ARIN XXI Public Policy Meeting Draft Transcript - Tuesday, 8 April 2008 [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.

Meeting Called to Order

MR. PLZAK: Okay, good morning. Hello. Okay, a few items. First of all, as I said yesterday at the close of business that we would be reordering the agenda, and that information has been posted on the website. An announcement has been sent to the PPML. In addition, a printed copy of the advised agenda was made available as you entered this morning. It looks like this. I’m sure you can all see that from where you’re sitting. If you didn’t get a copy, copies are available at the registration desk. So, well, you know, yesterday we were talking about what we were going to do last night and said we’re going to paint the town red. Well, we did. And we do have some evidence, and so I will briefly show you that. (Laughter)

MR. PLZAK: There are other pictures available upon request. Okay. So, anyway, reminder, Cyber Café, take a break. It’s a good place to get connected. You can watch some of the information (off mike) and to get information. Also, we are going to continue bombarding you with surveys. And we will continue to bribe you to fill out those surveys with prize drawings. Remember, you must be present to win. The help desks are open as shown. And remember, if you are a loser, you’re really not a loser because you will still be entered into a consolation prize drawing which is an Apple TV, so ooh.

SPEAKERS: Ooh.

MR. PLZAK: Ahh.

SPEAKERS: Ahh.

MR. PLZAK: Perfect. Okay. So, don’t forget. We have another Project X – Project X Live Demo at 1:00 p.m. It’s in here. Reminder of the rules. They’re coming up very slowly. They must have been out too late last night, as well. Anyway, we had a quite extensive discussion yesterday, and following these rules makes that discussion easier to contain. And the Chair will enforce the rules. So, at the head table we’ve got John, Bill, Scott, Matt, Lea, R.S., and myself.

Statement from Sponsor

MR. PLZAK: And so now a word from our sponsor. We’d like to introduce Thad Mazureczyk from WildBlue. And he’ll give us a few words.

MR. MAZURECZYK: Thank you, Ray. Members of the ARIN panel. Good morning, everyone.

SPEAKERS: Good morning.

MR. MAZURECZYK: Welcome to the 21st ARIN Conference and to the City of Denver. Hope you’re all having a great time at the conference here in the Mile High City. From the slides I just saw, it looks like you are. No one likes a longwinded sponsor, so I think I’ll keep it short, especially since I’m in engineering and not marketing. My name is Thad Mazureczyk, and I’m responsible for the engineering group at WildBlue Communications, which is a national space driven spot beam KA Band satellite Internet service. We have a growing business delivering broadband services principally to the rural regions of the Continental U.S. We at WildBlue are grateful for the opportunity to be a sponsor for your conference. The work you all do here is very important to the future of the Internet, and we’re glad to be able to play a small role in supporting your conference. We’d also like to thank ARIN for working with us as we launched and continue to grow the Wild Blue business. Since you have a lot of work to do, let me just wrap up by saying we at WildBlue wish you a fun, productive, and successful conference this week. And once again, welcome to Denver. (Applause)

2008-2: IPv4 Transfer Policy Proposal Cont.

MR. PLZAK: Okay. And so now on with the agenda. The first item of business is a continuation of the discussion of Policy Proposal 2008-2. Matt Pounsett will please come to the microphone, and John, I will turn it back over to you.

MR. CURRAN: Okay, folks, we’re opening the microphone for discussion of Policy Proposal 2008-2. I will be allowing about 45 minutes to an hour of discussion, at which point we’ll do some shows of hands to help the Advisory Council. I’d like people who approach the mic to limit their comments to about two minutes because we really had a lot of people, and we probably will have the same problem this morning. So, microphones are open regarding the Transfer Policy 2008-2. When we broke yesterday, we had nearly 10 people on the queue when I closed them and were endangering the social. This morning it’s the same policy proposal, and I just want to point out the microphones remain open. Yes, Mr. Darte.

MR. DARTE: Hi, I’m Bill Darte. I’m on the Advisory Council and represent Washington University in St. Louis. I think first of all that I’m for the general position that a transfer policy change to exist. That’s reluctant, however, because I basically don’t like the idea of doing it in general. But I think that it’s all about a set of signals that we need to send. If we don’t do something like this, it seems to me that we open ourselves up to calls from outside our group that we have advocated our responsibility and stewardship for these resources and to provide them as best we can to the community. And so, I think we need to do something to keep – to dampen any of that sort of criticism. I’m not sure that we need to tweak this too much or to try to rationalize all of these issues, like deaggregation. Not that it’s not serious, but we have to recognize that we have a limited amount of control over what happens.

So, while I’m in favor of this, I’m not in favor of it in an unlimited sense because I think – one of my concerns is that if there are investment dollars to be made towards development, I wouldn’t want to send the wrong signal to the development community and say, you know, gee, if you’ve got limited dollars and you can develop for the v6 world or the v4 world, look, they seem to be saying that v4 is going to be perpetuated. And so I need to make my investments there. Rather, I would like to see people take a queue from our activity here that says v6 really is the world that we need to populate with in the future. And so, while I think the transfer policy ought to go into place, I don’t think it ought to be necessarily too critically crafted. And we out to sunset it and basically say five years, seven years down the road it ends. This is a process of transition. This is a way to help folks who haven’t embraced this notion, haven’t worked it into their business plans or their architectural plans. And so that would be a signal that this – the v4 world is not the world of the future. And so that’s what I think about it.

MR. CURRAN: Thank you. Any response?

MR. POUNSETT: No.

MR. CURRAN: Center microphone.

MR. SCHILLER: Bill, could you stay at the mic for a second? Jason Schiller, Verizon Business, NRO NC. I just wanted to respond to something that Bill said about sunsetting this particular policy. Oh, in general, I think transfer policy is a good thing. And specifically 2008-2, I think I’m warming up to it. With regards to sunsetting, though, I think what I wanted to point out is two things. First, any policy can be revoked by the ARIN membership at any time, obviously. But secondly, if we really do think that v6 is the future and at some point it’s going to be widespread adopted with critical mass, won’t that just sunset the transfer policy anyway? If the majority of the Internet has migrated to v6, then with the exception of a few people that are really shoehorned into imbedded systems that they can’t get a v6 stack in, I would assume that v4 addresses would become nearly valueless.

MR. CURRAN: Bill, do you want to respond?

MR. DARTE: You know, the law of unintended consequences is always in my mind. And while I would hope that your prognostication would be exactly what would happen, I think we can, in fact, accelerate that by being quite explicit about – I think the sunset clause, you know, just like we can change policies, you could extend the sunset, too, couldn’t you? So, to me it’s all about sending signals. And the sunset clause sends a very clear signal, I think, and explicitly, that we see this as an interim transition mechanism.

MR. CURRAN: Just to be clear, Bill. As written, without a sunset clause you would still be in favor for a lax transfer policy?

MR. DARTE: I think we have to be from a geopolitical stand.

MR. CURRAN: Okay.

MR. SCHILLER: Bill, just one other question. Do you think it would also – would it also help for the Board, for example, to make some sort of policy stating that we believe that for the future of the Internet the right thing to do is to adopt IPv6 similar to what they’ve done in the past?

MR. DARTE: Yes.

MR. SCHILLER: But specifically pointing out that the transfer policy is intended to help with this transition.

MR. DARTE: Absolutely. Applying the principles of stewardship, if ARIN, a nonprofit corporation allocates Internet protocol resources, blah, blah, blah, blah, consensus based policies facilitates the advancement of the Internet through information and education outreach. And I think that is the second and more important phase of our future than this policy.

MR. CURRAN: Okay, thank you.

MR. SCHILLER: Thank you.

MR. CURRAN: Okay, microphones remain open. Far right side.

MR. DURAND: Alain Durand. Commenting on the previous point. In the press articles it was saying that because of transfers there would be (off mike) space in v4 to sustain the next five years. First, questioning the need to move to IPv6. And a lot of people who read the press thought that it was (off mike) so I’d like to be very, very careful in the signals that we are sending through this policy.

MR. CURRAN: Okay, Alain, as the policy is written today, would you be for it, against it, or undecided?

MR. DURAND: As of today I would be against. I may change my mind a few months from now.

MR. CURRAN: Okay, thank you. Microphones remain open. Center rear microphone.

MR. OBERMAN: Kevin Oberman, ESnet. Against the policy as currently written. The statement that was made that the policy can be changed is a valid one. But in a world where markets and network operation activities can happen very fast, ARIN does not pass policies very fast. I think you have to be very conservative in any policy you write in this area. Because once it gets out of hand and the genie is out of the bottle, changing the policy may become utterly meaningless at that point. So this requires, I think, a lot more discretion and care than a lot of the types of policies ARIN deals with.

MR. CURRAN: Okay, Mr. Woodcock, do you want to respond?

MR. WOODCOCK: I think my main issue with this policy is just the one that Tom brought up yesterday, which is that it bundles many different fairly unrelated concepts together into one omnibus kind of policy. I think that it’s a complicated enough situation and there’s room for reasonable debate on many of these individual points. And I think that we’re only going to get the best consensus judgment of the community on all of those points if we have a chance to debate them individually rather than trying to have the AC put together a big package of them and squeeze it through the very narrow bottle neck of a community approval or disapproval on the package as a whole.

MR. CURRAN: Okay, thank you. Front center mic.

MR. LEIBRAND: Scott Leibrand, ARIN AC, Internap. One general point that I think we need to all keep in mind: Human nature is that we consider inaction to have less impact than action. I think in this case it’s actually the opposite. So we all need to stop and think what are the impacts of inaction here. And really consider whether that would be better than action. So that’s just a general keep that in mind. To Bill’s point, I really would like to see some real discussion and proposals about things that we can do other than a complete transfer policy that can stand on their own to the degree that we can actually implement them. As I see it, as soon as we start going down the transfer policy route, unless we have a number of the restrictions that are in this proposal, we open ourselves up to a lot of negative, unintended consequences as I’ve elucidated in my opinion about unrestricted transfers that I see coming out of APNIC. So, I would love to see specific proposals of either subsets of this transfer policy that we can do that would be good and useful on their own, or some people think that there are things that we could do to provide incentives without a market. And I’ve seen one proposal on that that I don’t think is viable. I’d love to see others that might be more viable. But I just haven’t seen a good alternative to the transfer policy yet, and I don’t think doing nothing is a good alternative.

MR. CURRAN: Okay, Matt, comment?

MR. POUNSETT: Yeah, I wanted to comment on what Bill had to say as well. I think it would be nice if there was a way that we could take a series of simpler steps. But I’m not sure I see a way to do that. Similar to what Scott said, I think, as soon as we do anything in this area, we have to do more than just the very simplest thing for basically the same reasons he said. If we do anything without some complexity in restrictions, then we open ourselves up to a pretty bad situation, I think.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Bill, myself, then Lea.

MR. WOODCOCK: Yeah, I would fully agree with the premise that doing nothing is our most dangerous course of action. And I am by no means suggesting that this is a simple situation that is best addressed with a minimalist response. What I am suggesting is that I believe it’s a complex situation and I believe it’s too complex to be able to give a good yes or no answer to a large bundle of propositions without those propositions being debated individually in addition to, or prior to the whole thing at once. And I agree that there’s a lot of work here, and I’m certainly not trying to say it’s all work for the AC.

MR. CURRAN: Let me respond first and then Lea is next in queue. Along the lines of attempting to create policy that would be supported by many, and at the same time get debate on policy elements that might have issues, anyone in the room who isn’t for the policy proposal but knows of a chance and modification that would let them support it, that would be a good thing to bring to the microphone. Because that’s most helpful to the AC in considering whether small changes would help and what the degree of consensus on those are. So if you are on the fence on this policy proposal but know a change that would let you support it, I really encourage you to find the microphones. Okay. Lea and then the front mic.

MS. ROBERTS: Hi, I’m Lea Roberts from Stanford University and also on the ARIN AC. What Bill said, absolutely. I think personally I believe it’s necessary to have a transfer policy, but I think this one, I’m against it as it’s currently written because it’s just way too nitpicky and complicated. And what Bill said, you know, made me think that the way the policy is written now, it only takes effect when the IANA free pool is depleted. So, you know, you can actually build on or modify the policy all the way up till that time. So it’s entirely possible that we could start with a very simple, you know, we are going to allow a relaxed transfer policy and then as Bill says kind of build on the various pieces that can accomplish community consensus. So I think that’s a great suggestion. Thanks, Bill.

MR. CURRAN: Okay, front center mic.

MR. SCHILLER: Jason Schiller, Verizon Business, NRO NC. With regard to Bill’s point about the omnibus bill before us in the house, I think that, yes, there are a lot of amendments to this bill and that people may have some – there may be some piece of the policy that they disagree with. In all, they might think that the transfer is good except for this one particular restriction. So I think it is important to look at the restrictions individually. However, I don’t think it’s as simple as simply looking at the restrictions individually because if you considered a transfer policy that had only any one of the restrictions named, certainly a lot of people who might generally be for it might be against it in that case. So, I think, yes, we have to look at each of the restrictions individually to see what we like about them and what we dislike about them. But then we also have to take a step back and look at the policy overall and make sure that we have enough of the right restrictions of the right type. So, I think in a sense, yes, we need to break it down and talk about them individually, but we also need to talk about the individual restrictions in combination with each other.

MR. CURRAN: Okay.

MR. SCHILLER: In response to John’s question about what would you like to see in this policy to make it more desirable, I’ve been thinking long and hard about this. And from comments of what R.S. has said in the past and what Edelman has said and some other comments about – that there has to be deaggregation, I think that there are maybe two things in concept that might help me with the transfer policy. And one is if we can make sure that if there is a market, that larger blocks on a per address basis are more expensive than smaller blocks. I’m not sure how we could manufacture that behavior. Certainly people that have a better understanding of economics and free markets, I would encourage to comment. And the second thing would be is if we could encourage people that are vacating space but need to keep some piece of it for their own use, if we could somehow make it beneficial to them to actually remember and give up the entire space as a single aggregate, I think that would go a long way to swaying me more in support of 2008-2.

MR. CURRAN: Okay.

MR. SCHILLER: So two comments. One, can we make sure that large blocks are more expensive than small blocks per unit? And two, can we encourage people to renumber out of space if they need to so they can give up an entire aggregate?

MR. CURRAN: Got it. Okay. Center rear microphone.

MS. ARONSON: I’ve got to wait for the mic. Cathy Aronson, ARIN AC. I’m not in favor of this proposal as it’s written because of the same things that Lea expressed. That I think it’s cumbersome and difficult to implement. I think there should be a minimum allocation size, and I think that people should be able to get what they need. And they should be encouraged in some mechanism to get a block – contiguous block of the size that they need. And I think that I’m a little nervous about the six month requirement to be able to get more space because if the only blocks that are available are /24s and I can only get one every six months, then I’m not going to get what I need. So, I think that we really need to make it so that people get what they can justify.

MR. CURRAN: Okay, thank you. Response or – microphones remain open. Go ahead.

MR. LEIBRAND: Response to a couple of things, particularly what Bill and Lea said. My own personal opinion is that one of the ways that we ought to go forward with this is the way we did our 2005-1, the IPv6 for provider independent space, which is to put out a survey of here are all the points that we think are up for discussion. Please give us your opinion on each point. And also, please give us your opinion on the entire thing. And that seemed to work really well for 2005-1, which was a complicated policy, and got us towards a consensus that then had quite a bit of support. So, I agree with the comments of Bill and Lea that there are a lot of aspects of this that we need to consider. And I think that there are ways to do that, and I think we will go ahead and do that. So, with regard to C.J.’s comment about there not being enough space and the six-month restriction being a hardship, I can see that as a hypothetical, but remember that we are talking about a market here. So, if there’s a shortage, it probably means that’s because the price is too low. And so there are a number of possible outcomes that might not be ideal, but remember here that we are talking about a flexible system that will tend to adjust to avoid those outcomes, and by doing so will provide the incentives for people to participate.

MR. CURRAN: Okay, got it. Center rear microphone.

MS. AZINGER: Marla Azinger, Frontier Communications. Right now I have one foot on the fence and one foot on the against side. So I’m still in the decision-making process. I have gone a full 360 of my opinion of this. I actually nine months ago wrote what I thought could possibly be a change to the transfer policy myself to try to grasp really what would take effect, and I’ve gone from that to thinking, oh, maybe this is a good idea, to, oh, wait a second. If I think about issues my company itself and I would face as a core network engineer, one of the main things is I don’t want to get into a battle with marketing trying to sell my address space that I need to run the network. Because if marketing starts telling us that we’re going to start using NAT on a large network, I’m sorry, I’m not a NAT lover. I don’t want to get into a NAT discussion. But that’s just how I feel about how we want to run our network. And a transfer policy change could possibly make that very difficult for us. And the other thing is, you have to put a lot of exemptions. We’re all worried about nitpickies, which all of us hate nitpickies in a policy. However, when I went through and wrote it, I realized there needs to be a lot of exemptions written in so that we’re not, pardon the word, screwing people when they need to come and get address space to actually run their business. So, we kind of have to come to a grip if we’re going to do this that no matter what there are going to have to be a lot of exemptions written into it. That takes a lot of time because if you forget one, yeah, we’re going to have to come back and write another exemption in to change the current policy if this were to go into effect. The other thing I’m now starting to more lean towards is, okay, maybe we should work on this, try and make it as good as we can, but not implement it unless we see specific alarms that we’re concerned about go off. If we preset what we don’t want to see happen and we start to see that happen, then we take this document that we already wrote and we emergency implement it. I kind of more lean towards that now because we’re in a ‘what if.’ This is all a ‘what if’ scenario. And I would rather see some alarms go off before we implement something this extreme.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Far left microphone.

MR. LEWIS: Ed Lewis, NeuStar. I want to second what Scott Leibrand had said just a little while ago about doing surveys. I hate surveys, but I think in this case we have so many diametrically opposed principles we’re after that I think it’s worth identifying what’s the most important thing here. Like, I don’t like tying any dollar value to an IP address. I don’t like that at all. I think it’s a very bad road to go down. But I want to incentivize people to become more efficient with what they’ve already had already on hand. So I think we do need to decide what are the most important things to solve and avoid. As far as the policy itself, I’m very undecided. I’ve gone back and forth because each principle comes up to me, like, this is important, but this is important. And this is important and that’s important. It’s hard to come to saying yes or no on this because we have so many things we’re trying to fix at one time.

MR. CURRAN: Okay, thank you. Far right microphone. Owen.

MR. DeLONG: Owen DeLong, ARIN AC, speaking strictly on my own behalf. I don’t buy into the premise that not changing policy is necessarily the most harmful thing we can do. There are many, many unknowns either way we go in this scenario. And I don’t think that there is any way to develop enough data to really know which direction is more harmful. And I will point out that we have a great deal more operational experience with current policy than we do with what would be done by adopting such a radical policy. I’m still not convinced completely one way or another on this policy or on the idea of a relaxed transfer policy in general. But the more we look at the number of devils, and the number of details, and the number of moving targets and variables that have to be factored into any sort of change like this, and the fact that we don’t even know of the 12 different competing diametrically opposed targets that we need to try and optimize for, which ones should take precedence, and to what degree over the others. I’m just not sure this can be done in a way that doesn’t create more harm than good.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Center front microphone.

MR. SCHILLER: Jason Schiller, Verizon Business, NRO NC. It’s been stated a few times that this policy was the work of the ARIN AC over the course of many weeks, and many discussions, and many arguments, and is not necessarily the opinion of the AC in its entirety. I would like to hear some of the dissenting opinions from that group.

MR. POUNSETT: You’ve heard several.

MR. SCHILLER: Have we heard all of them?

MR. POUNSETT: Offhand I’m not sure.

MR. SCHILLER: I mean, certainly this output from the AC is great, and I’m glad that you guys got together and talked about these issues and came up with a policy. But if there were other things that were considered in your discussions that we haven’t heard up until now I would certainly encourage the other AC members to make sure that those opinions are heard by the membership.

MR. POUNSETT: Okay. Cathy, do you want to respond directly?

MS. ARONSON: Yes, I would like to respond to that. I mean, the reason that the AC as a whole, you know, all of us probably haven’t been up here speaking is because we want to know what you think. Okay, because we’re here to put together a policy for this community. And it may be that I’m against this proposal, but if you guys convince me it’s what you need, then I’m going to vote for it. So, you know, we come here to hear you guys. We want to know what you think. We want to know what you want. We want to know what you need. So, we want you up here, not us.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Far left microphone.

MR. TITLEY: Nigel Titley, RIPE NCC Board, but in this case speaking in my capacity as one of the authors of the RIPE transfer policy that’s currently going through our process. Yesterday, Jean Camp suggested that her predictions of the slow diffusion of IPv6 were largely due to the inability of the market to address long-term risks against short-term costs. The advantage of a transfer policy is that it can provide short-term gains that can be set against short-term costs, and, therefore, could actually bring IPv6 adoption earlier. That’s just the point I’d like to make. The only one thing I would say is that the ARIN policy, because it only kicks in when the IANA pool exhausts, to some extent works against this.

MR. CURRAN: Okay, good point. Would you – I know as a staff member – as a Board member of another RIR per se is not necessarily a place you want to take a position, but would you advocate that this body consider a different implementation date or a different effective time for this policy?

MR. TITLEY: Yes, I would suggest that that particular clause get struck.

MR. CURRAN: Okay, thank you. Far right mic.

MR. WILSON: Thanks. Paul Wilson from APNIC. One of the premises behind the transfer discussion is that transfers are going to happen. In fact, the transfers are already happening. Personally, I’m fairly convinced by that by seeing the behavior of companies – members of APNIC in our region. And I’ve also heard many casual comments from people in this meeting over some years now about how there’s a market that exists already. But then occasionally someone will say correctly what’s the evidence. They’ll suggest that there is little evidence, and I think that’s a problem as well. So I’m not sure that we’ve had too much discussion about this, but what are the mechanisms for actually finding out how much transfer of address space actually is happening outside of the system at the moment either by analysis of fragmentation and routing tables, trying to draw some conclusions from that, or else otherwise by a www.betareporting.com – for instance, an anonymous survey targeted and very well publicized where we might get people to confess to some out of policy use of address space and so on. I think since this community is going to be – and all the communities are going to be deliberating over this for some time, there is in that time plenty of opportunity available to start, you know, covering those bases as well.

MR. CURRAN: Okay, thank you. Do you want to respond, Bill?

MR. WOODCOCK: Yes. Paul, I absolutely agree that information would be extraordinarily valuable in the policy input process. But it strikes me that that’s of exactly the same nature as, for instance, debate over illicit drugs. Right? People argue about legalization or regulation or whatever. And everyone wants to know in that policy debate just what is the size of the illicit market. And you get widely variant claims about that in support of different positions. And I suspect we would fall into the same trap, rather than arguing about what our goals are and what policy could be developed to support those goals. I don’t want to fall into argument about what the nature of the illicit market is and how to control the illicit market. That seems to me like a losing expenditure of energy.

MR. WILSON: You sound like my father who once said that there’s nothing like facts to spoil a good argument.

MR. WOODCOCK: I’m not sure that the – I think it is very likely based upon observation that there exists some amount of illicit market. I haven’t the foggiest idea whether it’s getting larger or smaller. I believe it’s not too terribly big.

