

For example, how we actually informed Leah that the program actually exists is we have a – NARALO signed an MoU with ARIN the last year. The last two years we had people from NARALO that actually participated as well (indiscernible) was the year before, and we had another person. And each year we keep telling the NARALO leadership in North America to get involved. So I think we’re moving the relationship along, which is really good.

My second set of influences through the Public Interest Registry as well as an advisor, plus with the Internet Society – we have chapters and more chapters are coming, we have a list which I – again, I tell as many people as possible. So well I’ve told people, each year I didn’t get accepted because there was other people that jumped the queue on me.

But I finally got here. So I really appreciate it. The other group I’d really like to encourage and poke is the people with the ISOC disabled chapter, Mark Ervin and gang. Love to see more people of the disability community here as well.

Paul Andersen: I know I escaped for a second. Did you explain what NARALO is for those that didn’t know, the acronym is? Acronym is not always good for everybody.

Glenn McKnight: NARALO is one of the at‑large structures that are part of ICANN. And what myself and Joe ran off this morning, we spoke to 300 students with the computer science department at McGill, which we have charts here. And we actually pointed out to the students that ARIN was going on here today as well.

Sorry, one more thing. Joe Catapano and Chris Mondini, the GSC that’s the vice president of ICANN, is doing serious outreach to colleges and universities. I’ve created a very extensive list of where we’re going in North America in the next year, including my friend from Puerto Rico. So I’ll share that list.

John Curran: Excellent. Thank you. Center front.

Cathy Aronson: Cathy Aronson again. I’m on just because of talking about fellowships. I’m on the NANOG fellowship committee. And NANOG also has fellowships. And they’re a little bit different in that it’s not so much outreach in the same way ARIN’s are but they’re available and we get almost no applicants for those fellowships, and there are a lot of them.

So if you know people who are also involved in network operations in some sort of way, it would help their community to be involved in network operations. Please – we get almost no women and we have a women’s fellowship for ABA. So, anyway, there’s those two. So when you’re plugging one, plug the other, because we need applicants.

John Curran: We can try to get out more information about NANOG’s opportunities in our outreach. We’ve not been doing that to like our partners and Raul, but we’ll include that in, because it’s a good point. I hadn’t thought about it. NANOG doesn’t have necessarily the relations that we do with some of the outreach for. Excellent.

Mic one.

Louie Lee: Louie Lee. So ICANN has a very robust Fellowship Program, but their fellows are only hearing half of the story, because they’re attending only ICANN meetings. Do people still want me to keep asking them, pushing them to help us expand our Fellowship Program here by contributing financially or otherwise? Because I can stop. But I’ve been asking them for years to do this. And nothing’s really moved forward.

John Curran: I guess that’s an interesting question. I wasn’t aware you were asking them.

We have ample financials and reserves. If the Board tells me to expand our Fellowship Program, we don’t need to per se raise fees to make that happen.

So I’m not saying there’s anything amiss with it. But I think we need to be coordinated in how we do this. We’ve just expanded the Fellowship Program. We’re going to run see how it goes for a few meetings, but if it turns out we want more, then maybe more than one choice would be to do that.

I would be hesitant to say that we want funding for additional fellows here without knowing how that process would work, I guess. We know how our Fellowship Program works.

Louie Lee: To say they’re giving them a chance to come to our meetings.

John Curran: The most ironic part is we have very good remote participation. And to the extent that someone wants to participate, you don’t have to be here to do that.

And so that’s another thing to help emphasize. Okay. Microphone 3.

Mike Hammett: Mike Hammett, Midwest‑IX, Fellow, first time at ARIN and NANOG. I have a wireless conference next week that I’m going to. I know ARIN’s going to be present. And I will definitely report to those. There will be approximately a thousand wireless operators at this conference. So I will tell them about this week.

I also have a podcast that is not huge but there’s a few hundred people that watch it from the fixed wireless community, and I will certainly spread the word there.

And actually before I even came here, I already had somebody else inquiring as to when the next meeting was so they could apply for the fellowship.

John Curran: Excellent. Good to hear. And I will see you next week at that. We should synchronize our messages. Ready? ARIN is out. Just repeat that. ARIN is out. Because that’s what we’re going to have to say all next week.

Okay. Microphone No. 1.

Leah Symekher: Thank you. Leah Symekher again with the Internet Systems Consortium in San Francisco Bay Area ISOC chapter. I want to say I’ve been here since Friday, and it was actually a great opportunity that we had all the three conferences happening one after the other. It’s allowed me the opportunity to experience the DNS ORG, which is a research‑based nonprofit organization that provides research reports on DNS.

So that was really great. And then secondly, of course, attending NANOG, which for me it’s pretty exclusively for our engineers in the company I work for.

Of course, it was totally overload of information, because I’m not an engineer, but it kind of helped me connect the dots.

So many times I felt like not the conference for me but it really gave me some pretty good insight. And then of course ARIN. This is really great. So they really flow very well into each other and so I would suggest probably continuing to do that where you have a week with all the conferences together so that people can travel, take time off work and go to other conferences but having it together, made it very convenient.

John Curran: Good to know. We do find people find it valuable for us to be with NANOG on some conferences because it makes it possible as people know.

Sometimes the reason we have people at one or the other meetings is because we’re adjacent to the other. So it’s worth doing.

We don’t know if we can do it a lot because it gets very complicated when you do it for more than one meeting a year. But we’ve done one meeting a year adjacent to NANOG. I’m glad it lets you go the full sweep of meeting this week.

Leah Symekher: I think once a year is good enough so people can just target that meeting.

John Curran: Excellent. Good to know. Center front.

David Farmer: David Farmer, University of Minnesota, ARIN AC. I want to applaud ARIN and all of the associated groups for the outreach that they’re doing and sort of the cross‑pollination, I think that’s very important.

So to Louie’s point, maybe not financial support but making sure that the people in ARIN’s Mailing Lists know about the ICANN possibilities and vice versa I think is an important thing to make sure it happens.

John Curran: Good point. Excellent. We can do more of it. We don’t want to inundate people with messages because a lot of us are on the same list you don’t want to get the same message five times.

David Farmer: How about one email with five different possibilities?

John Curran: Exciting to coordinate among organizations.

David Farmer: I understand.

John Curran: Let’s try to figure it out. We’ve not pulled it off with NANOG let alone any others. But we’ll talk about that.

I think we can do a little more and at least maybe create a way of people who are interested in those opportunities to hear about them.

Microphones remain open. I am going to close them shortly. Microphones are closing in 10, five, 3.14159 – two, one.

Paul Andersen: Another runout.

John Curran: Zero. Microphones are closed. This concludes our open microphone session. Thank you.

Closing Announcements & Adjournment

John Curran: I’d now like to close the meeting.

(Applause.)

Vote. It’s that simple. Please vote. And, yes, if you Google the ARIN election site you will find a link which was for some years back, which now redirects the same place so you’ll get there anyway.

Okay. Thanks to our sponsors: Telus and Videotron. Thank you.

(Applause.)

Our webcast sponsor, Google.

(Applause.)

And the break sponsors: CIK TELECOM, Belair, ColbaNet, and ServerHub.

(Applause.)

Okay. Don’t forget the meeting survey. You will get a link but you can also click on this, and fill out the meeting survey. It’s what we take away from these meetings in terms of improving the logistics and the dynamics of the meetings.

We will have a survey prize for those who enter. Okay. Thank you for being part of ARIN 36. We’ll see you again at ARIN 37 in Jamaica. Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

[Meeting adjourned at 2:45 p.m.]

Network Sponsor

Webcast Sponsor