MR. WILSON: Just one final comment. We’re seeing fragmentation happening in the routing table in the use of addresses. The amount of fragmentation which comes from RIR allocations appears to be, according to Jeff, around 60 percent of the routing table. The long prefixes in the routing table are not any longer dominated by historical space. They’re coming from fragmentation of existing allocations. And that gives us some pointers to a community of people following the WHOIS database and all of the reliable information we have there. It gives us some pointers to actually approaching and asking people to respond. And the people who are involved in this sort of thing may be more motivated to respond anonymously about what they’re doing and why than the general population in drug use surveys.

MR. WOODCOCK: Is your worry that people are showing up to RIR policy development and making policy which is in explicit disagreement with their actual behavior, or is your worry that it is a different community of people that are showing up to the policy development process than who are crafting routing announcements?

MR. WILSON: Well, I don’t know. But the community of people who we’re referring to is a lot – is many sizes larger than the number of people in this room. So there are a lot of people who aren’t here.

MR. CURRAN: Our meeting locations probably are not attractive enough yet to get them to participate. Okay, Counsel, did you want to make a comment? No? Okay. Center microphone.

MR. DUL: Andrew Dul, Perkins Coie, speaking for myself. I’m just going to wrap up all my comments from this discussion into this list, I guess. There’s been a lot of talk about transfers already happening. I agree transfers are happening. They are illicit, if you want to call them that. Just because they are, I don’t necessarily believe that we 100 percent need to condone that with an open market-type arrangement. I think we need to look more strongly at how those effects will affect us long term. There’s been talk about forcing pricing on larger blocks versus smaller blocks. That doesn’t sound like a market to me, so I don’t know how that fits. And to echo some of kc’s comments yesterday, I actually think – I absolutely think we need more scrutiny, more academia research, more people looking at this than people in this room. No offense to Ben or anyone else. I think you guys have helped us as we can, but we need more people from outside this forum. From as many places as we can get, because this is a huge change for us. And as much as we can get. Specifically, I’d like to see what is – if we can get people to do some sort of modeling based upon assumptions. We realize that we don’t have hard data to support what a market would look like, but we can model that based upon assumptions. And we could make educated guesses about what might happen using percentages of people willing to do certain actions. And I’d like to see some work done in that area to see if we can come up with that. And results published in some sort of manner. I’d also like to see other types of research published in terms of liquidity, concerns about hoarding, why we believe hoarding would not occur under certain types of arrangements. How we can make sure that liquidity actually exists, such that we don’t have price fixing or those types of issues. I also have concerns about how transfers would delay IPv6 transition. That’s probably of paramount concern of how this policy would affect that in the long-term stability of the network, our communities, and our businesses. And lastly, I have concerns about how this policy could lead to more walled gardens by service providers, as well as more NAT throughout the networks. I think that’s it. Thank you.

MR. CURRAN: As the policy is written –

MR. DUL: I am opposed to the policy as written and transfer policy in general. I’m not convinced it’s the best move for this organization at this time.

MR. CURRAN: Okay, thank you. I was going to suggest something, but we’ll let Counsel – go ahead.

MR. RYAN: I wanted to oppose a particular issue that seems to be – I haven’t heard enough discussion either for the AC or for counsel to evaluate. The key difference between this policy proposal and the APNIC and RIPE proposals is that the ARIN proposal as written contemplates that a need would still have to be proven. That is, the person who – if I believe I read the policy correctly, indicates that the person who wants to avail themselves of the rule of the transfer market would have to demonstrate a need. And I think Paul characterized it as get a ticket from ARIN. And I think that’s correct. From a lawyer’s standpoint, the APNIC and RIPE proposal is very easy, because then we don’t have to worry about all of the mechanism of doing that. On the other hand, there’s a stewardship responsibility that has to be considered here. It seems to me that if the AC is going to be helped by the discussion from the floor, I’m picking this as an example. I’m putting before you to encourage that you discuss as a separate thread. But what we need to do is establish several of these separate threads and actually have people stop reacting globally to the transfer policy and react to these individual slices of it, particularly where the other regions may be contemplating a different policy. Let me make one comment then that’s unrelated to that. There’s been several lists – it’s like a repeated raising of the issue of will the United States Government as an example of a sovereign government within our region, would it be regulated at the Securities and Exchange Commission if we did something like this? I just want to review briefly that my judgment is in the United States, as one example of the 19 sovereign governments, or 20 in our region, the SEC would have literally nothing to do with a transfer policy related to IP addresses. The SEC regulates publicly held companies. They will not care about this. The consumer – pardon me, the CFTC, the agency that does look at commodity markets, will likely never look at this either. It will never be the kind of commodity that is addressed in the bundle of rights that we’re talking about on a floor of an exchange like they do. So that the government regulatory mechanisms here that will look at this is an antitrust review potentially by the Department of Justice or by the FTC. And I think we’re very, very comfortable in knowing, for example, with our Canadian counterparts and our Caribbean counterparts, how we would address those legal issues once you make a decision as an entity.

MR. CURRAN: Thank you. So Counsel raises in particular it would be good to have a discussion on the fact that the difference in this transfer policy compared to those in other regions is the need to go to ARIN and demonstrate the need for resources. Does anyone want to speak about that aspect being a particularly good or bad idea? So, Bill first.

MR. WOODCOCK: I’d like to say that this is the one really critical difference from my point of view. There are many other aspects of the policy that I consider to be necessary find tuning in order to make it work as well as it might possibly work. But this is the core of the policy that we have spent the last 10 years in a public forum having open debate about what the requirements for justification of address consumption are. That is, who gets to have IP addresses and why. And I think that it is vitally important that we continue to build upon that good work going forward rather than using, you know, vague notions about a free market that shouldn’t be regulated for some reason as an excuse for throwing out all of that really, really good, constructive work that’s been done over the years.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Far left microphone.

MR. LEWIS: I think getting the ticket from ARIN is the most essentially good part of this proposal. I think that has to be there.

MR. CURRAN: Center mic.

MR. DARTE: Bill Darte, ARIN AC. I also support the fact, the ticketing notion. I think anything other than that says that the course that we’ve trod all this time we’re abandoning. That it is free market, open, and it makes us irrelevant as far as I’m concerned. And so I support it fully and wouldn’t support any transfer policy that didn’t have that as a component to it.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Far right microphone.

MR. DURAND: Alain Durand. I’m not sure I’m for a transfer policy in general, but if we need to have one, I think that the need to have basis should be in it. I absolutely support this view because this in essence is why we are all here. This is the bottom up process that actually have proven to work over many, many years. And I don’t think that throwing in the towel and essentially letting the baby go with the bathwater is a good answer.

MR. CURRAN: Okay, thank you. Center rear microphone.

MR. DARTE: Bill Darte, ARIN AC again. I’m sorry, I meant to say that IPv6 as it emerges assuming so, we still have a stewardship responsibility for conservancy there as well, and we have spoken to that issue by, you know, addressing, you know, /56s as opposed to /48s as the minimum, et cetera. So I think it’s consistent with our future goals as well not to abandon this notion of need based allocations.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Microphones remain open. One of the items that also stands in difference between this policy proposal and those in the other region, not that that’s good or bad but it’s something to note, is that this one does specifically take effect upon completion of the IANA free pool. To that extent, there’s been comments that that may have positive aspects or not having to worry about this proposal till then, and negative aspects in that it can’t be utilized by someone who might want to desire to do so at that point. Does anyone want to speak on the start of the effective date of this policy proposal and the merits of that either way? Okay, I’ve got Bill and then far mic. Go ahead, Bill.

MR. DARTE: Bill Darte, ARIN AC. I think at the point of exhaustion of the IANA free pool is the appropriate, or in that range, is the appropriate time. Because, again, I think this policy – the signal that should be sent is that this is an emergency transitional mechanism. It’s not the future mechanism by which we see allocations and transfers and things working in the future. I see this as a signal that this is a transitional policy and that’s all it is.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Far left mic.

MR. LEWIS: Ed Lewis. I actually don’t like that. I’d like to have this policy take effect immediately to more quickly go to make more efficient use of what we’ve already given out and maybe delay depletion of the IANA free pool.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Far right mic.

MR. WILSON: Yeah, that was – Paul Wilson from APNIC. What Ed just said was one of the points I was going to make. I’ve had numerous discussions about this particular issue. The advantage of bringing this kind of policy in earlier is said to be both the provision of the alternative mechanism or means for those who want addresses to receive them from somewhere other than the RIRs and the IANA free pool. Another point being that the existing well-known pricing structure, if you like, attached to RIR membership will help to tell people what these addresses are actually worth. That will obviously be influential in a market situation. The other one would be a softer landing. So right until the free pool is exhausted and then to unleash this untested opportunity and facility for transfer of addresses is, to me, scarier than to allow it to happen in a more gradual fashion in the meantime. Thanks.

MR. CURRAN: Okay, Matt, do you want to respond?

MR. POUNSETT: Yeah. We actually considered a few different ways to approach the start date. We considered everything from, you know, immediate or, you know, as soon as we can get it running start date all the way to ARIN’s free pool exhaustion. And a couple of the competing interests that we took into account there were the earlier we started up, the more of a smooth ramp up we get in availability, price, you know, all those sorts of things. And – but on the other hand, the earlier we start up, the more likely we are to either give the impression that we’re trying to extend before a great deal, or actually actively extend it, neither of which we felt were really good things to do. So we decided eventually to go with IANA exhaustion because it was, we felt, a reasonable balance between those interests. But, you know, we really want to hear other people’s opinions on that.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Center front microphone.

MR. SCHILLER: Jason Schiller, Verizon Business, UUNET, NRO NC. So far we’ve heard two opinions, which is we should start it immediately or we should wait until depletion occurs. I don’t want to debate those two points, but I want to bring up a third point that was mentioned by Marla. I think that there are probably a number of people in the room, and I see Alain is at the mic over there, that feel that we don’t want to necessarily decide on, and support, and enact a policy based on a what-if scenario. I think that there are many people that probably would be in favor of a transfer policy rather than having transfers occur on the black market, but at this moment they may believe that there is no black market for address space, and maybe there never will be. There are other people that believe there already is a black market. The point I’m trying to make here is Marla brought up an interesting point, which is rather than get into a critical situation where emergency policy without the community has to be enacted, it would certainly be more beneficial that the community could agree on an emergency policy that could be enacted at a certain time given a certain event. For example, if someone demonstrated that there was a severe black market in addresses, let’s immediately enact this policy as soon as the AC and the Board can mobilize it. I’m not suggesting that that should be the event that causes the policy to be enacted. I’m not suggesting that there should only be one event. But I think that certainly that would help remove doubts from some people that are concerned about voting on a policy to be enacted based on a what-if scenario. And I think that they would be more comfortable if that what-if scenario actually started to play out and we enacted the policy. So I hope people would consider that.

MR. CURRAN: Would you – I want to get an idea of sort of which idea you’re advocating here. Would you like to see something in NRPM with some specific triggers attached to it? Or would you like to see discussion of policy that we never quite put in NRPM that’s just there and available for the Board to enact when they feel, or when the triggers that we’ve talked about come up?

MR. SCHILLER: I think either way is acceptable as long as it’s clear that the membership has decided that this is what the text of the policy should be, and these are the triggers, and this is how you measure the triggers. Whether that’s actually recorded in the NRPM or not, I don’t think is really that important, except that I think that the membership may want to revisit the issue in six months and maybe revise the triggers or revise the policy. So, I think it needs to exist somewhere where everyone can see it and maybe in the future revise it. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be in the NRPM. It can either be in the NRPM going forward or it could be an emergency policy that has support by the community that can be enacted at such time.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. I’m going to be closing the microphones. Approach the mics if you need to comment on any aspect of this policy proposal. Center front.

MR. FARMER: David Farmer, University of Minnesota. I would support a multi-trigger kind of idea because there probably are more than one reason we might want to do something like this. The one thing I would say, though, is we know that there’s a trigger that’s coming, so we can probably plan for that one. And this is going to be a big change, so we need to make sure that we ramp into this and make sure that we have enough time. Let’s say we guessed wrong on the mechanisms. We need to tweak it. It would be good that we have enough time to tweak it before we actually have to rely on this policy to keep things going. I’m not sure when the IANA free pool is exhausted is enough of a cushion for that because everybody is going to panic then. And so it would be good to have this enacted a little bit before panic sets in. Hopefully, enacting this doesn’t cause the panic, but, you know, that’s just an opinion.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Thank you. Microphones are now closed. Only people remaining in line. Far right microphone.

MR. DURAND: Alain Durand. I would like to remind us that about two years ago most of the industry was in denial about this incoming IPv4 completion. And things have changed. At the same time we talk about this transfer policies, but we are very early in this process. There are a lot of unknowns that we don’t have good answers for today. So I think that it would be wise to not implement it now, to keep the discussion going, and try to understand better what will be the consequences of implementing such a thing.

MR. CURRAN: Thank you. Far left mic.

MR. HAIN: Tony Hain, Cisco. I have a couple of different comments. One, I think that you should actually enact it right now if you’re going to enact it to work through the issues because it will take a while. And while the IANA cushion is not enough, I absolutely agree you probably don’t have enough time and enough cushion anyway. You should have started two years ago. The other point is the whole needs based justification, I think, needs some serious deep thought, because one of the things that this community has been very clear about is not making any statement about the routability of any prefix that may be assigned. But the entire point of need in a market driven address space transfer is to get it routed. So, you’re stepping across that line whether you intend to or not, so that’s why I think you need some serious deep thought as to exactly how that plays out. And that’s exactly why you need to move quickly as opposed to wait until later because if you wait and then realize you’re stepping across that boundary, you may not find a good, clean foothold to get across.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Good point. Center rear microphone.

MR. DARTE: Yeah, to reiterate – Bill Darte, ARIN AC. To reiterate, I think it’s all about sending signals, and I think the signal that should be sent now is that this is a problem that we should educate in our role to let people know that this is a problem, that we are not abandoning our stewardship or our role in supporting people’s acquisition of IP address resources. We should let people know clearly that we have a response plan in place and to keep that dialogue going as long as possible. But to clearly state that this is a transitional process.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Thank you. Far right microphone.

MR. HAZEN: John Hazen from Tellme/Microsoft. I want to say I’m in favor of having some need-based clause in the policy. And that if the criteria for the need-based clause is the same as the existing criteria for getting allocations from ARIN, then I see no detrimental effects other than possibly the philosophical thing of we plan to keep supporting v4 of implementing immediately rather than waiting for exhaustion. And I think the benefit of that is that, you know, there can be a gradual price setting or whatever, that while we have the ability to have allocations directly from ARIN and transfers, then I think there will be a smoother transition than trying to implement it when you’re already done.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Thank you. Center front microphone.

MR. LEIBRAND: Scott Leibrand, ARIN AC. I just want to caution about triggers, that we don’t put triggers that get triggered too late. Effectively the policy has a trigger right now, which is IANA exhaustion. I think that’s a good and valid trigger that gives us just barely enough buffer time to get this thing ramped up. I’m sympathetic to the argument that we should do it earlier. I think it’s dangerous to do it any later. So, I would caution against trying to put in triggers around black market formation or such like because if you wait until something like a black market is up and running, you’re behind the curve and you’re going to have a lot harder time getting people back out of the black market into the transfer policy than if you have that thing available from the beginning and they haven’t already committed themselves to using the black market.

MR. CURRAN: Understood. Microphones are closed unless you want to directly respond to that.

MS. AZINGER: Can I?

MR. CURRAN: We have two people who have stepped up to the mics. Mr. Hannigan, are you responding directly to this point?

MR. HANNIGAN: Martin Hannigan, Verne Global, undecided. And wake up, the black market is here.

MR. CURRAN: All right. Front.

MS. AZINGER: I do agree. The black market does exist. It’s not gigantic, though.

MR. CURRAN: Okay.

MS. AZINGER: And for markers, the triggers that Scott says – by the way, I am Marla Azinger again, Frontier Communications. I am on Advisory Council as well. Those are not the triggers that I agree with. Mine are more later. Not that IANA run out. Mine is I want to make sure that we’re not putting something in place because of a ‘what if.’ The black market may not become a gigantic monster. We’re assuming it will, or some are.

MR. CURRAN: Thank you. Okay, microphones remain closed. Final speaker far side.

MR. GRUNDEMANN: Chris Grundemann, Colorado Chapter of the Internet Society. I just want to say I’m against the transfer policy in general. I think from a stewardship standpoint the idea would be to promote IPv6 and not to promote IPv4. To do everything we can to push people to IPv6, and I think this is counter to that. I also think that privatizing or giving the impression of privatizing a private resource such as IP space, it sets a bad precedent and invalidating that with a dollar amount on IP addresses, I just don’t like the idea of it in general. I think that there is a black market, and I think that the only compelling strong reason I have heard for this policy is that there is going to be or that there is a black market. And I actually feel the opposite. I think the fact that there is a black market today is evidence that this policy is not necessary because there is IPv4 space available right now. You can go to ARIN and get space, but people are trading for it already. And so when it’s available and they can get it and they’re still trading for it, I don’t know that a transfer policy is going to stop that in the future. I think that the current system that’s in place of allocating numbers and of returning numbers that you’re not using should stay the same.

MR. CURRAN: Okay, thank you very much. Okay, that concludes the discussion. I’d like to thank Matt for your ample guidance. (Applause)

MR. CURRAN: So, the AC has an interesting job to do. And with some policy proposals it’s more interesting than others. And as several members actually said at the microphone, while they’re elected experts from the community, they also want the community’s input to make sure they’re following the guidance of you to get this job done. So, I’m going to ask for a few shows of hands. I’m going to ask them in a very particular order based on the discussion that we’ve had. And the first one will be on whether or not ARIN should continue work on a relaxed transfer policy. That’s the only question. Just should ARIN continue work on a transfer policy? And to the extent that someone says yes, then the AC will continue. And the extent that the consensus says no, the AC will have to take that into consideration. Again, this item on the AC work list was sort of prompted by the Board, so it’s not inevitable that ARIN needs to go this direction, but clearly there are other RIRs doing it.

So, I’m going to make sure my pollers are in position. I’m going to ask for a show of hands. It’s going to be everyone in favor of ARIN continuing work on a relaxed transfer policy. A vote of aye or raising your hand says ARIN will go that direction. So, on the issue of Policy Proposal 2008-2, in general, all those in favor of ARIN continuing work on a relaxed transfer policy, please raise your hand now. Nice and high. Okay. All those opposed to ARIN continuing work on a relaxed transfer policy, raise your hand now. Very high. Nice and high. Thank you. Waiting for the poll results. Okay, on the matter of continuing work on a relaxed policy, the transfer policy: Number of people in the room, 123; number in favor, 49; number against, 7. This will be provided to the AC for their use. We’ve discussed various aspects of the Policy Proposal 2008-2. Presuming that work continues on such a policy proposal, I’d like to know of the people in the room who was in favor of us retaining a need based qualification for recipients. So I’m going to ask for a show of hands on that topic. A vote of aye or raising your hand says that in a transfer policy proposal adopted by ARIN, you would like to see the need-based qualification retained in such a policy. A vote of no says you do not wish to see that retained. So, I’m going to ask for a show of hands on retaining a need-based qualification in our relaxed transfer policy. All those in favor of retaining a need-based qualification, raise your hand. Nice and high. This is actually the exercise benefit of your ARIN membership. (Laughter)

MR. CURRAN: Okay. All those opposed to retaining a need-based qualification for recipients, raise your hand. Okay. Thank you. Okay, 123 people in the room. No one managed to sneak out in the last three minutes. On retaining a need-based qualification, in favor, 54; opposed, 3. This will be provided to the AC for their consideration. Presuming ARIN should continue with work on a relaxed transfer policy and continue with a need-based qualification of recipients as currently stated, one of the issues that’s come up is whether or not this policy should begin sooner than the depletion of the IANA free pool, whether that should be considered by the Advisory Council. As stated, it begins upon depletion of the IANA IPv4 free pool. So, under the assumptions that ARIN continues work on this proposal and that a need- based qualification is retained, I’m going to ask for a show of hands for all those who believe that this policy should take effect sooner than the depletion of the IANA free pool. A vote of aye is a vote saying the AC should consider an earlier effective date. A vote of no is that it should be retained as is in 2008-2. So, let me make sure my pollers are ready.

On the assumption that ARIN continues work on the policy proposal and maintains a need-based qualification of recipients, all those in favor of an effective date sooner than the IANA IPv4 free pool depletion, raise your hand. Nice and high. If you’re behind a tall person, raise it extra high. Thank you. And all those opposed to an effective date for the policy proposal sooner than the IPv4 IANA free pool depletion, raise your hand. Thank you. On the matter of an earlier effective date than the IPv4 depletion date, in favor, 35; opposed, 13. This information will be provided to the AC for their consideration. Thank you very much. (Applause)

MR. CURRAN: I’m sorry, is there someone at the microphone?

MR. DURAND: Alain Durand. I wanted to point out that not wanting to have this policy enacted now is not necessarily incompatible with wanting to have it sooner than the IP for completion. There’s a gray zone in between.

MR. CURRAN: There is a very gray zone.

MR. DURAND: My question was, it could be a little bit in a weird situation.

MR. CURRAN: It is very truly a very large zone. Unfortunately, we can only make incremental progress towards consensus, and I can only poll for that which I’ve seen adequate discussion on both sides. Okay? Thank you.

NRO Activities Report

MR. PLZAK: Thanks, John. Now Paul Wilson, who is the current Chair of the Executive Council of the Number Resource Organization will give an activities report. Paul?

MR. WILSON: Good morning, everyone. The NRO in 2008 has had its regular rotation of office holders, so in addition to myself as Chair, Adiel Akplogan from AFRINIC is the Secretary. And that makes AFRINIC the secretariat of the NRO. And the Treasurer is Axel Pawlik, so off the hook for the time being are Ray and Raul. But thanks very much to Ray for his services as Chair last year.

As some may know, we did finally make steps towards the finalization of the relationship between the RIRs collectively under the NRO and ICANN last year in December, with an exchange of letters which was less formal and less binding mechanism than the sorts of contractual relationships and arrangements which had been discussed for quite some time. It was still some reasonable step forward, I think. What the exchange of letters served to provide is a statement of mutual recognition and support between the NRO, RIRs, and ICANN. They clarified that the NRO will continue to make voluntarily contributions to ICANN, which is something of a change from the more formal service- oriented fee and fee-oriented relationship which had been discussed for some time. The letters also say that we will pursue further contractual arrangements of a more – as it says, a more appropriate formal relationship between the two parties within a year. So if you’d like to have a look at those letters, they’re on the NRO website. A long URL there, but you can also find it fairly easily from the site itself.

We all attended an ICANN meeting recently. The latest one being in February in New Delhi. We spoke – appeared and spoke at a session of the Government Advisory Committee of ICANN on IP addressing on the now-common themes of v4 consumption and v6 transition. We have seen increasing interest in the ICANN community in this topic, and at the next meeting we’ll be spending at least, I think, a couple of hours with the GIC on a more extended discussion about this stuff. And that’s a very substantial allocation of time for the GIC. You’re lucky to get 10 or 15 minutes with them normally, so that’s an indication of how important stuff is being seen within ICANN. We also had, thanks to IANA, a workshop, or appeared at an IANA workshop on IPv6 during that ICANN session as well. And I guess that’s sort of an informative or educational-type of session that’s going to, I expect, be continued as well. We met – in accordance with the exchange of letters, we met for a review of the contributions that the NRO makes to ICANN, the voluntary contributions. And we agreed to some total of $823,000 U.S. as the contribution for this financial year, that is for 2008. And we agreed that we’d be reviewing that on an annual basis with no particular discussion about the basis for this fee or basis for any increases. It’s just, as I mentioned, a voluntary contribution that we make in support of ICANN.

The NRO also, in an associated move, we wrote a response to the U.S. Government’s call for comments on the JPA. So we said a few things there, but basically the message is that the NRO continues to be supportive of the ICANN model. We support the ending of the JPA in due course. We didn’t go into the – and quite deliberately didn’t go into the details. There were 10 points that were under discussion about ICANN’s performance, but the message behind our response was really where we’re now in a position – we feel ICANN is in a position for us to deal with ICANN directly on those issues of their performance and all of those details. And don’t really see it as necessary to contribute that through this formal U.S. Government-sponsored process.

The Internet Government Forum is the aftermath of the WSIS, the World Summit on Information Society, in the working group in Internet governments. It’s a process we heard about from Lynn St. Amour yesterday. During the last year we were quite active in that. We had, fortunately, I think, two of our NRO representatives, members of the AC, both Adiel Akplogan and Raúl Echeberría, on the multi-stakeholder advisory group. And that’s a group whose seats are very hard to get and under a lot of contention. So to have the two NRO reps there, I think, was a good evidence of the success of the work that we’ve done in promoting the importance of having our expertise available to this forum. And so in its typically opaque style, we’re not sure what’s happening to the MAG of the IGF this year, but it’s under some discussion. At this last meeting of the IGF that was in Rio, in December last year, we had a NRO display and new had materials. We had produced a report called “The Continuing Cooperation Report of the NRO.” And that was circulated there as well as there were numerous presentations and sessions going on there. And it was just part of the ongoing road show that we’re finding ourselves involved with. The next meeting we’ll be doing it all again. It will be at the end of this year in Hyderabad in India. Now, you can’t see the beautiful screen grab cover that I prepared for – which is just a copy of the cover of the NRO continuing cooperation report, but you might be able to see the URL there or as I said before, you can find that easily linked from the NRO’s website.

So activities coming up this year, again, the road shows. We’re doing the addressing stuff at ICANN meetings, of course. Representing ourselves in the IGF in the run up to the IGF and in the event at the end of the year. We’ve got two of the ITU telecom events, regional events coming up in Africa and in Asia this year, Cairo and Bangkok. And the NRO is doing a small activity. They’re represented by the corresponding regional Internet registry, who is sort of coordinating that show. That’ll be AFRINIC, of course, and APNIC for those two. We’ve been discussing a more visible statement of support for IPv6 or the position of IPv6 among the NRO. Looking at the possibility of setting a timeline for some sort of full support as defined by all of the RIRs for IPv6. I’ll say a little more later about what that means – what that’s meant in APNIC’s case.

Concretely for the NRO, one issue there that we do need to discuss, and that’s happening through the engineering group, is how we’re going to go about the IPv6.arpa, the management of the reverse delegations for IPv6. And the other thing that is on the engineering front is the resource – the issue of resource certification across the NRO and what the NRO is doing there is nothing operational, of course. But within that engineering group looking at to what extent we should be defining a common architecture and what that common architectural should look like in the event that resource certification is undertaken on a global basis or amongst a number of the RIRs. And the old chestnuts, IPv4 and IPv6 issues, are under active discussion within – obviously, within each of the Board governing bodies of the RIRs, and also there’s some coordinating discussions going on among the RIRs. Boards – we had one of those in formal meetings this week. And we’ll probably be having at least a venue provided for that kind of discussion to be happening at all of the future or hopefully all of the future RIR meetings. It’s unlikely, unfortunately, that all of the RIR Boards can ever be in one place at one time. So those meetings are informal and they really get together for an exchange – for an ongoing exchange of view about these current topical issues. So thanks. That’s all from the NRO.

MR. CURRAN: Thank you. Any questions to Paul as head of the NRO? Rotating head.

MR. WILSON: Rotating head, exactly.

MR. CURRAN: No? Thank you very much, Paul.

MR. PLZAK: Okay, we are at time for a break. We’re a little early, but that’s okay. So, let’s take a break. Get out to the Cyber Café. Remember, fill out those surveys. Help desks are open. Please take advantage of them. And be back here at 10:45 by this clock. (Recess)

RIR Update - APNIC

MR. PLZAK: Okay. Welcome back. We are now going to have another one of our regular reports. This is the report from APNIC. It’ll be presented by the Director General Paul Wilson. Paul?

MR. WILSON: Thank you, Ray. Okay, you get to hear from me again. And this is the – an update of a few things, items of news from APNIC. I try to vary this report from meeting to meeting so that, well, it gives me something to do on the plane on the way here. And also, maybe, if you’re interested, you might just see some different aspects of what we do at APNIC.

The structure, these days, has got four – three different areas under the DG. They are the services, communications, and business area. We’ve also got the mad chief scientist out there as a separate member of the senior executive team at APNIC. So that’s – that team of people is now complete. We had some vacancies over the last year, but we’ve been recently joined by German Valdez, who you might remember from previous ARIN meetings having reported on behalf of LACNIC, which is where he earned his stripes. But he’s moved to Brisbane recently and joined us. I don’t normally show you what our staffing looks like, but, so, that’s the – I thought that might be of some interest. We have got just over 50 staff at the moment at APNIC. The rate of growth is tailing off, although – and in the last year, we had no net growth at all. That was more for financial reasons than operational needs. But the pattern there is definitely of a decreasing rate of growth, and a fairly low staff turnover, as well.

The planning process at APNIC, I thought I’d say a few words about this. It’s something that we’re developing now with this new senior management team that I mentioned. The process is based around, or seeded by, the regular membership surveys that we have, now, every two years. We conduct or contract KPMG to anonymously survey the community – not limited to members, in fact, but members and stakeholders. And so we use the results of that anonymous survey, which are quite detailed, to base our future planning around. So using those results, and also the results of our open policy meetings, both formal policy decisions and the operational outcomes of those, but also less formal inputs from our other special interest groups, we plan activities in an internal secretariat process. We base our budget on that, and that goes out through the Executive Council of APNIC, the Board, for monitoring during the year.

Now, one of the challenges that we’ve had in that planning process, in recent years, has been related to this graph here. I guess it would be this. What you’re looking at here would be familiar in form to all of you, because this is your currency. Against the Australian dollar, the U.S. Dollar has really diminished lately. So, back in January 2001, we were getting 2 Aussie dollars for – just over 2 Aussie dollars for each U.S. dollar that we received. And that crashed to just around – just over a dollar over the previous six years. So that’s both currencies moving in different directions. But you can see that that would cause a fair amount of problem for an organization that’s spending Australian dollars in trying to provide services. Youch. The other problem here is the unpredictability of it. So, we started the 2007 calendar year with an official forecast that we’d be getting $1.27 for each – local – for each U.S. Dollar. But from that point on, from the beginning of the year on, it still went down and down and down. And it was looking, at one point, of going down to a dollar or lower. So, we really needed to do something about that. You can’t run a business with those sorts of variations happening even – happening live, with no ability to predict. So what we finally managed to do, after numerous discussions within the community, which were not only about our fee levels, but, in fact, about the overall structure of APNIC fees. We did, at least, make the small change of converting our existing U.S. dollar fee structure into – from U.S. Dollars to Australian dollars. So, that really solved what could have been a – or addressed what could have been a very bad year this year for APNIC, where you set that fee structure at that rate that you see there, which was the predicted rate for 2007.

The interesting thing about this is that we’ve got a lot of currencies in the region. I don’t expect you to read this, but it’s available online. We’ve got a lot of currencies in the region and the actual impact of changing our fees to Australian dollars on each of those currencies was completely different, widely varied across the regions. So, the latest APNIC newsletter, APSTA, has got this analysis which I’ve written up, which shows the impact for a whole selection of currencies in terms of what a small membership costs in that local currency at – over the last, quite a number of years, since year 2000. So, that shows that in most cases, for most currencies, the amount that APNIC costs now is still lower than it has been in previous years during 2000 – since 2000.

Okay. Just a few graphs here, showing what we’re doing in terms of services. The top left is IPv4 allocations measured in total /8s. And so we’ve gone in 2006, having allocated just over 3 /8s, to in 2007, having allocated about 4.25 /8s. That’s a fairly large increase in rate. The next one across at the top right is IPv6. This is something I mentioned yesterday during the discussion about where IPv6 deployment is happening, if anywhere. And it’s certainly not in the Asia-Pacific, as you can see here, in any – it is happening, but it’s not in the sorts of numbers that some people sometimes assume. So, 2007 seems to have been our biggest year in terms of total prefixes allocated. But it’s still just over 50, 55 prefixes in total. We’re reporting prefixes here because, well, the size, the variation in size of v6 allocations which are made is pretty dramatic. And the actual numbers in terms of addresses don’t seem to make too much sense just yet. ASNs, bottom left, are moving up, and members are also moving up at a slow, but exponential accelerating growth of – rate of growth, which is good to see. And you could contrast that, those growth curves, with the staff growth curve, and it’s looking fairly good in terms of the overall efficiency, I think, of the operation. IPv6 is on everyone’s lips at the moment.

So, as I mentioned earlier in connection with the NRO, APNIC has a goal for 2008 of having – providing full support for IPv6 across all of our services. Mostly it’s done, and there’re a few things underway, but these are things like making sure that our IPv6 request process is as fully automated as it is for IPv4. Our request management process, our internal resource management system, support for IPv6 is improving. Our DNS management, also. We’ve got, I think, all of our online services now speaking v6. So, DNS services websites, MyAPNIC, all dual-stacked. And also, importantly, that when we’re doing that, we need to actually have reachability, and so we’ve quite some substantially improved the v6 connectivity into our sites. And there’s a lot of communications involved. So, in the training area, there’s IPv6 training under continual development and being deployed quite often. A lot of information services and, also, the notion of IPv6. And I put that in brackets because we’re not doing, sort of, IPv6 evangelical sessions. I don’t think any of the RIRs are, and we’re not being asked to. But we’re being asked to promote awareness of the need, and the benefits and realities of transition to IPv6. And that does seem to be quite a dire need in our part of the world. And I won’t click on this, but we do have a little – a happy little IPv6 man on our website. So if you connect with v6, you get a little treat there. And that’s just following the Kame turtle and others who’ve done similar stuff.

SPEAKER: Treats?

MR. WILSON: Hmm? Treats. Treats. Okay. This is the policy meeting and so I thought I’d mention the policy outcomes of our latest meeting. That was APNIC 25, which was held in Taiwan, alongside APRICOT, earlier this year.

We had three proposals accepted at that meeting. One was to change the minimum IPv4 allocations size to a /22. The next is some operational changes in relation to our new automated DNS shared zone management system, between APNIC and the NIRs that we support. A proposal to change the IPv6 initial allocation criteria. So in addition to the requirement to plan for 200 allocations, or assignments within the first two years, there’s now an alternative, which is that you don’t have to have precisely that plan. But if you have v4 addresses and you’re basically acting as an ISP, providing assignments and so forth, then you can qualify on that basis rather than the 200 assignments. So we had, also, a policy proposal for the allocation of the remaining IPv4 address space. That’s the proposal that’s often referred to as the last /8, or the last five /8s. The proposal that the last IANA blocks be distributed to the RIRs. That one’s gone back to the policy special interest group. We abandoned a policy on cooperative distribution of the end of the IPv4 free pool. And, also, a proposal to create an IPv4 shared use address space among LIRs, which was, in effect, an addition to the RFC 1918 address space. And further work by the authors is being done on the IPv4 Resource Transfer Policy, and on another policy from IPv4 Soft Landing. Now, coming up at APNIC 26, which is our next meeting, we’ve got a proposal already submitted which has got to do with generating valid routing registry data from the resource public key infrastructure, so the resource certification system is able to be used to construct the data for input into the routing registries.

Okay. Meetings. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to announce four upcoming meetings at one time, but here are the next four. We’re meeting in Christchurch in New Zealand this coming August. In Manila, next year with APRICOT 2009. That’s the regional operators’ conference. We’re meeting at a city to be announced in China in 2009, and in Kuala Lumpur in 2010. And all of you would be very welcome to come to any or, indeed, all of those meetings, if you can make it. Thanks very much. (Applause)

MR. PLZAK: Anybody have any questions of Paul?

2007-23: End Policy for IANA IPv4 allocations to RIRs

MR. PLZAK: If not, Chairman John Curran had to leave the meeting, so Scott Bradner, the Vice Chairman of the Board, will now assume the duties of Chair of this meeting. And we are now on to Policy Proposal 2007-23. This is a global policy proposal in that all of the RIRs have to agree to a common text of the proposal. And for it to be enacted globally, it would have to be approved, or ratified, I should say, by the ICANN Board. The action by this group would be whether or not to accept this proposal. And it would be, then – and when the Board adopted it, it would be contingent upon implementation upon the exact same text being ratified by the ICANN Board. So, having gone through that convoluted explanation, this proposal’s been around since August of last year. It’s – at the last meeting, it was – community consensus was revise it. And you can see that it is a global proposal. It has been under – it is – at the last APNIC meeting, it was returned back to their list. And it will be discussed at the upcoming meetings of AFRINIC, LACNIC, and the RIPE NCC. The text is in your meeting packet. Basically, the understanding is, is that IANA will take the last five /8s of IPv4 space in its free pool and allocate one to each RIR. The AC shepherds are Dan and R.S. No liability risk is seen by the council. We do have some concerns from staff, in that it conflicts with the spirit of RFC 2050, Fairness and Efficiency. But staff, on the other hand, sees a minimal impact, saying that 30 to 90 days after ratification by the ICANN Board, we could implement this policy. Here’s the PPML discussion. Not much. There was a lot earlier, but there hasn’t been much since it’s been revised. And so, I would like to call on, I believe, Izumi? Or who’s going to present this? Oh, there she is. I was looking for you over there. How are you?

MS. OKUTANI: Hello, everyone. My name is Izumi Okutani, and I am here to present a proposal on how we’re going to distribute the last piece of IANA IPv4 address blocks to RIRs. And this is actually a joint proposal made by AFRINIC, LACNIC, and JPNIC team. So I’m just here to present on behalf of the whole team.

The brief introduction. This is intending to address a very short-term issue, when we face the time of IPv4 address exhaustion, to clearly define how we’re going to distribute the last piece of IANA blocks, so that there will be a minimum of confusion when we try to, you know, finish up the IANA blocks. And there were actually two proposals made at the last ARIN meeting. One was the same proposal number as this one, and, basically, the same concept as this proposal submitted this time, which is to allocate a single /8 to each RIR. And the second proposal was made by AFRINIC and LACNIC team, which was to allocate two /8, instead of one. And the discussions at the ARIN meeting was that, generally, there were favorable comments, generally supportive comments, for the idea itself. And the show of hands expressed was roughly 70 for the support and 10 against. And there were more support confirmed for one /8, instead of two /8s, for the allocation size. And the council also confirmed that there were no negative legal implications for ARIN if we implement this policy.

So, what we’ve done after the last ARIN meeting was that we got advice from the AC for the two authors of the two proposals to get together and draft a single proposal, since it’s trying to address the same issue. So, we tried to maintain the same concept as what was proposed in the last meeting, and then stick with the size of one /8 to each RIR, instead of two, as there were more support for the size of one for — within the ARIN community, as well as in other RIRs’ communities. And we have also taken in the concept of reserving this particular block for our standard IANA pool, which was an idea introduced in Proposal 2007-18. And our proposal itself is very, very simple. As you can see in the diagram over here, we proposed to separately reserve five /8 from the standard allocation blocks that IANA makes to RIRs, as you can see in the diagram below. And five because we currently have five RIRs. And then, we expected IANA to carryout allocations as it is under the current policy for the standard IANA pool, under – as it is under the current practice, until the last RIR makes an allocation request and standard IANA block is gone. At that point, IANA will allocate from the reserved IANA block to each RIR and, as a result, each RIR will get a single /8 each. That’s what it is. Very simple. And then we tried to consider what would be the implications of implementing this policy. Firstly, possible negative implications. Some people may feel concerned that for RIRs with high consumption rates, such as ARIN, APNIC, or RIPE, they would lose out the chance of receiving more than one /8 allocations by restricting the size as one. But when we actually think about the possibilities, depending on the timing of the request, those RIRs, for example, ARIN, equally would have had the chance of receiving no allocations, whatsoever, if the timing of the request is too late and IANA block is gone. So, yes, it’s true that ARIN will lose out the chance of receiving more than one /8 blocks, but it also ensures that ARIN will, at least, receive one /8 at the very end, instead of zero.

So it’s very difficult to say that ARIN will or RIRs with high consumption rate will lose out as a result of this policy. And also, as introduced by Ray, since the consumption of one /8 is an equivalent of one to a few months’ worth of consumption in RIRs with high consumption rate, so, I think it is also fair to say that the impact is minimum. And also, in terms of positive implications, it ensures and makes sure that RIR will know what size they will get at the very end. So, it would reduce confusion as much as possible, and makes the size of allocation predicable. That’s all. Thank you.

MR. BRADNER: Okay. Microphones are open. Any discussion? Don’t all leap up at once. Ah-ha, an instigator. (Laughter)

MS. TAYLOR: Stacy Taylor, Time Warner Telecom. I support this proposal. And ARIN AC.

MS. OKUTANI: Thank you.

MR. BRADNER: Front mic.

MR. FARMER: David Farmer, University of Minnesota. In general, I support the idea. The only question I would have is since this is sort of figuring out the timing of the trigger for the previous proposal, some thought should be given to that. In other words, is this, you know, is this – does this pull the trigger at the right time? Would allocating two at the end give enough cushion for that trigger, or something along those lines, would be my only consideration. Otherwise, I fully support it.

MR. BRADNER: Okay. Don’t go away from the mic yet. One of the things Ray pointed out in the initial – when he presented it originally, is the text for all of the RIRs needs to be the same.

MR. FARMER: Yes.

MR. BRADNER: So, is that – is your concern enough of one to push it back into the reset button to start thinking about that in all the RIRs again?

MR. FARMER: I don’t know. I think the whole end – I don’t know that – this is sort of one of many proposals around the endgame. And so, does – should this one be the first one or should this one come in at the same time as the other endgame proposals get finished up? I don’t know. It’s a valid concern. I honestly don’t know.

MR. BRADNER: Would you support the proposal as presented?

MR. FARMER: I would support the proposal as written.

MR. BRADNER: Okay.

MR. FARMER: Just saying, hey, you know, it’s the trigger for the endgame. Is this when we want the trigger?

MR. BRADNER: It’s a good consideration.

MR. LEWIS: Lewis. We’ve spoken about this proposal last time around, and I think that the first thing I want to say, this is a good end signal saying that v4 is about to run out. This way, no one’s really caught by surprise. You have one /8 left to play with. The other – the question that was just brought up about one or two, we’ve debated this in Albuquerque, also. And I – it’s not like I say we shouldn’t debate it again, but I’m sure people who weren’t there might want to hear more about why – I sort of prefer one because it sticks us closer to the needs-based allocation until the last minute, and then still gives the signal that, okay, we’re almost done. Also, I believe there’re some other considerations that people might want to bring up about that. But we have discussed that and, for those who haven’t heard it, it’s probably good to go over it, if they really want to hear it again.

MR. BRADNER: Far microphone.

MR. DeLONG: Owen DeLong, ARIN AC. I support the proposal as is. As my predecessor said, we debated one versus two pretty thoroughly in Albuquerque. The conclusion reached there was one. I don’t see any reason to change that at this point. And I think this allows us to better get on with some of the other endgame proposals that are needed.

MR. BRADNER: Rear center mic.

MR. ECHEBERRÍA: Thank you. Raúl Echeberría from LACNIC. A chance to make a minor correction about the status of this policy in LACNIC region. The policy has been approved in LACNIC region, but with a larger number of /8s to be distributed. Due to the fact that it needed to be harmonized with other proposals, as Izumi has explained, it has to be – it needs to be voted – discussion again in the next meeting. But the concept has already been approved. So, I think that it will be approved again with the minor number of /8s to be distributed. Thank you.

MR. BRADNER: Thank you. Thanks for that update. Center front mic.

MR. LEIBRAND: Scott Leibrand, ARIN AC, Internap. I support the proposal. I think it’s important that we, like we’ve said, get on with the business of figuring out what to do with the last /8. And this kind of sets the stage for that. With regards to the question about triggering, since this is a global policy, and this seems to be the consensus among everyone else that we should do one /8, I think we should go ahead and approve this. And then we can set our transfer policy, or whatever other endgame proposals we want, to have language that deals with that, and sets the date to the date we want, based on the fact that we know that there’s going to be this one /8 given out to everybody at the end. So, I think this is the prerequisite to doing anything else endgame, and we should advance it.

MR. BRADNER: I think Ray was next. (Applause)

MR. PLZAK: Yes, Scott. Just as a manner of mechanics regarding the common language between the RIRs, the ASO MOU provides for the staffs of the RIRs to get together to perform any minor editing and grammar corrections they maybe need to make to get a common language.

MR. BRADNER: But it wouldn’t extend to changing the number of –

MR. PLZAK: No, no, no, no. It’s strictly grammar and that kind of thing.

MR. BRADNER: As long as staff knows their position. Far mic, and then the table.

MR. DURAND: Alain Durand. I would like to say that I support this proposal for (off mike) region. I think that (off mike) right set of compromise and wish that we could pass it today.

SPEAKER: Thank you.

MR. BRADNER: And on the table? R.S.

SPEAKER: (off mike)

MR. PLZAK: I’m sorry? No, I already spoke. (Laughter)

MR. BRADNER: Having too much fun with your e-mail?

MR. SEASTROM: I’m having too much fun trying to shuffle through the – collect my thoughts. I’m just – I’ve heard this sentiment several times that this provides ample warning that we’re running out of space, and that, you know, that time has finally come. My theory on this is that when that time finally comes that the IANA free pool is actually exhausted, that it’s going to be showing up in places from The Economist to the Wall Street Journal. And that there will be – nobody will be able to say that they haven’t heard this. So I think that’s sort of a red herring of an argument. I am opposed to this as it is currently written.

MR. BRADNER: Center front mic.

MR. SCHILLER: Jason Schiller, Verizon Business, UUNET, and the NRO NC. I just wanted to point out a little bit of some of the discussions that have occurred in other regions regarding this policy. The intention of this policy, basically, is when we are in the endgame and there’s only one /8 left, we may want to do something different with it. We may want to give out space from that last /8 in a way that’s different than our current policies support. And what I’ve in some of the other regions is that they feel comfortable with that approach, however, they don’t want to ratify this policy until they know what the rules are going to be about how the space is dealt with. So, I just want to caution the ARIN membership –

MR. BRADNER: Just a clarification. Do the other RIRs believe that there’ll be a global policy on how that space is – the last /8’s dealt with? Or would that be a local decision?

MR. SCHILLER: No, specifically, that would be a local decision because each region may have differing needs based on how they want to consume that last block. The point I’m trying to make is that some of the other regions have concerns about ratifying this policy without knowing how the block is going to be used. And I just want to urge the ARIN membership to think about whether or not they are comfortable ratifying this policy without knowing how that last block will be used. And also, to encourage people to start writing policies about how that last block should be used. Thank you.

MR. BRADNER: Back center mic.

MR. DARTE: It’s Bill Darte, ARIN AC.

MR. BRADNER: Are you trying to speak to this point?

MR. GAGLIANO: Hello? Yeah, I’m Roque Gagliano. I’m LACNIC staff, but I take that hat off because I’m also one of the coauthors of the policy. I just want to mention that it’s true, what Jason said, it’s just one region that came out with that issue. But you have to understand that this is a global policy. And it’s a policy that takes, you know, two years, perhaps, in the whole circle, to get approved. And those – and actually, that’s something in favor of this policy, is that it allows the regional RIRs to have those discussions. And that’s something that, I think, is going to be encouraged by the approval of this policy, in the sense that there’s also been concern on people saying, we don’t want to start discussion whether it’s going to happen with that last /8, we don’t even know we can have it.

MR. BRADNER: Okay. Thank you. Center back mic.

MR. DARTE: Yeah, this is Bill Darte. I’m on the ARIN AC. I support this policy as written. And I think that, you know, to Rob’s point, I really think that notification about these issues shouldn’t come as a surprise. One of things that I think the ARIN community needs to do is get on the PR bandwagon and make these issues much more widely accessible to people in the broader community, and the impacts that it might have on them.

MR. BRADNER: Any other discussion? Do you want to say anything else?

MS. OKUTANI: No.

MR. BRADNER: Okay. Thank you very much. (Applause)

MR. BRADNER: Okay. Got some input for the AC? There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of variant in the discussion, so I’ll just ask the simple question. How many support this proposal and how many oppose it. And, so, first, how many – are the counters ready? No. We’ve got to wait for the counters to be ready. Don’t have enough practice at this. Okay. Counters are ready? All right. So, how many support this proposal? Keep them up. You’re not – your hand’s not up. Put it up. There you go. There you go. There you are. Got to really participate here. Do we have a count? We have a count. Okay. So you can relax. And how many oppose this proposal? The count should be quicker. Okay, you can put your hands down now. Okay. On the matter of Policy Proposal 2007-23, the number of people in the room is 123. The number who’s indicated in favor is 48. The number of opposed, five. This information will be provided to the AC.

2007-14: Resource Review Process

MR. PLZAK: Okay, the next proposal is Policy Proposal 2007-14, Resource Review Process. First introduced in May of last year and was discussed at the last ARIN meeting. The proposal has been revised. This is an ARIN-only proposal. Text is in your packet. And understanding of the policy is that it provides clear policy authority to audit, or reclaim resources, guidelines for how it shall be done, and a six-month minimum grace period for the user to stop using the space. The shepherds are R.S. and Leo. And the legal liability risk is none. However, counsel did make a comment about this, supporting this version of the policy being an active (off mike) adoption policy could reduce future legal fees. The only concern the staff has is about sharing results of audits regarding fraud or suspicious activity investigations and see a minimal impact if we did put this into place 30 to 90 days after ratification. Not much discussion on the list. And the proposal will be presented by R.S., and Scott will lead the discussion.

MR. BRADNER: While R.S. is trying to outsmart his computer, I want to mention that in the last two shows of hands, we’ve had remote votes in both of them, one each. I’m not sure whether it’s the same person each one, but there’s one each. I think that’s as good, but we didn’t really prepare for that. So we don’t have any process in place for dealing with remote votes or of ensuring that remote votes are adequately represented in the discussion. (off mike) tells me that the staff is looking into ways to do that in the future. So while we appreciate the remote input, we will note it in the record, but it won’t be counted as – particularly in the vote count, per se. But certainly the AC will understand that that’s part of the record. But in the future, we’ll try and figure a way to empower the people that can’t actually get here. Thank you.

MR. SEASTROM: Thanks, Scott. So, I’m Rob. I said I would present this for Owen, who’s a little under the weather. 2007-14 has already been presented here once. There have been some changes made to it. Wow, look at those transition effects. (Laughter)

MR. SEASTROM: The existing policy does not address audit or reclamation. The NRPM is silent on it. The RSA uses terms like “cooperation.” It goes into some detail about the kind of information you might be asked for. The authors were concerned that a little bit more framework ought to be defined. So, the intent is to provide a framework for audit and reclamation, and provide protection for registrants from unreasonable or abuse of audit processes, and provide a defined appeal process, and a mechanism for cooperating with ARIN to return stuff that you may not be able to justify having. So, ARIN can – this policy preserves ARIN’s ability to go after fraud at any time, while offering some reassurance to registrants that there won’t be audits happening so often as to represent an unreasonable burden to their business process. It requires that ARIN disclose summary results to the holder of the resource, and provides the processes that we were talking about a moment ago. More framework is desirable, but we wanted to be able to have ARIN be able to – whoops, I’m off a slide. That doesn’t make any sense. So – actually, I’m just going to skip forward to that. Never mind. Okay. So, ARIN was concerned that release of too much detail about the audit process might enable workarounds and compromise the integrity of future audits.

MR. BRADNER: I’m not one to criticize what you can do with a Mac, but. (Laughter)

MR. SEASTROM: I was not the person who did this and I flipped through it in composition mode, so I – frankly, this is as much of a surprise to me as it is to you. (Laughter)

SPEAKER: Okay. I would call this –

MR. SEASTROM: And I have to say, I’m pretty impressed, too. (Laughter)

MR. BRADNER: I would call this decomposition mode. (Laughter)

MR. SEASTROM: So, so –

MR. BRADNER: Just the facts next time. (Laughter)

MR. SEASTROM: So here are the revisions that have been made since the last time you saw this policy. Owen, where are you? This is the last time I’m doing this for you. (Laughter)

SPEAKER: And that’s how you’ve got –

SPEAKER: (off mike) and change to the disco sparkle transition, and you’ll be set. (Laughter)

SPEAKER: And now you’ve got the –

MR. SEASTROM: You know, this is just too difficult. We’re going to do that.

SPEAKER: (off mike)

MR. SEASTROM: Yeah, I see that. So, you should have the text in your folder. Are there any comments or questions? Any questions about the presentation itself will not be entertained.

MR. BRADNER: Yeah, we’ll ignore the presentation, if we can. The microphones are open. Any discussion?

MR. DeLONG: Okay, so, Owen DeLong, ARIN AC. I’ll apologize for the excessive transitions. The staff concern, actually, was, I think, pretty much addressed in discussions with the staff offline, in that what is required is only the disclosure of, you know, we’ve taken a look at your resource utilization and no further action is required at this time. Unless, of course, there is some other action that they feel needs to be taken. In which case, I don’t see how they could get that action taken without contacting the resource holder. So, the policy really doesn’t require the staff to disclose the mechanism by which they audit things, or the fact that they are taking a look at something, until they’ve come to some conclusion on it. And so, we don’t believe – the authors don’t believe that that will actually negatively impact the staff’s ability to look for fraud.

MR. BRADNER: Any other comments? Yes.

MR. LEWIS: Ed Lewis. I have a question about the staff concern. Was the concern that they were afraid, dealing with a suspected case of fraud, that they didn’t want to accuse the person of fraud? Was that the concern, or?

MR. BRADNER: Could we have whoever from the staff who wants to speak for the staff?

MS. NOBILE: Yeah, that was one of the concerns. We don’t want to alert people when we’re suspicious of them and, yeah, what you said.

MR. LEWIS: Do you think that the proposal now, as it’s being presented, addresses that or are you still concerned with that?

MS. NOBILE: I don’t think it addresses it, no. But I do – well, I mean, we had a suggested rewrite of that, but it wasn’t taken. We thought that it should say we’d only notify the customer that we did an audit if an action was required by one of us. If there was no action and we were just looking, we didn’t think we should be notifying them. Because, like I said, we don’t really want to alert them to that fact, if we’re actually suspicious. And, we don’t want to accuse them. So, it is – it’s – you know, double.

MR. BRADNER: Any more? Yes.

MR. LEIBRAND: Scott Leibrand, ARIN AC. I have a question then. I got the impression, from the discussion, that telling people the results of their resource review will only happen if you actually, like, ask them questions and initiated something. If you just did behind the scenes investigation of your own, that that wasn’t properly an audit that had to go through this process. So, I’m wondering if maybe the authors could speak to the –

MR. BRADNER: The text in the proposal is, “ARIN shall communicate the results of the review to the organization.”

MR. LEIBRAND: I guess, what constitutes a review? Is it a review that involves the –

MR. SEASTROM: I’m going to defer to the authors on that. But having discussed that with, you know, as a shepherd, I’ve never been of the – under the impression that anything informal really counted as an audit.

SPEAKER: So, why don’t we –

MR. DeLONG: As one of the authors on the (off mike) ARIN AC, the intent in stating that staff would communicate the results was the authors didn’t believe you had results until staff had come to a conclusion of any audit. Therefore, communicating the results at the end of such process, it is our opinion, shouldn’t really interfere with the process itself.

MR. BRADNER: I think the question is does the staff, if they’re just taking a look, but not doing a formal review, have to report that – the results of the informal look – to the organization?

MR. DeLONG: I would say that an informal look would be part of an ongoing review, and there’s nothing in the policy that limits the amount of time ARIN takes to conduct a review. So, I would think that the correct action for staff in that case would simply be to keep the review open, until such time as they come to a conclusion.

MR. BRADNER: It does sound like there is a disagreement over when something triggers the requirements for disclosure, et cetera. Just keeping something open as an escape mechanism to not report, doesn’t sound quite ideal. But other comments? I think you were – far mic.

MR. LEWIS: I just want to finish off my comment that I think the proposal as it is, is a good idea, but I have a big concern about the issue that the staff has had. And that makes me say I probably don’t want this until the staff is happy with what they would have to reveal. I have a hard time going with the proposal as written.

MR. BRADNER: I think the front center was first. Okay. Back center.

MR. HANNIGAN: Martin Hannigan, Verne Global. What’s the check and balance to make sure that this process isn’t abused? Is there something in the back office that takes place that this just can’t be implemented for any reason whatsoever? Does there actually have to be a reason?

MR. SEASTROM: Well, the whole idea was that it could be done for any reason, or no reason, whatsoever, but that it was limited to happening every 24 months unless there was extenuating circumstances.

MR. HANNIGAN: Complies with the Privacy Policy as stated on the website?

MR. SEASTROM: Pardon?

MR. HANNIGAN: Complies with the Privacy Policy as stated on the website? Privacy concerns, I mean.

MR. SEASTROM: We were more concerned – I think that the authors were more concerned about having it happen too often, like getting audited every three months.

MR. HANNIGAN: Okay. I’m for this.

MR. BRADNER: Owen, you wanted to speak to that?

MR. DeLONG: I don’t see any way it would affect the Privacy Policy on the website, because the disclosures required under this are strictly between ARIN and the organization that has received resources. There’s no external disclosure.

MR. BRADNER: Okay. Center front mic.

MS. SCHILLER: I had a question for Registration Services.

MR. BRADNER: And you are?

MS. SCHILLER: Heather Schiller, Verizon Business. My question is, when you perform audits today, when, for whatever reason, but I imagine it’s largely when folks come back for additional resources, what is – how often can you perform an entire audit without input from the resource holder?

SPEAKER: Do you want to answer –

MS. SCHILLER: It seems like you would, in order to really perform an audit, you would actually need input from the resource holder. So, that’s how I see it. And so I’m wondering, like, how you could even do an audit without getting their input? So, how would you even be able to an audit without them knowing.

MS. NOBILE: I’m trying to figure out how to answer that. We do audit them when they’re coming back for additional resources. That is generally when we’re interacting. And that is true, we will ask questions. But there’s other times when we have other red flags, that I don’t want to go into, that, you know, that will cause us to take a second look at someone who’s not in for resources. Just, you know, searching around the web, checking out, you know, customer lists, or, you know, we just do a general look. And that’s sort of a semi-audit, you know. And we wouldn’t necessarily want to inform someone of that, if we’re just taking a look.

MS. SCHILLER: So what he’s saying to me off to the side is the difference between an informal audit and a formal audit. And so if you’re formally auditing someone, I would imagine you’d have to get to the point where you do talk to them about the results, and that, in this case, you would be notifying them. Because you’re asking them for information, you are notifying them that you’re doing this audit. And so, I don’t know if that needs clarification or not, but. Thanks.

MR. BRADNER: Thank you. Center back mic. Wait until the mic turns on. Okay. Try that. No? Doesn’t work. Why don’t you move to the front mic if that one’s not working?

MS. WAGNER: Hi, I’m Jennifer Wagner with San Isabel Telecom. I’m just asking about item 7. It says, “ARIN shall continue to maintain the resource(s) while their return or revocation is pending, except no any maintenance fees assessed during that period shall be calculated as if the return or revocation was complete.” Just –

MR. BRADNER: That is accurately read and inaccurately written. (Laughter)

MS. WAGNER: Okay, but how should it read?

MR. BRADNER: How should it read? Owen?

SPEAKER: I’m going to defer to the author on that one because we didn’t pick that one up either.

SPEAKER: (off mike)

MS. WAGNER: Okay. Thank you.

MR. BRADNER: I assume that the word “any” is extraneous.

SPEAKER: And you’ll perhaps –

MR. BRADNER: The text currently reads, “While their return or revocation is pending, except no any maintenance fees assessed during that period shall be calculated as if the return or revocation was complete.” So I think the word “any” is just extraneous.

SPEAKER: That’s correct.

SPEAKER: Other way around.

MR. WEILER: Sam Weiler. I think it’s the “no” that’s extraneous. But I’m sure you all can wordsmith that.

MR. BRADNER: I think either one could be extraneous, but. A good catch, in any case, that the AC will be cognizant of the next pass.

SPEAKER: Strike the word “no.”

MR. BRADNER: Center front mic.

MR. BARGER: Yeah, Dave Barger, AT&T. Item 1, “ARIN may review the current usage of any resources issued by ARIN to an organization.” Does this mean to imply that ARIN will not review resources, legacy resources, prior to ARIN’s existence?

MR. BRADNER: Thank you. I’d hoped somebody would ask that question, since I’m related to an organization that has some legacy resources and I couldn’t. Thank you. So, would somebody answer that?

MR. DeLONG: It’s the belief of the authors that doing so is somewhat outside the purview of ARIN or, at least, nebulous at best. So, we felt it best strictly to address the resources that were clearly under ARIN control.

MR. BRADNER: So you meant it as the text is in the proposal?

SPEAKER: Okay. Thank you.

MR. BRADNER: Leslie wants to speak?

MS. NOBILE: Yeah, I’m actually glad someone caught that, as well. We did not. Currently, ARIN, under ARIN policy, we can audit all resources issued to a resource holder, when we’re reviewing requests for additional space. This seems like it may limit our ability to do that, so – and I’ve used this example before and I hope no one minds, but if you’re a Class A holder and you come to ARIN for additional space, and we have – if we have no right to ask about that Class A, it seems to me that it’s a waste of resources and it’s just not efficient. So.

MR. BRADNER: So, I think the fundamental, underlying question is does this replace or usurp the normal review done when resources are requested? And that’s a question to the authors of the proposal.

SPEAKER: Can I comment on that one?

MR. DeLONG: Can you look at section 8 of the proposal, please. I believe it addresses that concern.

SPEAKER: Yes, it does.

MR. WEILER: On the paper version, it’s the last line.

MR. BRADNER: That says, however, “The legacy resources in active use, regardless of utilization, are not subject to revocation by ARIN pursuant to this subsection. However, the utilization of legacy resources shall be considered during a review to assess overall compliance.” But that conflicts with the strict wording of the first one – bullet.

MR. LEIBRAND: I’d like to comment on that point. Scott Leibrand, Internap/ARIN AC. I’ve always thought that the word audit is something you go back and do after the fact, and is not part of the application for new resources. This issue is actually part of the safe harbor concerns with 2008-2, as well. We’re making a safe harbor against audit. We’re not intending to make a safe harbor against getting reviewed when you want new resources. So, maybe we need legal input here or whatever. I think there’s an intent here of both this – these authors and the authors of 2008-2, that the word “audit” generally refers to after the fact review of resources already allocated. And there’s a separate process of resource review that is put in place when you go for new resources, and we’re not talking about that. And Owen has specifically put in text to try and confirm that he’s not talking about that. So I don’t think the two conflict in his policy, but I think there’s a more general question about what’s an audit?

MR. BRADNER: Just to be clear, the term “audit” is used post – ex post facto, post an event. But it’s also used to find out how many of something you have, at any time, independent of anything else. To audit, audit your returns or audit the number of books you have on the shelf, they’re both good uses of the term and so that may be confusing.

MR. LEIBRAND: Yeah, so I think that we need to define, for purposes of ARIN policy, whether we call the resource review, at time of request for more resources, an audit or not. And make sure our language is consistent with our intent.

MR. BRADNER: Bill.

MR. WOODCOCK: This is kind of a minor nit, but resources assigned by ARIN, while it may sound unambiguous, is a different criterion than is used in other places. And it brings up the ambiguous case of things that have been traded under the amnesty policies. So, if someone has legacy space and they’ve handed in all or a portion of the legacy space to ARIN and received another assignment in return, those amnesty policies specifically say that that space is to be treated as legacy space for billing purposes. But this might, I mean, if taken literally, that’s ARIN-assigned space, even though it’s ARIN-assigned space in exchange for legacy space, you know, and intended to otherwise be treated the same as legacy space. So, you might, instead, just look at saying that the supplies to people under RSA, under the terms of the RSA that they’ve signed.

MR. BRADNER: Far mic.

MR. WEILER: Thanks, Scott. Sam Weiler. I generally support this. Addressing the concern about when does an audit start, I would propose that the metric that be used – I don’t think this necessarily requires a textual change – is at the moment that ARIN asks for data from the resource holder. I would strongly support a hard cap on the duration of an audit. Someone mentioned the risk that ARIN would keep one of these open for a long time. I strongly support a hard time cap. And lastly, section 7 talks about fees. We try not talk about fees in policies. And I’m just a little bit wary of that. That’s all.

MR. BRADNER: Okay. The other two people at that mic, and then the center mic afterwards.

MR. WEST: Ken West, Sprint. I have a question about the informal versus formal audits. Specifically, on section 2b, “Any time without having to establish cause unless a prior review has been completed.” Now is that a prior formal review or informal? And I’d suggest that “formal” and “informal” be used in front of “review” or “audit” in this document across the Board.

MR. BRADNER: We could also ask the authors what the intent of this was. Is this to minimize the disruption on the part of the auditee? Or is this to keep the auditee from feeling picked upon or what?

MR. DeLONG: So, a few clarifications. Number one, there is no intent or, I believe, language in this policy that states that it is intended to affect the resource application process. It is assumed that the reviews of resources under that circumstance would remain unaltered by this policy, and ARIN would continue to behave as it does in that regard. The intent is to create a framework whereby ARIN clearly has the authority to audit utilization of resources at other times than applications and to prevent abuse of that process by, say, conducting an audit every six months and asking the resource holder for a bunch of hard to produce information or what have you. By putting a 24-month limit on that, the intent is to, you know, prevent ARIN from coming back to you and picking on you too often. Because for certain large organizations, the process of complying with one of these audits could actually be somewhat expensive. Having said that, there’s clearly, you know, an escape clause for ARIN in that if they think you’ve committed fraud, they can come back at you more often than that. And that was intended to address several concerns that were expressed by staff and by legal. And, basically, the intent here is to affect, primarily, resources that are covered under RSA. But in the case of someone who has both RSA and non-RSA resources, we would not want to exclude their utilization percentage of their non-RSA resources from being factored into the overall utilization percentage of their total resources. Resources issued by ARIN was used specifically to include pretty much everything that is affected by an RSA. I believe, although I could be wrong about this, that resources issued under the Amnesty Policy are, actually, covered under RSA, even though they are not subject to fees because they have a specific fee exemption. Therefore, those resources are intentionally covered by this.

MR. BRADNER: Do you have any follow-up on that?

MR. WEST: Yeah, I still want to know if I can pencil in “formal” in front of “review?”

MR. DeLONG: There was no intent here to define formal versus informal review processes. The intent is that – the authors believe all reviews should either be a formal proper review or, essentially, nothing. You know, staff is taking a look at something casually on the web, and doesn’t notice anything that triggers their desire to conduct an actual review, I would say that that isn’t an informal review so much as a no-op. But if they actually decide they want to review somebody’s actual utilization and go into details in a record search and possibly ask questions of the resource holder, then that becomes a review as defined under the policy. And then at the conclusion of that, they would have to communicate the results. I also wanted to address – thank you for reminding me, indirectly – the question of when I said ARIN could keep a review open for some period of time, that wasn’t intended for ARIN to be able to stretch things out by keeping the review open. That was a statement that until ARIN reached a conclusion, one way or the other, to the review – obviously, the expectation would be they’d be diligently doing so – that there’s no need to communicate the results until there is actually a conclusion, under the requirements of this policy.

MR. WEST: I would just like to add, I’m against the policy as written.

MR. BRADNER: Thank you. Center front mic.

MR. BARGER: Yeah, Dave Barger, AT&T. Yeah, I’m a bit concerned about, you know, supporting a policy like this without having any kind of rules of engagement, so to speak, from ARIN, in terms of some timeframe around the audit process. And as I think we can all suspect, something like this, depending on how much address space is being audited, could be extremely resource intensive. It could take months. It could take additional staff. It costs a lot of money to do these kinds of things. So I think there needs to be some kind of wording in the document that puts a timeframe around this audit process. And in addition to that, I think ARIN should provide some sort of a framework for what constitutes an audit. You know, what kind of information are they going to look at? What are they going to expect? And again, because it takes a considerable amount of time to gather that data, sometimes, and a lot of resources. So. And it’s like an IRS audit. I mean, you know, if you’re audited, you’re going to be expected to produce certain documents, and certain proof, and certain verification. And that’s fine. But I think that needs to be spelled out up front, and we need to have some guidance as to what we can expect so we can ramp up for that.

MR. BRADNER: Thank you. Now, the microphones are almost closed. Anybody have a burning desire to get up now? Center front mic.

MS. SCHILLER: Heather – oh.

MR. BRADNER: Does Council want to usurp? Okay.

MS. SCHILLER: I’d rather let Steve go first. (Laughter)

MR. BRADNER: Get closer. Pretend to like the microphone. Okay.

MR. RYAN: I’m very uncomfortable with any time limit on an audit, and let me tell you why. Generally, the reason why an audit remains open is lack of cooperation on the part of the party being audited. And so, there’s been a tendency in this discussion to think that it’s us, at ARIN, who would be delaying the resolution. I don’t think that’s the case. And so, from my standpoint, if we’re really auditing someone, it may be a protracted situation, and protracted based on their lack of cooperation. So, as you make policy in this area, just don’t see it as a unilateral switch that we turn on and off, or we declare the file complete, with regard to that issue. So I thought that might be helpful to you in your consideration.

MR. BRADNER: The microphone lines will be closed after R.S. gets there. So you had the microphone.

MS. SCHILLER: Okay. Heather Schiller, Verizon Business. And I have the courage to come up and talk about this now that the AT&T guy went first. So, I have to agree with what he said. Given our size and the amount of address space that we have, I’m very concerned about any kind of audit that ARIN would want to do with our address space, just knowing the work that I do every day, and the internal auditing that we’re trying to accomplish. I am concerned about the – so I agree with ARIN’s need to be able to audit in case of fraudulent requests and, of course, when you’re coming back for additional address space. But the kind of open, you know, free reign to audit at will without any kind of – I’m sorry?

SPEAKER: Safeguards?

MS. SCHILLER: Yeah, it just, like, you know, they decide they don’t like me today and they want to audit, like, and make my life miserable? I don’t – I mean, there should be something there, even the IRS, you know, when they audit you, have some kind of reason. I don’t think it’s entirely random.

MR. BRADNER: No, some are just random, but.

MS. SCHILLER: So, I mean, there just should be a little bit more there.

MR. BRADNER: So you’re suggesting that there be some kind of text about what kind of triggering condition should be needed.

MS. SCHILLER: Or at least something that, like, ARIN has to provide you with the reason that, you know, prompted their audit. To give you some –

MR. BRADNER: Well, there’re two different things. One is what should trigger ARIN’s desire to do an audit. And then they should tell you that.

MS. SCHILLER: Yes. But I’m thinking that the fact that they have to tell us means they had some reason. So –

SPEAKER: It might be random.

MS. SCHILLER: Yeah.

MR. BRADNER: Okay. Thank you. Far mic.

MR. GRUNDEMANN: Chris Grundemann, Colorado ISOC. I was just wanted – on the topic of segmenting an audit when resources are applied for, and later on, 2a implicitly includes when any new resource is requested, and kind of blurs that line for this policy. So I just wanted to point that out.

MR. BRADNER: That’s a good point. Center mic.

MR. LEIBRAND: Scott Leibrand, ARIN AC. I think we need to be careful that we don’t step into what should be operational procedure, and such like, in policy. I fully anticipate that ARIN staff could come up with a document that details all of their procedures and reasons for doing audits, and random audits, and all this other stuff. But I’d be really reluctant – I mean, we’re having enough trouble just coming up with the policy that staff is comfortable with. I’d be really hesitant to try and tell staff what they can audit and what they can’t. We’ll just get even more rat-holed than we are now.

MR. BRADNER: Thank you. I’m sure (off mike) staff thanks you for that, too.

MR. CASSIMIRE: Thank you. Nigel Cassimire, CTU. We’ve heard a lot about – or concerns from about people about this audit or review, whether it’s formal, informal, the depth, and how onerous it would be and so on. And I didn’t hear the authors say anything about it, but if I read a paragraph from the rationale in the statement of the proposal, the second paragraph on the rationale says, “The nature of the ‘review’ is to be of the same form as is currently done when an organization requests new resources, i.e., the documentation required and standards should be the same.” Now, it might help if some text to this effect is included in the text of the policy proposal itself. All right? So, I’m just saying that that might be something that could be considered.

MR. BRADNER: That would certainly tend to clarify things. Thank you. Does – the microphones are closed, but that doesn’t ever apply to the lawyer, so.

MR. RYAN: We’ll wait.

MR. BRADNER: Okay.

MR. SEASTROM: Rob Seastrom, ARIN Advisory Council. And I have a question for the author present here, which I’m actually surprised, in retrospect, that I never asked when we were talking privately about this. I’m trying to figure out, in my own mind, whether this is something to address well-founded fears, or something to address the monster in the closet of horrors. And my question is, bearing in mind that anybody who gets audited is going to cry foul to some degree, has anything come to your or Steven’s attention that would – where somebody is making a credible – and seems to a reasonable, disinterested third party like there’s some sort of abuse of process that we are directly trying to clamp down on? Or are we just worried and wanted a little more framework, or how does this work?

MR. DeLONG: Comments made by staff at ARIN XIX led both the other author and myself to believe that there were certain abuses that ARIN believed they had limited ability to address, and that a policy like this would help them in that way.

MR. SEASTROM: Can you enumerate those?

MR. DeLONG: I cannot, because I’m not privileged – I’m not privy to the details and I would suspect that there’s no way for ARIN to disclose those details under the privacy policies and such that exist. And even if there were, I suspect that it would hamper their investigations and such if they did so.

MR. BRADNER: So your summary is that you’re attempting to be responsive to the staff concerns that you heard.

MR. DeLONG: Correct.

MR. SEASTROM: Thank you.

MR. BRADNER: Okay. Is this a tag team?

MR. RYAN: Yeah, we’re going to just offer a couple of comments to try and contextualize where this policy sits versus what we’re doing today. Let me point out today, we’ll audit you all we want. Okay. That’s our current policy because that’s the right thing to do for stewardship. We have to audit. So, for example, when somebody sends in documents that are intentionally falsified about the transfer of corporation A to B, when there really has been no transfer, that’s the sort of audit trail that we go through. We tend not to worry too much about publicly traded companies, because I can read in the newspaper when they’ve been bought or sold by one another, in a sense. Not that they get an easier trail in the audit world, but a lot of the work that we’re doing is about two, privately held corporations, for which there’s no public records other than their state filings, that we’re looking at. So I just want to point out, the reality is, in the absence of this policy, I want everyone to know that we have the right to self-initiate audits, to let them languish as long as the person is not cooperating, but hopefully, never to be inappropriate or abusive in that. I think, quite to the contrary, we have tended to be too polite, too nice, and too not inquiring deeply enough, given the current stresses on the marketplace. Reflecting, of course, you had to be a moron to defraud us in the past, but now there’re more reasons to defraud us as we go forward. If you take it that the activities of the downturn of the v4 pool have an effect on this policy. So, if I were making a suggestion as you’re considering this policy, it would be don’t try and define this like the IRS relationship, because it’s not the IRS relationship. In the IRS relationship, the IRS – you tell them what taxes you owe, and then it’s their job to prove what you didn’t. It’s an adversarial relationship. We don’t see this as an adversarial relationship to the community. We see it as protecting our stewardship obligations in, frankly, the limited number of cases where we do that. So having a policy like this that writes down some of these assumptions is probably a good thing. But if you drive it too far, you do get into operational areas. And I think if that helps contextualize, I think, our view on this.

MR. BRADNER: Okay. Thank you. Thank you, R.S. Okay, and a fun time had by all. I’m going to ask four questions. One about the general idea that Steve just spoke to, to codify that ARIN has the responsibility, right, whatever, to conduct audits for trigger conditions that we won’t go into. Yes or no. And then, secondly, about this particular proposal. Support or don’t support. Okay? Anybody want to discuss the questions? Or can we just do the questions? All right. So, first question. How many support the idea that ARIN – that the policy should have in it – the written policy procedures – policy should have in it an explicit statement that ARIN has the authority to conduct audits for some set of reasons not currently defined? Stick up your hands if you believe that. Keeping in mind what Steve said, of course. Do we have a count? We have a count. Okay. How many believe that this is a bad idea? We should not do this? That should be a considerably quicker count. Okay. And the second question. Second question. How many would support this proposal as written, and then how many do not? So, how many support this proposal as written? And how many oppose this proposal as written? Do we have a count? Not yet. Okay, now we have a count. You can relax again. In the matter of Proposal 2007-14, number of people in the room, 123. Nobody’s escaping, how about that? Is it a good idea to have the right written into the policy? In favor, 29; against, 0. Support this proposal as written: In favor, 2; against, 35. This will be provided to the AC for their consideration. Thank you.

MR. PLZAK: Thanks, Scott. Okay. Security alert. Okay. Remember to go to the Cyber Café to take a break, do those surveys. Help desks are open. And remember, we’re going to lunch, and you have the same opportunity to find AC members as you did yesterday. Some of the feedback that I got was that – or received, I should say, was very favorable. And so, I know the AC members that I talked to really thought it was useful to be able to have these discussions. And they’re looking around to see who said that. (Laughter)

MR. PLZAK: So, look for this sign at lunch. They’re here for you. And remember at 1:00 p.m., we have another demo of Project X. And let’s thank our sponsor, WildBlue. (Applause)

MR. PLZAK: Reminder: This room is not secured over the lunch period, so take your valuables with you. And we’ll see you back here at 1:30, by this clock.

MR. PLZAK: Welcome back. Okay. What slide is this for? Oh, okay. I didn’t know I had this slide to talk about. Okay. This is a reminder about the PPML. It’s a policy- related – it’s for all policy discussions. It is actually a forum, and we consider it a forum, and that’s how we describe it, but this is where you can raise and discuss policy-related issues. And I would mention that these are policy issues. These are not places where non-policy issues get discussed and ARIN discussed. So all policy proposals are introduced on the PPML, and it’s very simple to subscribe. All you have to do is go to the website, and it’s – just follow the instructions. A reminder: John will be enforcing the rules. And at the head table we have John, Bill, Bill, I don’t know where Heather is yet – oh, there she is. And I don’t know what happened with Owen, so Suzanne is up here. Hello, Suzanne. And I’m up here. Hi. Okay.

RIR Update - LACNIC

MR. PLZAK: First thing we have on the agenda for this afternoon is another one of the RIR updates. This is the one from LACNIC, and it will be presented by Raúl Echeberría, the CEO of LACNIC. Raúl?

MR. ECHEBERRÍA: Okay. Thank you very much for all the assistance for putting my presentation on the screen. Good afternoon, everybody. I know that after lunch, it is sure that the issue that has less interest for you is listening about LACNIC. You probably are more interested in a nap than in listening about LACNIC. Okay. October last year we made our fifth anniversary, which was very good. It led us to organize a celebration for our five years. We take advantage of any occasion for house celebrations, so it was very good to do that. And so that we can show some of the numbers that are the result of those five years of working, the membership continues growing in Latin America, as we have at this moment about 700 members. The staff is also growing. At this moment we are 18. It is surprising for myself when I see that we have so many people working for LACNIC. All the departments are growing. We are growing also from the point of view of the budget. We started in 2002 with a budget of $150,000, and this year we are in a budget of $1.7 million. We have new staff members, as Paul Wilson mentioned before. German Valdez, who used to be the communication manager, left LACNIC in the beginning of this year; he’s now working for APNIC in Brisbane. Ernesto Majo has been appointed as the new communication manager. Roque Gagliano, who is here in the meeting and has been very active in the community before working for LACNIC, has been hired now as a project engineer. At least temporarily, he is also the policy manager, covering some of the functions that used to be under German’s responsibility in the past. One of the most important things that we have done in the last year was the work in strategic planning. We expended efforts in 2006 in strategic planning, and last year was the first year in which we started to work in a different fashion, and it made us think very much about our organization and about our role in the community, which concluded with the definition of the vision, mission, objectives, and also projects. It has been a big challenge, as we have changed our mind as we are working in different dimensions, taking care that everything that we do has some relation with our missions and vision. This is very interesting. The result of the strategic planning process was this definition of the vision of LACNIC that, as you can see, doesn’t mention IP addresses, because the role that LACNIC has in the Latino-American and Caribbean community is much broader than only the bureaucratic function of administering the IP addresses. So we see ourselves as a key player in articulating collaborative efforts in the promotion of Internet and the information society in the region. So to be consistent with that vision, we continue spending resources and energy in many different projects focused on the development- oriented, focused on our community. One of them is very known, the FRIDA program, which is a very successful project that is being run by LACNIC in partnership with IDRC from Canada and the Internet Society, and consists of giving small grants for funding research in related ICT research projects. As we are now in the second phase of this program, we have spent in total more than $1 million in these 4 years, and we have already funded 41 projects. The results are very, very positive. We have been very active in the last year – until February of 2008 – in a regional process that is named eLAC 2010, which consists in the definition of the action plan toward the development of the information society in Latin America and the Caribbean. This process was finished in February with a ministerial conference in El Salvador, in Central America, and we were very active in different parts of the action plan. We have contributed very much in issues like interconnection and promotion of IXPs and development of infrastructure, but particularly we were really active in issues like IPv6. We proposed a goal to be included in this action plan that finally has been adopted by all the governments of the region. The text is there, but in a few words, it’s that the governments are committed to the development and deployment of IPv6, and also to adopt the way in which the governments buy the requirements, including the requirements of IPv6 compatibility. So we continue with the projects like promoting the deployment of root servers in the region. We already have deployed five anycast root servers in different countries of the region. We plan to set up two more this year. As we are expanding the projects area, we are involved with new projects. One of them is 6DEPLOY, which is a project that is funded by the European Union in which we are one of the partners. We have also some projects funded by – we are in the process of negotiating some projects with InfoDev, which is a project of the World Bank, about projects about Internet governance for development and IPv6, also. We are also involved in some projects about cybersecurity in the region. Since we have talked about that in the past meetings of ARIN, LACNIC has become a stronger presence in the Caribbean region. This is a region that is served by ARIN and LACNIC. We have last year signed an agreement with CTU, so the three organizations – CTU, LACNIC, and ARIN – are working now under this agreement on the activities that ARIN and LACNIC will sponsor in 2008 in the Caribbean region. As ARIN is also doing similar things, we are also preparing a sub-regional meeting for our Caribbean members. This meeting will be held probably the 22nd of July. We are still discussing the venue, but most probably it would be held in Curacao or Trinidad and Tobago. A short report about LACNIC 10, because we have already talked about that in the last ARIN meeting. But it was a very interesting meeting, very successful. We had 350 participants from 25 different countries. There were many meetings and workshops about issues like CCTLDs, IXPs, security, IPv6. Also, we hosted a meeting of ISOC chapters of Latin America during LACNIC 10. We have some projects under way in LACNIC. We are working on a new system that will be released in the middle of 2008, probably. We have set up a very powerful CRM tool that will permit us to have much better information about our customers, our members, and also about contacts from other organizations, as we are sharing the information in a more efficient way internally in LACNIC. We have changed the network infrastructure, both in Montevideo and Sao Paulo. We are changing now not only the servers, but also the links. We have better connectivity, as we used to have in Montevideo IPv6 through tunnels, and now we are implementing native IPv6. We’ve already had all our services available in IPv6 for a couple of years, but we now have all the infrastructure on IPv6. We have also been involved in some projects under the NRO umbrella, like DNSSEC and also trying to coordinate efforts about (off mike) certification. Finally, our next meeting will be held in the last week of May, as in every year. This year the meeting will be held in Salvador de Bahia in Brazil. It’s a very nice city. We expect to have a meeting as successful as the last meeting, as we all have also many activities and workshops around the LACNIC meeting, as in the previous years. So it is a very exciting meeting, and I invite all of you to join us in Brazil in the last week of May. Thank you very much.

MR. CURRAN: Thank you. Any questions for Raúl? No? Okay, thank you, Raúl.

IPv6 IAB/IETF Activities Report

MR. PLZAK: Okay. Next up on the agenda is the IPv6, IAB/IETF activity report, and this will be presented by Marla.

MS. AZINGER: Hello. I’m Marla Azinger, and I work for Frontier Communications. Thomas Narten is actually the one that put all these slides together. And I put some commentary on some of the slides, but he made the slides. What this presentation is: This presentation is not an official IETF report; there is no official IETF liaison to ARIN or any RIR. It is believed to be accurate, however, and the errors are the sole responsibility of Thomas and myself, if there are any. This presentation is not a detailed review of documents mentioned. There will be quite a few, so we don’t have time to go into all of them.

Okay, routing and addressing. The Routing and Addressing Directorate has been working on writing a problem statement for the remaining issues and constraints regarding IPv6 routing. New comments have just been received and are being integrated. However, the current status of this is no change due to – we haven’t submitted a revision to that yet. At the same time, the Routing Research Group has members that have moved ahead of the problem statement, given that they already understand the problem, and they’re busy presenting creative ways of providing an answer. Most of these hover around locator ID separation. Out of this, a new emerging architecture based on these preliminary principles is being created and is in the creation/testing phase. This new architecture can be run in parallel with the current architecture and is called LISP. I am not going to go into the details, but you can find via IETF links to this new architecture that’s being worked on, and a concise, informative paper in a question-and-answer format is going to be released soon. Other items regarding the Routing Research Group: Charters and pointers can be found at that URL that’s on the slide, and 10 proposals at present, and they’re all progressing at their own pace. Multiple sessions at IETF meeting continue. Usually you have one. We’re having one to two, and maybe some impromptu third one, a lunch meeting, so it’s very active, to say the least, right now. RFCs that have been published: Report from the IEB Workshop on Routing and Addressing, and you can check that out on the IETF Web site.

So, IPv6 Maintenance Working Group. There’s one new working document, the IPv6 Node Requirements. As far as active documents, you have two: Solution Approaches for Address Selection Problems, and Reserved IPv6 Interface Identifiers. And good old Centrally Assigned Unique Local IPv6 Unicast Addresses has hit a dead space again. It just seems it’s not being touched. And the recent RFCs, there are three: Deprecation of Type 0 Routing Headers in IPv6 – that one actually got quite a bit of discussion before it went through; Negotiation for IPv6 Datagram Compression Using IPv6 Control Protocol; and IPv6 Router Advertisement Flags Option. On to v6 Ops. There was a lot of discussion at the last meeting around translation requirements and the next steps, but no working documents have come out of it yet. And IEST processing. There’s several bullets there: The IPv6 deployment scenarios, IPv6 unicast address assignment considerations, requirements for address selection mechanisms, problem statements of a default address selection in a multiprefix environment. And the active documents: Recommended Simple Security Capabilities in Customer Premises, Equipment for Providing Residential IPv6 Internet Services, and good old Teredo Security Concerns. And RFCs published: Special Use IPv6 Addresses and IPv6 Implementations for Network Scanning.

On a side note, v6 Ops – John Curran here presented a document, and it was a way to implement IPv6 with some deadlines. It’s been asked of IPv6 Ops to take that on as a document, or any other possible entity in IETF. However, that remains to be seen whether or not they want to do that. Time will tell. SHIM6 Working Group. Approved by the IESG is hash-based addresses, and then there’s two core docs with IESG, Level 3 Multihoming SHIM Protocol and Failure Detection and Locator Pair Exploration Protocol for IPv6 Multihoming. The active documents: Applicability Statement for Level 3 Multihoming SHIM Protocol, Default Locator Pair Selection Algorithm for the SHIM6 Protocol, Socket Application Program Interface for Multihoming SHIM.

And I have a side note, and unfortunately, I added this URL, and I’m not a PowerPoint pro. I couldn’t get this darn URL to show up in a color other than gray that’s almost the same color as the white paper. I can give it to you separately, or if you open it up on the Internet, maybe you can play with it a little bit, because these slides are published on ARIN’s website. The interesting thing that happened this last session in Philadelphia, there is suddenly a new wind of attention being given to the list of cons that are viewed by some engineers, one of them being me.

Two years ago, a presentation was given and posted on the IETF SHIM6 link regarding traffic engineering, and I don’t know if that’s the one I put there or not. Yeah, that’s the one that’s in gray. Sorry. However, this was not given any attention other than a quick dismissal, and it was kind of pooh-poohed on. And now at the March 2008 IETF, multihoming and traffic engineering were actually finally being discussed without being booed off the stage. So that was new. Yeah, exactly. So that was a relief to some people. We’ll see where it goes. This move in SHIM6 to work on it, honestly, time’s going to tell, because different people I talked to kind of said, well, they think it was more because of competing work that’s being done for solutions that kind of pushed people to kind of work on it in SHIM6, so we’ll find out whether they’re really interested in creating this, or if it was more just kind of an ego tap, and so they thought they’d better give it a little attention. So hopefully, it’s more than an ego tap.

Softwire – there is a lot of active documents. Sorry. I hate to read the slides to you, but I’m going to do it. Softwire Mesh Framework, Softwire’s Hub and Spoke Deployment Framework with L2 TPV Version 2, Softwire Security Analysis and Requirements, Traffic Engineering Attribute, BGP IPSec Tunnel Encapsulation Attribute, BGP Encapsulation SAFI and BGP Tunnel Encapsulation Attribute, Advertising an IPv4 NLRI with an IPv6 Next Hop. And I do apologize. The next slides are really just straightforward. This is what’s going on. There’s nothing exciting as far as interesting, funny details. DNS Operations. One new working group document: DNSSEC Trust Anchor Configuration and Maintenance. And six other active documents: AS112 Name Server Operations, I’m Being Attacked by prisoner.iana.org – that, literally, is the most interesting one, though; at least the title is. Locally Served Zones, DNS Referral Response Size Issues, Considerations for the Use of DNS Reverse Mapping, and IESG Processing: Preventing Use of Recursive Nameservers in Reflector Attacks.

That just popped forward. Did you guys see that pop forward or not? Yeah, okay. New working group documents for DNS extensions: The Modern DNS Implementation Guide, Revised Extension Mechanisms for DNS. And then they have active documents, a good handful: Clarifications and Implementation Notes for DNSSECbis, Update to DNAME Redirection in the DNS, Measures for Making DNS More Resilient Against Forged Answers, Use of SHA-2 Algorithms with RSA in DNS Key and RRSIG Resource Records for DNSSEC, and the last one, DNS Zone Transfer Protocol. As far as recent RFCs: DNS Security Hashed Authenticated Denial of Existence. OpSec. Active documents, there’s one: Security Best Practices Efforts and Documents. And then there’s a handful of expired, and the status is just not really clear what’s going on here: Filtering and Rate-limiting Capabilities for IP Network Infrastructure, Router Control Plane Security Capabilities, the Logging Capabilities for IP Network Infrastructure, Service Provider Infrastructure Security, Framework for Operational Security Capabilities for IP Network Infrastructure. Because the status is unclear, they’re expired.

This is one of those things where if anybody has an interest in one of these and didn’t know it kind of dropped off the radar, you might want to go snoop into it. Secure Interdomain Routing (SIDR). New working group documents: Manifest for the Resource Public Key Infrastructure. And they’ve got about almost two handfuls of active documents going on: An Infrastructure to Support Secure Internet Routing, Certificate Policy for the Internet IP Address and AS Number, Template for an Internet Registry’s Certification Practice Statement for the Internet IP Address and AS Number, Template for an Internet Service Provider’s Certification Practice Statement for the Internet IP Address and AS Number PKI, the Profile for X509 PKIX Resource Certificates, a Profile for Route Origin Authorizations, a Protocol for Provisioning Resource Certificates. GROW. Active documents. There’s one: MRT Routing Information Export Format. And new working group activity. So the newly created ones are Timing Over IP Connection and Transfer of Clock, and Highly Accurate Time and Frequency Distribution, Routing Over Lower-Power and Lossy Networks. Deals with environments not addressed by OSPF and ISIS and a few more. CGAA and SEND Maintenance Extensions to IPv6 SEND Technology. And a proposed working group, which hasn’t been approved, is Internalized Domain Names in Applications, to work on creating a working group to finish ongoing IDNA work.

The next IETF is in Dublin, Ireland. This is the date. If you can go, that would be great. The IETF BOF wiki summarizes recent upcoming BOF activities, and these are different links that you can go to. And it includes early topics that might or might not eventually result in official BOFs. If you go there and you see something you’re interested in, it’s definitely worth getting on one of the lists to say, hey, I am interested in this, and why, so that it actually becomes a BOF. And officially approved BOFs, once known, will be on this link. And performance metrics for other layers BOFs. More references. I’m not going to go through these, but there’s a slide if you have more wanting to know. And that is it.

MR. CURRAN: Thank you. Any questions for Marla? Yes, far side?

MR. HAIN: Tony Hain, Cisco. Just one point of clarification. I actually had discussed with Bob Hendon about picking up the central ULA draft, so I will probably be submitting a new version of that shortly. It’s on the queue of documents to get ready.

MS. AZINGER: Thank you.

MR. PLZAK: Okay. Any other questions? Thank you, Marla.

2007-17: Legacy Outreach and Partial Reclamation

MR. PLZAK: Okay. Now on to our first policy proposal discussion of the afternoon: Policy Proposal 2007-17, Legacy Outreach and Partial Reclamation. It was introduced in June of last year; it’s been through one meeting cycle. It was revised several times, the last revision being the 28th of March. This is an ARIN-only policy. The current version includes the errata sheet, which is in your meeting packet. The understanding is that this replaces Section 4.6 of the Number Resource Policy Manual, and shepherds are Cathy Aronson and Lea Roberts. Counsel sees no liability risk. Staff sees some concerns in that the current 4.6 and 4.7 are effectively used by the community. It would take about 90 to 180 days after the ratification of this policy by the Board for this to be implemented. Not much discussion on the mail list, and so I would like to call on – Owen, are you going to do this? Okay. With simple animation?

MR. DeLONG: No, I’m good. This is exactly what I expected. Okay, so I really did minimize the animations in this one, because I ran out of time to take them all out. There are – (Laughter). Yeah, yeah, just bear with, okay? There have been concerns expressed to me by several resource holders that were considering applying under the amnesty policy that there’s some ambiguity as to who gets to choose what they return and what they get to keep, or whether they have to renumber into something entirely new. And as a result, they’ve decided not to take advantage of the current amnesty policy. And this was kind of an attempt to address that, and also to address some other issues that have been brought to my attention at the same time. So the elements of this policy are: It provides a clear intent to make resource return as painless as possible; it gives staff and resource holders better tools to work together on resource returns; and it attempts to remove some disincentives for legacy holders to sign the legacy RSA or even the current RSA. Highlights of the policy: No penalties for returns; minimal renumbering required for returns or aggregation purposes; and it encourages the Board of Trustees to adopt fee incentives or other incentive programs for returns as appropriate. And it allows the staff to negotiate appropriate time frames for returns of address space. It allows staff to reject transactions which are not in the best interest of the community, requires an RSA for any new resources issued, and requires annual contact or verification on the part of the organization holding the resources, regardless of whether an RSA is applied or not. There were some staff concerns expressed. The ones that were expressed to me prior to the meeting were primarily the complexity of the revised language. The revised language was a result of their previously expressed concerns, so – you know, we’re living in a complex world. And then the other concerns they had expressed were addressed by the language changes. Those included the potential for abuse by repetitive exercise of the policy. That was addressed by allowing staff to reject transactions not in the interest of the community. And the lack of time limits, which was addressed by creating a negotiation process for staff to work with the resource holder to set time limits. And with that, I’ll open it up to questions.

MR. CURRAN: Microphones are open.

SPEAKER: That may be the most disturbing slide yet.

MR. DeLONG: Yeah, well, you don’t like burning questions.

SPEAKER: Oh, okay.

MR. CURRAN: So front center microphone. Yes?

MR. LEIBRAND: Scott Leibrand, Internap, ARIN AC. I have a –

MR. CURRAN: Are you for or against this proposal as written?

MR. LEIBRAND: I believe I am for the proposal. However, we keep hearing staff concerns, and I’m not sure I understand them, so I would like to have staff elaborate on their remaining concerns, if there are any, if that’s possible.

MR. CURRAN: Okay.

MR. DeLONG: Leslie, would you address those concerns?

MR. CURRAN: Leslie, do you have any additional concerns on 2007-17, or have they all been addressed in the policy proposal?

MS. NOBILE: I think when Owen revised the policy proposal, I think he addressed most of them. I don’t – I couldn’t find the actual most recent copy of the staff comments, so – one of the things we told them was that there was a lot of complexity, which will confuse customers. There’s a lot of stuff in there. But I don’t think we had any other concerns.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Microphones remain open.

MR. MANNING: John?

MR. CURRAN: Yes.

MR. MANNING: I am in favor of this proposal, and I have a question.

MR. CURRAN: Okay.

MR. MANNING: How many transitions did you remove? (Laughter)

MR. DeLONG: You don’t want to know.

MR. CURRAN: Microphones remain open. Okay. Thank you very much, Owen. (Applause)

MR. CURRAN: That was remarkably little discussion; poses interesting questions for sake of openness and fair dialogue. But seeing as everyone has full understanding of how they feel, and don’t have any questions, I will at this time undertake a show of hands to provide input to the AC in their deliberations. So I’m waiting for my faithful polling team to (off mike) forth. Okay. So we’re going to do one show of hands, and the show of hands is whether or not we should advance Policy Proposal 2007-17. An aye vote, raising the hand, will encourage the AC to adopt this proposal, and a nay vote will encourage them not to adopt the proposal, or at least take that into consideration in their actions. So I’m going to do one show of hands, and I’ll make sure everyone’s ready. Okay? All those in favor of advancing Policy Proposal 2007-17, Legacy Outreach and Partial Reclamation, please raise your hand now. Nice and high. One hand per person. Okay, thank you. All those opposed to advancing Policy Proposal 2007-17, raise your hand.

SPEAKER: (off mike)

MR. CURRAN: Wow. Hmm. Thank you. Do we have a count? Well, on the matter of Policy Proposal 2007-17, 120 in the room; those in favor of advancing it, 38; those opposed, 0. Thank you. This will be provided to the AC for their consideration.

2008-1: SWIP support for smaller than /29 assignments

MR. PLZAK: Now on to Policy Proposal 2008-1, SWIP Support for Smaller than /29 Assignments. It was introduced in January of this year. It is an ARIN-only proposal. The text is your meeting packet. This is a simple understanding; it allows ISPs to use SWIP and RWHOIS for reporting a reassignment smaller than /29s. Shepherds are Owen and Bill. No liability risk seen by counsel. No staff concerns. We could implement this within 90 days after ratification by the Board. Some discussion on the PPML, mostly in favor of this. And so, I believe Bill –

SPEAKER: (off mike)

MR. CURRAN: Could you go back two slides, please?

SPEAKER: Yeah.

MR. CURRAN: One more slide. Okay. So PPML discussion, 14 in favor, 1 against. The following specific comments composed of 40 posts by 27 people.

SPEAKER: Right.

MR. CURRAN: Just don’t want it to fly by too fast. Thank you.

MR. PLZAK: Okay. So, wherever he’s hiding – there he is. Bill?

MR. DARTE: Hi. The author of this proposal is Joe Maimon, and I’m the shepherd representing him at this conference, presenting his proposal. So, points in favor. These are points that he, largely, presented at my request so that I could most favorably represent his policy proposal, with few exceptions. So, proposal is designed to encourage better WHOIS data; proposal likely to make a difference only to the smaller orgs; assignments smaller than /29 are becoming more prevalent; prevalence will likely accelerate with free pool exhaustion; WHOIS documentation of smaller than /29s currently requires RWHOIS; document all the assignments with one method; as a benefit, utilization review can refer to a single data source; appealing to small orgs to unify assignments into SWIPs; the proposal enables the optional use of SWIP or RWHOIS for /29s; the tabular method is not being deprecated, it’s just optional now; and ARIN does not expect there to be any resource issues as per review, as you saw in the introductory slides. Joe was also generous in offering up reasons that he had had expressed towards him or on the PPML about negative points. And IPv4 is dead; let’s not enhance it. You know, not my words. WHOIS is dead or evil; let’s not encourage it. Everything’s just fine; keep using RWHOIS. Use whatever X commercial package you wish, or whatever, which does all your number management. Everybody will immediately redo all assignments as /32s, and those /32s will overwhelm ARIN resources. People will then want /128 SWIPs and IPv6. Nobody really cares about WHOIS data smaller than /29, and there are more important proposals to deal with. Okay, so I think that’s a comprehensive and fair pro and con associated with this. At my request on the PPML – and thank you for those in the room and listening and remotely who responded to my inquiry as a shepherd – my request on the PPML was to reiterate support or objection. That, by my account, showed 100 percent supportive responses across 15 replies. And discussion from the floor for against this at this point?

MR. CURRAN: Yep. Microphones are open. If you’d like to speak for or against this proposal, please come to the microphones.

MR. DARTE: Could be even shorter than the last one.

MR. CURRAN: I know lunch was really good, I know people like relaxing, but it would be good to have some discussion to ensure we know people had that opportunity. Okay, center rear microphone?

MR. HUGHES: Hi, Aaron Hughes. I’m in support of this proposal. I think the more accurate data, the better. It’s great.

MR. CURRAN: Thank you. Center in front?

MR. BARGER: Yeah, Dave Barger, AT&T. I’m in support of this. It’s fine as long as I can continue to send in my reporting the way I’ve been doing in the past. But just one comment about, I guess, resources. No scaling issues with WHOIS or anything like that? I’m sure that’s all been looked at by the ARIN staff.

MR. CURRAN: It wasn’t identified, but if it should turn out to be an issue, obviously we’ll make sure the resources are available.

MR. PLZAK: Mark? Mark? Are you in the room? Kosters? Tim?

SPEAKER: Yes.

MR. PLZAK: Would you address any scaling issue or considerations we may have had in implementing this proposal?

MR. KOSTERS: Actually, I don’t see much of an issue with this. If they want to do it, we can support it. And on the RWHOIS side, well, that’s not really an issue locally, for us.

MR. CURRAN: Okay, thank you. Anyone think this is a bad idea and would like to speak about it? Anyone think it’s a good idea and want to speak? Yes, center front microphone?

MR. McPHERSON: Yes, Danny McPherson. I was just going to say I’m in support of it as well, and for one of the reasons not mentioned – also, it kind of feeds into what Aaron said – which is law enforcement and monitoring prosecution and all that sort of stuff. And the more accurate the data, the better. And then also, to echo the previous speaker, another thought should be given for the ARIN side in tying into RPKI and other infrastructure from that perspective. And so, just something else to (off mike).

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Thank you. Center rear microphone?

MS. AZINGER: Marla Azinger, Frontier Communications. I’m in support of the proposal. I’m lucky, I already have all this in my RWHOIS, so I’m not concerned about anything, but what about people that don’t have it set up correctly? Is there going to be like a time frame to get them in a grace period, to get on Board?

MR. DARTE: It’s optional. You can use it, or use it however you can use it.

MR. CURRAN: You can still do a –

MS. AZINGER: I keep forgetting it’s optional, sorry. I keep thinking – okay, okay, sorry, sorry. Okay. Thank you for pointing that out. Okay.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Anyone else want to speak on this? Closing the microphones. Microphones are closed. Bill, thank you for your presentation. Okay. In order to help the Advisory Council with their deliberations, we take a show of hands on occasion. I’m going to bring my pollers forth. We’re going to have one show of hands on Policy Proposal 2008-1, SWIP Support for Smaller than /29 Assignments. A raise of the hand or an aye vote says you’re in favor of advancing this policy proposal. A nay vote says you are against advancing this policy proposal. So, seeing people are ready, on the matter of Policy Proposal 2008-1, SWIP Support for Smaller than /29 Assignments, all in favor raise your hand now. Nice and high. Okay, thank you. All those opposed to advancing Policy Proposal 2008-1, raise your hand now. Higher, wherever you are. Bill, is that your vote?

SPEAKER: No, I’m encouraging people to vote.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Thank you. Okay. We have a show of hands on the Policy Proposal 2008-1. Number of people in the room, 120; in favor of advancing the policy proposal, 44; against, 0. This will be presented to the AC for their consideration. Thank you.

RIR Update - RIPE NCC

MR. PLZAK: Okay, we’re going to keep on moving ahead on the agenda, and we’ll skip the next item on the agenda, which is the coffee break, and let it occur at its natural time. And so now I’d like to ask Axel if he would come up and present the RIPE NCC report.

MR. PAWLIK: Good afternoon. I assure you that we will have coffee later on, and I won’t take too much of your time. Short update from Amsterdam – and by the way, I am happy to be here to see you all again; I nearly didn’t make it. Terminal 5 and snow in London, or something like that. Speaking of snow in London, we don’t have snow in Amsterdam, but the weather isn’t really that nice yet, but it will be soon.

Personnel changes, we have a small update. Our DNS Group – oh, sorry, the Database Group has been taken over by Anand. It’s a small group. He’s there to look after them, doing a good job there. I have previously announced a Customer Services Group, with Greg heading that. Greg has been ill for quite some time, so we have Andrea now on loaner from Registration Services to be acting Customer Services Manager, and we are all happy with that. We are living in interesting times, and I have mentioned before that we have been talking to our Board over the course of the last year, and of course internally with our management people as well, to look at where the RIPE NCC is going, where all of the RIRs are going, where the sole IPB for IPv6 things is moving, and we are currently working with our Board on preparing some scenarios. Basically, we’re talking about this all the time here, to write them down a little bit more formally and to see what the options are. And just track the environment and see what actually is happening. The idea here is to provide good service to our members, and the primary service there is to provide a stable environment, stable organization for the RIPE NCC during these interesting times. And you will hear about that as it progresses over time.

What have we done over the last few months since we last saw each other? A good thing: We have a content management system sort of up and running for our internal website. Not quite yet, but I’m using it already anyway. It’s great; we’re all looking forward to using it to enhance the quality of our RIPE NCC external website as well. It’s a good thing; we have been waiting for that quite some time. K-root has been completely updated CentOS. What else? Audits. Lots of audits. We heard about some audits here before. We, of course, do audits of our members, our LIRs, but we thought it would be a good idea to do some audits, to have some audits done, on ourselves as well. So basically, we’ve had one security audit done and looked at the results and have implemented the recommendations there. We’ve also had an audit of our network infrastructure done by external people to see whether we are doing good or really stupid things. That’s concluding currently.

And also, speaking of our members with regard to resources, we have had ourselves checked with regard to processes in Registration Services, and that is also coming to an end now. No big catastrophes there. Current focus activities. The external side – well, IPv6 is there for the root zone. What else? Information Services is putting a lot of effort into bundling services and making it more usable, more understandable what we are doing in that region there. Database – we have been asked several times and consistently to make real-time mirroring available. We are doing so. We’re not just saying that we are doing that. We worked together with a data protection task force there from our community, just to make sure that we have support for all those things from the community.

And we did a bit of reclaiming, not unusual amounts of addresses, but just to get an idea of how work-intensive it is to do these things. What is the level of success that we are getting? We are watching the Internet; parts of it, at least. There are some interesting things, some events happening over the last few months that we have been looking at. The somewhat more personally amusing thing is the YouTube hijack case study that we’ve done. Not the case study that we’ve done, but more the presentation. You might have seen it. I think it’s good work. Our chief scientist talks and explains what we’re all seeing, but the whole thing is underlaid by terrible soft-porn music. It’s a bit strange; we have to change our efforts there a little bit. But overall, this is what we’re doing. We’re watching things and we are writing up reports about it. I think that’s something that we should enhance a bit more, also.

I won’t talk much about policies. We’ve heard something about that yesterday already, and they are on our websites anyway. So have a look. Certification. You heard about that. We are more or less all doing this. That’s something that, again, we worked together with a task force on. We have had a meeting, I think it was three weeks ago; might have been two and half or four; I don’t remember any more – the fourth meeting with our task force. Basically, what we did, we presented a mockup of our user interface there. We want to make sure that what we are doing does not interfere in a negative way with the business purposes of our members, so we try very hard to be on a very short leash there when we are doing things. We will have a report, of course, at the next RIPE meeting. After that, we look forward to implementing a smallish test bed with a few members more than we have in the task force, maybe 15 to 20 people participating there, to gain some day-to-day experience with that. And then, hopefully, announce the deployment of the system at the Dubai meeting in October, I think it is.

Now we have currently about 5,400 and a few more members, maybe 5,500 by now. We do see still very, very strong growth in Russia, in the U.K., and Italy as well, and, well, Germany, of course, also. We continue to do our regional meetings. They are quite popular. Next one will happen next week in Kuwait, and then again another on in Moscow in September. We always try to probe our Russian members, or members from the region, let’s say, whether there is a chance we could go out to other places. St. Petersburg comes to mind. But they all say no, no, if you want to go to Russia and meet all the people there, then go to Moscow. So that’s what we will do later in the year again. The Middle East proves also very active. MENOG is really, really taking off. We do a little bit of secretarial and meeting support there for them. MENOG 3 will happen next week also, alongside the regional meeting. They’ll be interspersed, intermixed a bit. That seems to go rather well. And of course, we do a meeting later in Dubai, and MENOG 4 will happen there, as well as part of our RIPE meeting.

Membership survey. We heard from APNIC that they are doing. We’ll do another one. We will not be using KPMG this time, just for a change, to see some new people and see what they tell us how do to this. And we’ll do that later on this year. Enhanced cooperation, governments. We have another task force, the Enhanced Cooperation Task Force, that basically is writing up a proposal on what we actually understand under enhanced cooperation. Of course, this all comes out of the business process. We expect this to be evolving into a proper RIPE working group that is persistent and will go on, with, of course, participation from governments in the region. External relations in general. We have finally engaged a PR consultancy just to help us step up our efforts to talk to the external world, the non-technical world. And we’ve just started to do that really, but it seems to be quite promising; we’ll see what happens with that.

The OECD sits in Paris, just around the corner. They seem to have adopted us as the RIR they can talk to, because we’re just around the corner. So they have a big ministerial meeting, conference, in Seoul, in June, that they are preparing frantically. And we’ll participate in that together with our technical community and all the RIRs there as well. And of course, we’re all looking forward to the next IGF at the end of the year. Currently, preparations for that are a little bit slow, but I think they will step up significantly, of course, as the year progresses. We don’t perceive this to be any great threat currently. Well, we’ll see what happens.

The last RIPE meeting in Amsterdam was pretty full, but we didn’t feel too crowded; it was quite well. Attendance – lots of countries being represented there really, really nice. And that was the last that we’ve seen of Amsterdam for quite some years. The hotel is being redone. We don’t know when we’ll be back, so we are out and about for the next four, five meetings certainly. The committee statement on v4, 46, you probably know that already. It was time that we did something like that. Next RIPE meeting will be in Berlin. No, I don’t guarantee any blue skies like that, but it’ll be nice. Well, it is an interesting town, so you’re, of course, all welcome and, I know, eager to come here already. Some of you are maybe more eager to go to Dubai. There you’ll be welcome as well. I don’t know how big this will be in terms of number of attendees. Of course, it’s a little bit far out of our traditional places we go to, but we do get news that people are quite eager to see the sand, and the gold, and, oh, the RIPE meeting there as well. So if you want to come, of course, you’re more than welcome. And it starts on a Sunday, but, you know, doesn’t really matter. It stops early then as well. Okay, that’s me. If you have any questions, I am happy to answer them, or I’ll try at least.

MR. CURRAN: Microphones are open.

MR. PAWLIK: Ah, the lucky girl.

MS. ARONSON: Hi, Cathy Aronson. My question for you is, how many of the people that you reclaimed address space for are aware of the upcoming transfer policies? Do you think that they are willing to give up their address space only to find that they might get money for it in the future?

MR. PAWLIK: Actually, I don’t really know. Do you have any idea, Filiz? Certainly we are discussing the issues. I don’t know whether they have been told on being contacted that they’ll get rich if they don’t give it up.

MS. ARONSON: Well, I know. I’m just curious, though – oh, okay. Yeah, I know. But I mean, I wondered if you have any feel for how many of them might come back and say, oh, gee, I wish I’d known.

MR. PAWLIK: Filiz.

MS. YILMAZ: Filiz Yilmaz, RIPE NCC. Well, they may, I don’t know. But the main bulk of this recommendation is for PI address space, and our transfer policy doesn’t include PI address space –

MS. ARONSON: Oh, okay.

MS. YILMAZ: – so not immediately, at least.

MR. PAWLIK: Thanks.

MS. ARONSON: My other comment was, a bunch of us are going to go to ski Dubai, so if anybody’s interested, there’s three lifts and everything’s included with your lift ticket. (Laughter)

MR. McPHERSON: Hi, Danny McPherson again. Oh, sorry, you have to point me out first. I was just wondering if there was anything you learned from the security audits or the infrastructure availability audit stuff that was done that might be generic enough to provide value to ARIN or the other RIRs, and if any of that information has been shared, or if there’s a plan to do that.

MR. PAWLIK: Sorry, I didn’t get that.

MR. McPHERSON: If there is –

MR. CURRAN: A little louder, Danny.

MR. McPHERSON: Yeah, I’m sorry. If you learned anything from the security audits or the infrastructure availability audits that are worth sharing with the other RIRs, and if any of that discussion’s taken place.

MR. PAWLIK: No, I don’t think that we’ve talked to the other RIRs about that, but, of course, it’s no big secret. I’ll talk to our techies and see that we make sure that there is no big holes at the (off mike), and possibly, I don’t know, exchange some information. That’s fine; we can do that.

MR. McPHERSON: Yeah, I think that’s actually important work, especially given, again, the RPKI infrastructure and some of the implications that has on the routing system, or availability of that infrastructure and security of that infrastructure down the road. So I think that some joint work there between the RIRs would be very valuable.

MR. PAWLIK: Absolutely.

MR. CURRAN: Do you think that someone might decide that it would be worth getting hold of some of the certificate root signers?

MR. McPHERSON: Absolutely.

MR. PAWLIK: Anything else? No? Thank you.

NRO NC Report

MR. PLZAK: Moving on, Marty will present the Number Council report.

MR. HANNIGAN: Good afternoon. I’m Martin Hannigan, Verne Global, also the Chair of the Internet Golf Society. You’ll see me in Dublin at the IETF. Member of the NRO NC. Okay, so this is our meeting update of the activities of the NRO NC. Current members are myself, Louis Lee, and Jason Schiller, if you could just raise your hands for a quick second. That’s them there. Big clap. Okay, that’s us. There’s our e-mail addresses. If you have any questions, please feel free to get hold of us in person or this way. Current members of the NRO, ARIN, APNIC, LACNIC, AFRINIC, and RIPE. So what do we do? That’s a good question, and a lot of people don’t know. We appoint seats number 9 and 10 to the ICANN Board of Directors. We objectively process RIR-related global policies submitted from participants in the communities. We define operating procedures to process that policy so when we get one, we actually know what to do with it. We offer advice to the ICANN Board on RIR- related issues. We also certify that the global policies submitted to the process comply with the documented PDPs, so our job is basically to certify to the group before we ratify the policy to ICANN, that you guys agree that the policy was followed and passed through the process. And finally, we appoint a representative to the ICANN Nominating Committee, and the nominating committee is for the Board of directors and other positions within ICANN committees. So what’s happened since the last time we met? Some new people were added: Jason Schiller, whom I pointed out earlier; Vincent Ngundi from AFRINIC; Louis Lee ran a campaign for the Chair, and he won, so he’s now heading up the NRO NC for this year. He’s going to participate in the February ICANN meeting, as a matter of fact. The secretary changed from APNIC to AFRINIC, and we’d like to thank APNIC for their services. And overall, the wheel’s a-turning. So, the upcoming months, two global policies on the horizon. Now, these are not officially global policies, but there’s an early awareness process at ICANN, and since there is a process available to other folks, we wanted to just point these policies out to you. We’re not asking for discussion. In fact, that’s not what this is. It’s just to let you know that these are on the horizon. So, the ASN 2- to 4-byte policy, and the remaining v4 space, for which there are two policies, and n=? Nous allons Paris. May ICANN meeting, myself and Louis will be there representing the NRO NC, and Louis will be at the November ICANN meeting. Some of the work that we’re going to undertake in the next few months. We’re going to do some procedure updates. And that’s it. Thank you very much. Thanks to Russ for arranging our travel and sending Ray’s Christmas cards. And network engineers, you are people, too. Thank you. (Applause)

MR. CURRAN: Questions? Any questions for the ASO AC? No? Thank you very much.

IANA Activities Report

MR. PLZAK: Okay. I would now like to ask Leo Vegoda to come up and present the IANA activities report.

MR. VEGODA: Hello, everyone. I’m Leo Vegoda, and I’ve got some information about what IANA has been doing recently and what we’re carrying on doing. Oh, and I forgot, yeah. Last time I gave a picture of our Marina del Rey office, where I don’t work. So this time a picture of our Brussels office, where I do work. We’re surrounded by a bank and a café beux, which is very Belgian.

Okay. Overview. I’ll talk about IPv4 address space registry, research, IETF work, and DNS work, and then I guess we’ll probably be approaching the coffee break. So the IPv4 address space registry: New format, no more various registries. I think it’s, hopefully, more useful and easier to understand for network operators and also for ordinary people. For instance, unallocated and reserved are separated now, which probably makes it a little bit easier for people who aren’t network operators to understand what it means. XML. All our registries are going to be published in XML this summer. We’re going to lead the way with the IPv4 address space registry. The idea is, we’re going to make it easier for computers to read and also easier for people to read. I’ve just gone through the process of manually checking the XML against the text version, and the XML seems to be producing okay. So, hopefully, in the next week or two we will be putting that up on our website, and there will be an announcement and stuff like that. The great thing about having it in an XML format, which is the format we’ll be using to maintain the registry, is it makes it easier for us to go and shove it into other formats. So if you as the operators or your customers need a particular format that is prettier, or shows you changes to the registry, or something like that, then if you let us know, then once we’ve started publishing our registries in XML, we can actually start making them available in a variety of formats and colors and flavors and aromas.

Research. You are probably all aware of that symbol. It’s the symbol for the International Association of Squatters – or maybe not. Okay, network engineers don’t squat houses. Lovely. So some IPv4 address space, I mentioned previously, despite not being allocated has actually been used. There’s not any sure way of knowing exactly which ranges are used and how widely, but we have been doing a little bit of research, basically looking for DNS queries that make their way to the root DNS servers. And the idea is that we can infer from this, hopefully, some information about the unallocated address space that’s used, how problematic that’s going to be. That little graph there is an example of our initial proof-of-concept research. We decided that what we saw was enough to go and do it properly. So now we’ve done the initial proof of concept, we’re engaging a professional researcher. The idea is to use the Day in the Life of the Internet data, which is a nice big source of data, and, hopefully, give us a good view of exactly which ranges are used, whether it’s particular parts of the ranges or all of those ranges. The idea is that we’ll then be able to share this information with network operators with the RIRs, help us make some decisions, and so on. We are in the process of engaging the researcher. We’ve got a statement of work ready, and really we just need to finalize that so that we can go and get the work done.

IETF work. We recently reclaimed 14 /8s. That means we need to update RFC 3330. There’s a few other little changes to it as well. For instance, some of those start and end CIDR ranges, we want to go and say, yes, this can actually be allocated by the RIRs. For instance, a while back APNIC were allocated 223/8, I think. And they said, hey, you really ought to go and update RFC 3330 so that it’s absolutely clear that we can allocated this last /24. And so that’s what we want to do. The draft is out there. We’re going to take it to 01 hopefully soon, because we got some comments already that would make it better. If you want to go and have a look at it and give us comments to make it better, then please do. Also, RFC 3171, which is the RFC describing how we assign multicast addresses, needs updating. Basically, it was a good document when it was published; it’s just a bit old. We need to update the registry as well, make the registry easier to use, all that sort of general goodness. We want to take it to a 01 – I think it’s going to end up being another 00 again because, hopefully, it’s going to be adopted by the MBone-D working group. But if you’re interested in multicast, and you’re interested in addressing, that might be a draft to look at. DNS work. So everyone knows we went and put those addresses in the root for the four root servers that initially had the IPv6 addresses there. ICANN has made L-root IPv6-accessible. It’s not been published yet. The idea, I believe, is to wait until a couple of other operators are ready to have their nameservers added as well and do it as a job lot. But basically, more IPv6 in the root, which sounds lovely.

Also, we want to work, or we are working, with the RIRs on basically making it easier for them to interact with us when they want to manage their reverse DNS delegations. We started discussions on this at the IETF meeting in Philadelphia, and as well as just making it generally a little bit easier, hopefully this will also make it a little bit easier to manage any DNSSEC stuff. As you probably know, the IAB has requested that when we take over the in-addr.arpa and .arpa zone, all of that, we go and DNSSEC sign it. We’ve been doing quite a lot of preparation work on that, making sure that we’ve got the processes and procedures and the experience and so on. Hopefully, we’ll be making some announcements in the run-up to the ICANN meeting in June, but it’s something that we’re working on.

And that is my mandatory meeting picture. It’s the Blackpool Tower. No, sorry, it’s the Eiffel Tower. Yeah, and if you want to come to Paris, then you can come to Paris and you can say you’re going to the ICANN meeting, or you can even just come to the ICANN meeting. And there’s remote participation as well at the par.icann.org website. And that’s it.

MR. CURRAN: Thank you. Okay, questions? Any questions (off mike) microphone? Louder. Microphones?

MR. HAIN: Tony Hain, Cisco. I just wondered if you wanted to comment about the changelog that I sent you mail about on the IPv4 address page, just so that everybody knows kind of what’s going on there?

MR. VEGODA: Yes.

SPEAKER: Would you repeat that question?

MR. VEGODA: Yeah, Tony asked about a changelog for the IPv4 address space registry. Now that we’re moving our registries to XML format, it’s going to make it a little bit easier for us to manage this sort of information. And ideally, we will be publishing a changelog in some sort of format, possibly more than one format, depending on user demand. If people let us know the format they want, then maybe if we have an overwhelming demand for one thing, we’ll go with that first. But the idea is that when we go and make a change to the registry, we won’t just announce when we allocated new space. If we go and change something so that it, say, was managed by one organization, and it’s now managed by another organization, it’s not really an organizational change, but it’s interesting. So the idea would be to publish that sort of information as well.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Far right microphone?

MR. LEWIS: Ed Lewis, NeuStar. You mentioned DNS, so I have to ask a question. Can you go back about two or three slides?

MR. VEGODA: Yeah, tell me when to stop.

MR. LEWIS: Next, next. Next one. This one here. I’m just curious what you meant by automating reverse DNS delegation management. I’m just curious what that means. Do you have any detail about what is being done to do that?

MR. VEGODA: The idea is – at the moment, when the RIRs want to update the delegation for something, they go and send an e-mail, and we go and confirm it with them, and all the rest of it. It’s a little bit manual. And the idea is to put in a nice secure way of automating it, using – I believe the ideas we’re discussing at the moment, X.509 certificates, and doing stuff over HTTPS, and I can’t remember what the other thing was. But anyway, yeah, that’s the idea, so that it can be all nice and sort of securely done, and done more quickly than at the moment.

MR. LEWIS: It would be the same thing that TLD would do for its nameservers? That kind of – the same kind of management interface, but for forward DNS?

MR. VEGODA: I think the management interface is going to be a little bit different – well, the management interface that is being discussed at the moment is different because a lot of the work surrounding TLDs is not really to do with DNS, and we don’t need to put any of that in this. We just need to put the DNS stuff in there. So it’s simpler, but the same security would be in there.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Far left microphone?

MR. KOSTERS: Mark Kosters, ARIN. One of the things that – right now, in-addr.arpa is actually managed by us. And one of the things that would be very useful to see, because this is critical, is to see a very – a process in which this is going to be transitioned, and a timeline for it to actually happen. And I’m concerned that this has not happened yet, and we’re going through some of the machinations here, but we don’t have any dates associated with this. And I think it would be useful for the community to know when these things happen, and what sort of assurance is being made that when the transition occurs, that there will be no loss.

MR. VEGODA: I’m sorry that we haven’t published the timeline. Some of this is down to just we’re relying on more than just you and us; there are other parties in there. But I’m sure that we can make publication about the way that we’re going to make sure that it’s a smooth transition.

MR. KOSTERS: Great.

MR. VEGODA: Yeah.

MR. CURRAN: Okay, center –

MR. GAGLIANO: Just to say that, yeah, we have the same concern in LACNIC, and we mentioned that privately, and we’re looking forward to getting the information.

MR. CURRAN: Okay.

SPEAKER: What’s his name?

MR. GAGLIANO: My name is Roque Gagliano from LACNIC.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. You got the mic? No? Okay, any other questions? Thank you, Leo. (Applause)

MR. PLZAK: Okay, now we’ll take a break. How’s that? Okay, as soon as I can get some slides. Okay, Cyber Café, this is one of your last chances to give us a survey, so complete that survey card. The help desks are still open – all three of them. And this noon – it’s not going to work, okay. Well, how about let’s take 20 minutes, and by watch, that would put us back in here at 15 minutes past 3:00. (Recess)

MR. PLZAK: Welcome back. We are now going to talk about what we do. If I could have the slide please. So at the head table we have John, Bill, Scott is up here, Suzanne and another Bill. So we’ve got a pair of Bills. If they were at each end we’d have Bill-ends instead of bookends. And then Heather is a Bill, also? I don’t know if I would want to do that Heather. (Laughter)

MS. SCHILLER: Where’s the handsome Cathy?

MR. PLZAK: The handsome Cathy?

IRPEP

MR. PLZAK: Okay. So what we’re going to be discussing now is the policy development process itself. And so Scott has a presentation on some thoughts and so forth that the Board has been going through. So Scott, if you’d care to come up.

MR. BRADNER: Well, good afternoon. It’s time to ponder. Our current policy development process has been in place a couple of years, almost exactly two years now, so it’s time to think about, is it reasonable to tweak it based on experience? So a little bit of background first, just to be sure we’re all on the same grounding as we discuss this. ARIN resource policies determine the rules ARIN uses to administer the resources. It’s the program that the staff uses. We developed this in an open and transparent process. That’s part of our mission to do that. We had to change, actually, when ARIN was first founded, we didn’t have an open process like this. It was a process that was membership only and it wasn’t anywhere near as open. But as part of the ICANN formation and navel-gazing that happened at the time, we moved to an open and transparent and not restricted to membership process. So it’s a public policy process rather than a membership policy process. It’s important that it is public. It’s anybody who wants to participate and we want to keep it that way. We have a resource evaluation process which some people try to pronounce, and I’m not going to be one of them, which defines how the policies are developed and adopted and this was adopted, this particular process was adopted within discussion in one of these meetings, in a series of these meetings.

The Board doesn’t create policy. The Board can adopt policy. It can’t by itself modify policy. It adopts policy recommended by the AC under the current policy process, recommended by the AC, if the process was followed, and that’s important, and the mantra that we use in our motions to adopt policy is, “Yes, the policy process was followed, it is open, there was discussion, the community knows what’s going on.” There’s some level of community support for the policy. I say some level in that one of the things that you’ve noticed when either John or I call to give you the results of the shows of hands in this meeting, have been, there are so many people in the room, so many support, so many against. So we could have 123 people in the room and 35 in favor and 2 opposed. There’s some community support there. That’s unanimity. That’s not overwhelming community support. If it’s 14 in favor and 1 against and 120 people in the room, well, we’ve got to question that. But there’s some level of community support.

Both the Board and the AC at some level judge the level of community support. Of course the Board’s responsibility is to be sure any policies meet the requirements of the bylaws and articles of incorporation. We don’t do that, then we’re not doing our duties and we get our pay docked, so. Consistent with applicable laws, counsel is always in the room telling us when we’re trying to violate laws. He gets real testy when we do that, so we generally try not to do that. And it’s consistent with fiduciary duty, too. If the policy comes along and if indeed fees were part of the policy structure, which they’re not, but if a policy came along saying we have to pay people to take these six addresses, then the Board might look askance at that for a fiscal responsibilities. And also we don’t do things which are going to get us sued as much as we can. Note that we tried to make a cleanish separation more recently than in the past between the business practices and the policies for the allocation of resources. This got mixed up in the past quite a bit and we’re trying to separate that out so we now have this suggestion process to be followed when you want to have different kinds of cookies at the breaks or things like that. So trying to separate those out and doing a pretty good job of it, but not perfect. We’ve got to do some more sometimes. So that’s sort of that part of the background.

The next part of the background is this Advisory Council thing. Advisory Council is elected representatives of the ARIN membership. It’s not the whole community, but it is the ARIN membership. It’s real hard to have an election of the whole community because we don’t have any definition of what that is. So the ARIN Advisory Council is an ARIN body that represents – hello. I didn’t even get part way through my presentation.

MS. ARONSON: Is – I’m sorry, but isn’t it the case that the ARIN membership elects the Advisory Council, but the members are from the community at – I mean, the Advisory Council individuals are from the community-at-large. Because I, in particular, I am not an ARIN member, but I am on the Advisory Council.

MR. BRADNER: Whoever you are, since you didn’t announce –

MS. ARONSON: I’m Cathy Aronson for the 550th time.

MR. BRADNER: But the people out there in audio land can’t see you. Yes, that is absolutely correct that members of the ARIN Advisory Council, as with members of the Board, do not have to be members of ARIN. I am a member of the Board, but I’m a Board member of ARIN, meaning I get – it’s like an honorary degree, which they do at Harvard. They give out honorary degrees. It gets you on the Advisory Council for Harvard if you want to, so, yes, the members don’t have to be, but they’re elected by the members.

From the beginning of this policy process, the Advisory Council has had a role in developing policies. But the role has changed somewhat over time and we’re proposing, we being the Board, are proposing a quite significant change in the role of the Advisory Council. And as I said, the current process is just almost exactly two years old. Why change? Well, the idea to start thinking about this has been percolating for a while, but it really came to a head in the last couple of meetings, not so much this one, but the last couple before this, where we had a number of policy proposals on the floor which were overlapping or very similar and it just got very confusing. There was also a great deal of confusion as to what some of them meant. Some of them came along with staff comments that said, in effect, I don’t understand what this is trying to say. And yet, it still got on the floor, we still discussed it, with the staff saying we don’t know. If you pass this, we don’t know what to do. That’s not a good thing. Some of the proposals, the Board members individual and collectively viewed some of them as questionable technical soundness and the presentations and discussions at the meeting have been, let’s say, uneven at times.

So these are some problems. There’s other problems, but these are some problems that led us to want to change things. The basic concept here is the AC has been elected by the membership to represent the membership and the community, and they can think. They are people, too. Thinking people, too. We hope. There are times when you have to prove it, but we hope. So we’re empowering this proposal and it is a proposal at this point. We’re proposing to empower the AC, but to provide some strong checks and balances in that empowerment. We want the AC to require that the proposals be clear when they come to the floor and to the mailing list to discuss, requires that the assessments are being done before it gets out there so that the staff and the legal assessments are done before the AC pops out a proposal and the AC has to think about what those staff comments were. If the staff says, you know, you do this thing and encounter something else, then the AC has got to think about that. And unlike what happened in the last meeting, the text for the proposal is frozen a few days before the meeting so we all know what we’re talking about.

That doesn’t mean we can’t discuss in the meeting changes, possible changes to the text that would please people, but we want something that’s frozen so that what went out on the Public Policy Mailing List was discussed there, is the same text that we’re discussing in the meeting. So we’re basically proposing that the AC move from being a policy advisory group to being a policy development group, but again with checks and balances, and be charged with thinking about the policies, not just counting hands. So the AC has too often looked at the results of the shows of hands, which have been shows of hands in the past and actually in this proposal might be called votes in a concrete way because Robert’s Rules doesn’t like shows of hands I’m told by Mr. Roberts over here.

So AC is not bound to do exactly what the shows of hands say. The vote says 14 in favor, 2 opposed, and 120 in the room. The AC doesn’t have to say, well, that was supported. It can say, there’s not enough community support for it. They can look at it and say, well, even if the community liked it, it’s technically unsound and we want to push back on it and maybe even drop it. But if they do that, there’s a way around it if indeed the community and the proponents believe that that was the wrong decision. There has to be community and AC support, but, again, it doesn’t have to be unanimous. And if there’s a mixed message from the support, the AC is empowered to think about and bring forth what they think is the best proposal. So develop policy proposals, these are the roles of – the role of the AC, develop policy proposals as individuals or as the AC – and as the AC, solicit policy proposals. If somebody in AC says, you know, this would be a good thing to have a proposal on and goes out and taps somebody on the shoulder and says, you know, if you get some spare time, why don’t you go write a proposal, AC can do that. Review and revise policy proposals from the community. Not all proposals are coming from the AC. In fact, I would expect most would not. But the AC is empowered to generate proposals, but they also review and revise proposals from the community. Reject technically unsound proposals and reject proposals which have not shown community support and community consensus, but, again, if the AC looking at a mixed message from the community can chart its own path through that. And another important piece, some of the proposals that have come up have been very narrow. Not exactly earthshaking. And we want to make proposals that get in front of this meeting and have discussion time in the meeting, ones which actually are going to make a difference, not just dotting an I or something like that, but actually make a difference, to serve an actual need of some portion of the community. And if something gets – a proposal is made, which actually turns out to be an errant business practice rather than a policy arena, the AC should say, hey, that’s not our concern. That goes over to the suggestion process. And if the AC does suggest modifications to a proposal, then they have to work with the staff to ensure that what comes out of the AC is something the staff can understand. And something that legal has looked at and the AC’s responded to any comments that legal has. So the idea here is to try and get better proposals to the table, to the floor, to the discussion, as we go along.

This looks like it empowers the AC to do quite a bit. And it does. But it doesn’t provide them with a path to Nirvana without some checks. There’s checks at every decision point. There’s initial decision point to do with the staff working with the – I’ll go through all of the particulars in a bit, but there’s an initial point where the proposer works with the staff to make sure the text is clear and then the staff can say it’s not clear and the proposer can say, hey, I want the community to look at it anyway. There’s a way around the staff there. If the proposal gets to the AC and the AC decides to drop it or come up with a counter proposal or what, there’s a way around that. If the AC decides after the Public Policy Meeting that it’s not suitable for last call, there’s a way around that. And if the AC, after reviewing the last call decides to not send it to the Board, there’s a way around that. So there’s a way around all of the decision points where the community can speak rather than just accepting what the AC and the staff have come up with. So, trying to empower the AC, get them to think, yes, it’s more work, it’s different work. It’s not just counting hands. It’s actually work, thoughtful work, but making sure the community has a way to say to the AC that they’re exceeding their authority and they need to be pulled back. So here’s the proposal for the process. There’s a proposal to submit its action, development and an evaluation, discussion, review, et cetera, et cetera, and I’ll go through each of these steps.

The submittal. Anybody other than the staff or a member of the Board of Trustees, can originate a policy proposal. Now, if a member of the Board of Trustees thinks that a policy is needed in some area, if they can’t persuade somebody in the community to put one in, then they might rethink whether there needs to be one in this area. So this is not stopping Woody or somebody else from coming up with a policy. It is saying that it needs to come from the community to eliminate the confusion of whether it’s the Board trying to direct things.

There’s a template and the policy proposal is submitted not to the Public Policy Mailing List, but to a policy alias at ARIN, and that allows the ARIN staff to get it and evaluate it and work with the originator to make sure that it’s clear. And that’s the second step. The staff and the originator work together to come up with a clear text, to make sure that the staff understands what this means. Now, the staff is not evaluating it. Specifically, the staff doesn’t look at it and say, oh, that’s hard, or we don’t think that’s a good idea.

Their mission at this stage is to merely say that it’s clear and they understand what it means. And they work with the originator to make sure that it’s clear that there isn’t extra ands or buts or ors or whatever in the proposal, so that it is a clear proposal. If they can’t come to agreement, if the staff and originator can’t come to an agreement, the originator then can send it off to the Public Policy Mailing List and say, hey, I need to get this in front of the AC despite the fact the staff doesn’t say it’s clear. Now, I will advise you that if you do that, the AC will probably take into account that the staff didn’t think it was clear and it’s probably not your best move, but you can do it. It’s a perfectly possible thing for you to do, but that’s also a check on the staff. If the staff starts to sneak into evaluation and rather than just trying to make it clear, but sneaks into evaluation saying, bad idea, so we won’t agree, then this is an escape around them so that we shine light on that process.

When a policy proposal gets to the AC, the AC owns it. It’s no longer the originator, it’s the AC that owns it. And the AC can muck it up, combine it with others, split it in parts. I don’t happen to write here that it can bifurcate it, but one of the discussions today was clear about there are cases where there’s too much that had been piled in one proposal and you need to split it apart to get to more concrete things so we can actually discuss that as a unit. So rewrite, merge, abandon, split, do anything. They can do anything they want. When they’ve reached something which they think is worth thinking about, then they submit it for staff and legal review and that’s the review you’ve been seeing all along where the legal says, you do this and we get sued two minutes after you pass it, or it’s okay. And staff says, well, if you do this, it’s going to cost $13 million and 400 new staff. Whatever. But those are the reviews that you’ve seen all along.

When the staff and the legal review is done, this is done early in the process. Right now those reviews are done quite late in the process. In this proposal they’re done early in the process, they’re input to the AC, and the AC, one hopes, will react to them and take them into consideration in their evaluation and development of the proposed policy. The AC produces a draft policy if indeed they come up with something. And it’s not, this is carefully not saying this is the original proposal, because the original proposal may have completely disappeared. It may come through perfect because the person who wrote it has a fantastic idea and it’s exactly what’s needed and it just flows through the process. I won’t give you similes, but it just flows through the process. But it also could be that the AC modifies it quite a bit or merges it with something else or splits it into pieces. So what goes in is proposal, what comes out is draft policies. Or it gets thrown away and the AC can abandon it and say, I don’t like that, we don’t think there’s anything needed in this space. Or it kicks it off to the suggestion process. All that kind of thing is possible. If the original proposer doesn’t like what happened, they can petition.

Again, it’s a process and we’ll have to figure out what the thresholds and petitions are just like we have right now multiple types of thresholds depending on how far you are in the process, but the originator can petition and say I want my proposal as clarified by the staff, or not if they got that passed, but that would be generally a bad idea, but clarified by the staff, I want that proposal to go in front of a Public Policy Meeting, and if they get enough support from the community, then that can happen. This is a way around the AC deciding that they really don’t like a particular person who proposes lots of things and they’re going to kill all his proposals or kill all of her proposals. So this is a way around that. So the AC can modify test based on their deliberations, based on the comments from staff or legal. Every time they do that, they have to check with the staff to make sure that the result is still clear and understandable. So the AC selects a set of one or more draft policies which meet the criteria of only being useful and sound and technically sound and useful and fit with the bylaws, fit with everything that they know they’re supposed to be fitting with, and they say these are the ones that we want to discuss at the next policy meeting and they get posted to the mailing list. They get posted on the website. Along with them are the final staff and legal comments. I say “final” because staff and legal, which commented earlier, may change their comments based on revisions that the AC has done in between. So it puts out a set of draft policies for discussion on the mailing list. In addition, any proposal that has passed a petition, gets out there as well, gets out there for discussion in front of the public policy list. So we have this discussion like we do today.

Ten days before the meeting, the text is frozen. It’s frozen so we know what we’re talking about in the discussion leading up to the meeting, we know what we’re talking about in the meeting. That doesn’t mean that it gets frozen for all time; it’s frozen until after the meeting. So the AC presents the draft policies to the meeting. How the AC decides who’s going to do this is up to the AC. It can assign shepherds or holders or handlers or whatever they want to call them, some subset of the AC is going to have to take some kind of responsibility for the proposals that pop out and the draft policies that the – the policy proposals that go in. There’s got to be some mechanism that’s open and transparent, a list of them, a publicly published list of what proposals have been made, and who in the AC is going to be dealing with them, et cetera, numbers, all that kind of thing, so that we can refer to them in discussion. But then finally, the AC presents at the meeting, we have a discussion at the meeting, and we have votes, real votes, not advisory, not shows of hands, but real votes. The votes are advisory to the AC They’re not definitive, but we’re going to call them votes rather than shows of hands or something else like that to satisfy Mr. Roberts.

So the AC owns all of the draft policies at this point after the meeting, including the ones which made it there by petition. The AC can now muck with the text if they believe that the discussion in the meeting or the discussion on the mailing list or the combination means that the text isn’t exactly right. At this point, also, the AC can rethink it entirely. They have those same set of options, they can abandon, split, merge, do anything. They’ve got the full power to work on these draft policies at this point. They work within 30 days. Right now they work within a few days of the public policy meeting, kind of deciding basically where there was community support for a policy or not. We want to empower them to do more than that. We want to empower them to think about the proposals in front of them. So draft policies, they think about them, they decide what to do about them. They can still merge or split or abandon or tweak it based on the discussions in the meeting and then they decide a set of these are ready for last call. Again, if somebody petitioned or even if they didn’t petition, if they liked what a proposal was, what a draft policy was when it was discussed in front of the meeting, but the AC decides to deep-six it, let it sleep with the fishes, if AC decides that, well, somebody can try and revive it, though mouth-to-mouth resuscitation with a fish is not a great idea. So we want to think carefully about which ones you want to try to resuscitation. But there’s a petition process for that, which will take some higher threshold, whatever it turns out to be, just like the current one does, because it’s further along in the process. But the AC publishes their results of their thinking to the mailing list so it’s out there in public.

Again, the AC is going to have to have some mechanism where it is visible to the outside world which policies they’re working on and what the status of the work is before it pops out, so that it’s not just a black hole where things go in and maybe something comes out and maybe something doesn’t. There needs to be some more visibility than that. If the AC puts out something, they can say this is ready for last call and it goes out for a last call just like we have today. Variable duration depending on how complicated the thing is, how much discussion is generated, whatever, 10-day minimum, but it could be longer than that. If the text is different than the version that was discussed in the meeting, then the AC has to explain that, explain it on the mailing list, so the discussion can be had around that. If it’s significantly different, then it goes back to another meeting because it’s not last call anymore if it’s effectively a new draft policy.

The AC then reviews the last call. By the way, yes, somebody can petition to get it out there – get something out there for last call, as I’ve already mentioned. The AC determines consensus and sensibility based on the discussion. Nothing should have been out there other than maybe successful petitions which the AC hasn’t already felt were worthwhile, technically feasible, technically sensible, and provided some actual benefit. There shouldn’t be any proposals out there. So they don’t really have to revisit that most likely, but they could if they think about it. So the AC looks at the last call comments. And the last call comments, despite the fact that there was some support in the meeting, the last call comments can look at what the AC did and say, blech, throw that away, because the AC has empowered to go beyond the pure show of hands, the pure vote in the meeting. And if there’s any kind of – the final determinate of consensus is the last call, and it’s not this meeting.

So if the AC looks at the results of the meeting and determines that there may have been a misunderstanding or what the support in the meeting was for was something that was technically flawed, then the AC can some up with a revised proposal or the original proposal saying we really believe this is the right thing to do. The last call will check that. If there’s not support in the last call, the AC then reviews the last call comments and can abandon it at that point. If they want to push it on to the Board, the Board will then look at it and say, hey, wait a second, there really wasn’t consensus on the mailing list after that.

When the Board gets a proposal to vote on, to accept or not, we get the results of the discussion as well, so we understand what’s going on there. If there are changes to text, if the AC, after the last call, takes the results of the last call and changes the text, it goes out for last call again. And if the AC abandons something or significantly changes text, people in the community can petition that.

Remember, I note that I say “people in the community.” We’re not going back to the originator because the proposal at this point may be quite different than what the originator is. We don’t want it restricted to the originator. Somebody else may think it’s a good idea even if the originator isn’t around or has given up. Somebody else may think it’s a good idea, so anybody in the community can petition. Then the Board gets it, we look at it, and say, hey, this violates the law, it violates our fiduciary responsibilities, and we can reject it. If we reject it, we have to make a public explanation as to why. It goes out to the PPML and if you don’t like what we did, then you can vote us out of office next time around. That’s your power. You’re in power to do that, and John’s been wishing you to do that for quite a while. If we can adopt it, if everything’s hunky dory, we can adopt it, we can reject it, we can remand it, saying that we think that there was some problem, whether we think there was a problem in evaluating the consensus or we don’t think it’s clear, or if we’ve seen something that the staff and legal didn’t, for whatever we want to do, we can remand it back to the AC for reconsideration based on our comments and those comments are public. When we reject, it’s dead. When we remand it back, then the AC can work on it some more. And we can also just seek clarification; we’re not remanding it, we’re just saying, hey, we don’t understand something, tell us about it. It’s still on our plate and we’ll keep looking at it. And the results of any Board evaluations/discussions will be posted in our minutes, but also posted to the PPML. And then the staff goes off, assuming something gets this far, the staff is now charged with actually doing something and they will announce when they think the implementation will be done or the sequence to get to implementation, and the policy is added to the policy manual and it’s implemented.

So that’s the proposal and here’s the pretty sheets for it. The staff has done up a very nice job of putting together pretty little sheets for it. This is a front and back of an 8-1/2-by-11 page that’s better artwork than I could have done by two or three orders of magnitude. And it’s not been printed up because this is a proposal yet and we do need to discuss it here. And that’s the time now. John, do you want to run the discussion?

MR. CURRAN: Microphones are now open for comments on the proposed revisions to the IRPEP.

MR. LEWIS: Ed Lewis, NeuStar. Perhaps this is really brilliant and I’ve just seen it for the first time, but there were two things that strike me that concerns me right away. When you give more power to something like the AC, what I’d want to get is an easier way to see what the AC is doing. I don’t want to see it put into PPML, which is a discussion list because it’s hard to take a month away from ARIN and go back and catch up on everything. It’d be good if there was an AC announce list which said here’s every little decision that they’ve made, just so we can go back and quickly review that, not to argue with the decisions, but to see that they were made. That’s one.

MR. BRADNER: To respond to that first one, I mentioned a few times going through here, I completely agree. I believe that the AC has to be very transparent here. I suspect that it might be better to have a webpage where each of the things they’re talking about is shown on the webpage with what the status is and the comments and the same kind of thing you would say on an (off mike) list, on a place you could go look at rather than go back and review some mailing list. But I completely agree, the AC has to be very transparent if it’s going to be empowered.

MR. LEWIS: And the second thing is, there was one petition that was successful a while ago and the principle of that petition was, a proposal came in that was bounced by the AC and the reason why I signed to do the petition was I wanted to see it discussed at the member meeting. So what I wanted to see is that something should come off the street, and even if the structure doesn’t want to look at it right away because it doesn’t look right, it may still need airtime at a member meeting and there should be a way to say this issue needs to be on the agenda. Because one thing we don’t have, we don’t have a program committee. The agenda fees meetings are not open to – you know, anything that goes in can go in, no papers are called for. To keep the bottom-up process in place here, I want to be able to come in off the street and say I’d like to at least have a chance to get this onto an agenda. If it’s worth the time and so on – I’m not saying it’s guaranteed, but I want to be able to get something in front of members even if we think it doesn’t have a chance as it stands as a proposal.

MR. BRADNER: A question back to you on that, there’s two different things. One is in the proposal there is, if indeed there’s a proposal or a draft policy or something like that, the AC has decided that in their infinite semi-wisdom to not advance to the meeting, there’s a petition process to advance that particular discussion, that particular set of text to the mailing list and then to the meeting. But it sounds like you’re asking for something different, which is to have a way to set the agenda to discuss a topic rather than necessarily a particular set of text. Is that what you’re asking for?

MR. LEWIS: Possibly. To extend what happened in that one petition that was successful a little bit further was, the target was to get something on the public agenda that otherwise had no way to be submitted as a paper. And I know I’m asking two different things here. One is I do realize you have the petition process and maybe that’s all we really need to have to keep doing what I had in mind, but I also think it would be good if we had a way to – something that comes more loosely into the process can get some airtime.

MR. BRADNER: Right. I think that’s an interesting point. There are some scaling issues with that, of course. You have one individual having a great idea in their mind, but not a particularly great idea in the mind of the staff or of anybody else, then just having the decision tree in the absence of something concrete that’s petitionable, is certainly a problem. We’ve talked in the past about how to create the agenda for a meeting. One of the aims of this proposal, the corollaries of this proposal is to reduce the number of policy proposals that make it to the floor. I mean, we had a gazillion policy proposals at the last meeting and we want that – that was just too many, too many similar, too many overlapping. We want to make sure the things are concrete, useful, et cetera, which, hopefully, will produce fewer, better proposals in the meeting, which would open up more time for other things at the meeting. John, did you want to talk about this?

MR. CURRAN: With respect to the agenda and being able to get something in front of the community at the meeting, now we have two mechanisms that already exist that wouldn’t change in the least. One is the open mic. And except when we’ve been completely destroyed by policy proposals, we’re pretty good about making sure the open mic runs until everyone is happy that they’ve had their chance. Additionally, particularly in the policy area, we have the open policy hour where someone can get up and do, you know, two, three minutes and say here’s what I think we need a policy for, people of similar mind find me, and let’s go talk about that. So we have a couple of mechanisms to make sure that even if you don’t have a formal policy proposal, you can still find people to make one.

MR. LEWIS: I guess what I would like to see is a chance where you can go up with a slide, which I guess open policy hour you can do that, and also have it minuted, too. And I think those two aspects haven’t been covered by open mic or the open policy hour, but that’s probably a minor fix to the process.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Good to think about. Okay, Sam Weiler?

MR. WEILER: Sam Weiler. There are several things I really like about this proposal. I like that we’re likely to get clear policy proposals to discuss on the list and in the meeting. I’m very comfortable giving the AC discretion to make that happen. I’m very happy that you’re continuing to keep the checks and balances of allowing the petition process. I worry a little bit about how many steps a petition it might take to move a proposal through and how long that may take on the calendar, but I’m happy that’s there. I’m even happier that you’re going to allow anyone to petition. I had not thought of that and I think it removes an opportunity to gain the process. Congratulations. However, there are a couple of goals that I would like to see addressed in a change IRPEP that I’m not seeing adequately addressed here. I would like to see the process streamlined so that the whole thing can go faster. I think that we’re going to have a number of issues come up where we need to act more quickly. I’d like to have a mechanism to do that other than the Board’s emergency policy authority.

MR. BRADNER: Let’s just react – I’ll –

MR. WEILER: Actually, let me go on because it ties together.

MR. BRADNER: Okay.

MR. WEILER: Thanks, Scott. It really does tie together. The other one is to make the mailing list, the PPML, more relevant than it appears to be right now. It seems that this meeting is really dominating the policy process right now and I’d really like to make that list more relevant. The only concrete suggestion I have for you is the one that I have made in the suggestion process 2007.32, the oldest one still open, which is to not require that policy proposals come through a physical meeting and giving the AC discretion to act or, in fact, a petitioner discretion to act without coming to a physical meeting. But I’m sure that you all can come up with something else.

MR. BRADNER: Yes. It’s not that we didn’t think of that, because you and I have talked about this in the past. I’m a great fan of mailing lists and I think it’s wonderful if we can indeed empower our mailing list more. I’m also a realist about the level of discussion on mailing lists, having watched it in the IETF and elsewhere a great deal. A single malcontent can pretty much blow any useful discussion on a mailing list, and we get that from time-to-time in pretty much every mailing list environment that I’m in. All that said, I would love to find a way for some level of – some types of policies, some level of policies, some way to gauge from an initial discussion on the mailing list, to have something that could go faster, that wouldn’t require a face- to-face meeting. And I don’t know what that would be and I absolutely welcome different suggestions on that one. I could imagine putting something out to the mailing list and with a default being that we try and have a mechanism to gauge its consensus on the mailing list, going through that stage that way, with some ability for some small number of people to say, no, it’s important enough it needs to be discussed at a face-to-face meeting, or the reverse. I mean, there’s lots of ways one could think of doing it. Concrete proposals would be really useful.

MR. CURRAN: I saw this as a change the IRPEP to speed the policy process. I actually did see that as part of the output and the reason’s because it is possible to start 70 days before a public policy meeting and go through a proposal, a public meeting, whether it’s presented here or not – I mean, it would be presented here, but it really doesn’t matter because you can get to the process of moving it to last call and putting it to the Board. Now, I have to admit, I don’t know how to combine the goals of speedy process and a speedy process that also works in a speedy manner for something that the AC has decided it’s not going to support. That is a problem. But for something that’s going to have AC support and community support, something can go through from start to finish in five months. It’s not that difficult. That’s a fairly swift process. So I do agree, if you have to exercise the petitions to get through the gates, it’s not going to be a swift process, but it’s still an available one. But I do think we have a fairly swift process for something that isn’t contentious and enjoys community support.

MR. BRADNER: I want to add one more thing to that. One of the things John’s been adamant about in running these meetings is that he won’t call the question until he feels there’s been adequate discussion, and assuring adequate discussion on a mailing list, I have found in my experience, is very difficult. And so proposals for that would be good. Maybe some kind of tools to do it, maybe some kind of interactive website to do it. There’s things that one could think of. I’m not going to try and invent something standing here, but certainly the concern is real. I would love to be able to avoid having to come to a meeting for some types of things. Other types of things, I think it’s absolutely vital to have the public discussion.

MR. WEILER: As a point of clarification, it looked like the new process would allow even major changes to a proposal after a Public Policy Meeting, without coming back to another one –

MR. CURRAN: That’s correct.

MR. WEILER: – if current policy process does not.

MR. CURRAN: That’s correct.

MR. WEILER: You could make a significant change based on what you heard and as long as it enjoyed support of the AC and last call, it would not be a cyclical process, I guess.

MR. BRADNER: But the Board in reviewing it could decide that they didn’t think there was enough discussion on the mailing list in the last call period.

MR. CURRAN: That technical term is called chickening out.

MR. BRADNER: Yes, the Board could chicken out and say that we really want it to go back to another meeting, but, yes, it can avoid a second meeting.

MR. WEILER: Thank you, very much.

MS. ARONSON: Hi, Cathy Aronson, ARIN AC. There are two things that I see – well, one thing that I see about this that shortens the process a lot for the AC and that’s that we don’t have to wait for the author because sometimes they submit a proposal and then they leave the country or they got some big work thing and then we’re standing there going, well, you know, we’d love to change your proposal, but you own the text. And if we own the text and the community wants something, we can just change it, which is really super cool. The other thing –

MR. BRADNER: On that note, just to interrupt you for a second, on that note, the AC, it would be polite for the AC to work with the author where possible.

MS. ARONSON: And I think that the AC would be happy to do that as well. I don’t think this precludes that. The other thing that the ARIN staff has set up that’s really lovely is our little survey process, which actually has allowed the AC to get quite a bit of information from the community in a way that helps us decide what’s important.

MR. CURRAN: Good.

MR. DARTE: Bill Darte, ARIN AC. I reiterate a lot of what Cathy said, but also on the ownership question, I just wanted to make it clear that I doubt whether any of us on the AC want to abandon the interaction with authors or anybody else who has interest and concern relative to the topic of a policy proposal and so you can be sure, through a mechanism like polling (off mike), as Cathy just said, or through the PPML or any other mechanisms that we can leverage, we would always want to hear as much input as possible from the community.

MR. CURRAN: Cool.

MR. SCHILLER: Jason Schiller, Verizon Business, NRO NC. I’m very happy to hear the sentiment that the AC would want to work with reasonable authors and to try to avoid this going to petitioning process. But I didn’t get that from your slides and when you were presenting it, I didn’t get the feeling that that needed to happen or was likely to happen. So certainly if when the proposal is pitched to the community here, if it’s – to me, it would make a big difference if it is very clear on how willing the AC is to work with reasonable authors that are available. That would make a big difference for me.

MR. BRADNER: Okay, specifically on that, there was a nuance, and actually, there was a line in the slides earlier on this. I think it was properly addressed earlier at the mic. We want a situation where under the default in normal condition, the AC works with the originator. We’ll call him originator rather than author, but originator. Under normal conditions it would do that. But if the AC looks at it and decides they want to merge it with somebody else’s or they want to significantly change it, then, yes, they work with the originator as much as they can, but the originator may say, hey, I don’t like you tweaking my thing, but the AC still has to be able to do its own thing there. Also, as was specifically pointed out, authors can go to Never-Never Land. I’ve been in that particular process many times. As area director in the IETF, we say to a working group, make these three changes and it will pass the ISG and it’s six to nine months before those three little changes get made because the authors get busy. So definitely the default wants to be that the AC should work with the originator. It’s common politeness to do so. I couldn’t quite figure out how to say that and still leave the AC the power of deciding for one reason or another that they needed to proceed without the author. Do you understand the nuance?

MR. SCHILLER: Yes. And I certainly would be more comfortable if when the policy is actually published and written that it’s much more than just a nuance.

MR. BRADNER: Yes. Agreed.

MR. HUGHES: Hi. Aaron Hughes. I support the proposal. I am curious about feedback from the AC and Board in terms of workload and impact on the members and impact on future elections.

MR. BRADNER: Future elections as in who would run for this silly thing? (Laughter)

MR. HUGHES: Yes. I mean, you know, it’s a non-paid position, it takes away from your jobs. I’m curious about the impact.

MR. BRADNER: You’ll have to ask the individual AC members. I think it will add to the AC’s workload.

MR. HUGHES: Have you asked the AC members?

MR. BRADNER: I presented this to the AC members in Washington. But let me finish off. I think it will add to the AC’s workload, but it will mostly change it. It will change it to something where they have an active, positive role rather than just a hand-counting role. Having been to many of the AC dinners, I wasn’t particularly – I didn’t think that, if I were an AC member, I wouldn’t have felt that I was really contributing in any thoughtful way to the process, but a number of AC members are popping up here so they can talk for themselves, but it was certainly in my mind that it would increase – it would potentially increase the AC’s workload, but I also think it would make it more rewarding.

MR. CURRAN: Point of information, if any AC member wishes to come to the mic and answer that, please raise your hand.

MR. BRADNER: There’s one right there, right in the back. Cathy?

MS. ARONSON: Is that why you’re up here, Scott? Cathy Aronson, ARIN AC, again, I think this is a really great idea and I think that although it will make more work for us, it’s really nice to be able to bring better policy proposals to the community and I’m all for that. The other thing I wanted to mention is, sometimes we really have to work with the author and the one proposal we have right now that I think really shows that is the community networks one because none of us really – we’re just starting now to understand what that means. And if we didn’t have the author to work with, then how would we even have a proposal? But anyway, I think this is fabulous. I’ve been on the AC for 10 years now and this is really good.

MR. BRADNER: And you’d run again even if this was in place?

MS. ARONSON: Yes. Well – ask me in two more years.

MR. CURRAN: So on the point of information, I’m looking for AC members at the microphones to raise your hand if you want to speak to this topic. Okay, center front.

MR. LEIBRAND: Scott Leibrand, ARIN AC. I believe that this is going to be a little bit more work, but it’s a better kind of work because if we have a change that needs to be made based on PPML discussion and we can ask the author if he’s amenable to the change, we can just make it. We don’t have to wait on authors to make changes, we don’t have to do a bunch of back and forth. So in answer both to the workload question and the working with the authors question, yes, we want their input, yes, we’d love their text, yes, we want all the info we can get, but we don’t want to put it on just the author to make changes. If it’s something that we can do and the author wants us to do it, we’ll do it. It might be more work in one sense, but it’s a lot easier and less back and forth in another sense. So I’m in favor of the proposal for that reason.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Thank you. On the point of information regarding workload? AC members? Yes?

SPEAKER: (off mike)

MR. BRADNER: A pile of geeks in the room, can’t run a microphone.

MR. ROBERTS: Lea Roberts from Stanford University and the ARIN AC. I would like to echo some of the other responses that certainly this is going to create some more work for us, but it’s kind of a good kind of work. One of the things that really impressed me with this proposal is that it allows us to be nimble and timely and get the things through the process in a good manner rather than dragging through multiple meetings like they’ve been in the past.

MR. CURRAN: Okay, thank you. On the point of information, AC members, who wants to respond? Back microphone.

MR. DARTE: Yes, just as a point of historical record here, actually the AC, when it originally was formed 10 years ago, I was there, too, we were empowered in much the same way we are now. After 10 years of experience, however – well, after 7 years of experience, we were limited by the previous IRPEP in what we did. Through that experience up to this date, I think that the new IRPEP combines the best of both worlds, the structure that we didn’t have in the early days and the empowerment that this gives us back from the other one.

MR. CURRAN: Very good. Okay, AC members, on the point of information in order. Heather?

MS. SCHILLER: Heather Schiller, Verizon Business and ARIN AC. And what I want to say is that when I was approached to run for the AC, one of the reasons I didn’t run before I did run, the year before, was because I felt that the process didn’t allow enough input from the AC and that they were too hampered from being able to make good changes. And so I really do appreciate the work that Scott has put into this and that these changes and what I would like to stress is that it really shows the importance that the policy is for the community and having it be owned by one person and controlled by one person is not always in the spirit of developing policy that is in the best interest of the community and having more of a community input to the actual development of the process and having the AC be able to help in editing the content, brings some of that back into balance.

MR. CURRAN: Okay.

MS. WOOLF: Yeah, I just want to point out, we do kind of have a worked example of what we’re talking about – I’m sorry, I thought John called on me by name. I’m Suzanne Woolf, ARIN AC. We do kind of have a worked example of the changes we’re talking about here because the transfer policy proposal in front of you now came out of the Board coming to the AC and saying we need you guys to step in to maybe more of a leadership role with respect to this issue than has been really the way you’ve operated in the past. I am actually – I’m very proud of the work we’ve done. I believe my colleagues are, too. It’s not perfect, but as far as the quality of the work and the quality of the discussion that has come out of the community about it, and I think that it does demonstrate that the changes Scott has been discussing will work for us and for the community.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Again, on the point of information regarding workload? Owen?

MR. DeLONG: Owen DeLong, ARIN AC. I think this will slightly increase the AC’s workload. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. As my colleagues have stated, I think we can handle it. I am concerned about seeing more information on the thresholds for petitioning and hope that they’ll be kept relatively low.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Matt?

MR. POUNSETT: Matt Pounsett from CIRA and the ARIN AC. This is going to echo what a bunch of other people have said, that this is definitely going to increase our workload in some ways and reduce it in others. One of the big workload issues we had last year was, what was it, I think 13 proposals at the fall meeting, and that was a huge amount of work for the AC. And so having a little bit more latitude in what we allow into a meeting or not is going to reduce the workload in many ways. But then just having more of a direct hand in helping to craft policies, too, is just going to make us more productive, if busier.

MR. CURRAN: Okay, AC members who want to respond to the point of information, raise your hand. Marla?

MS. AZINGER: Marla Azinger. I did this actually already with Jordi. I don’t think he’s here this time, is he? His last v6 one kept going around and around. and so I finally grabbed it by the reigns, rewrote what appeared to be compromises by the community because he couldn’t get past what he really wanted. And this is just a good example. And finally, when I gave him the rewrites, I said, look, these are what – either it’s going to fly or it’s not with these revisions. So he accepted that and submitted the rewrite with that and granted, it got voted down, but it stopped the endless cycle of going over and over again. So I am in favor of this because there’s proof that it does work.

MR. CURRAN: Any other AC members wish to talk about the workload? R.S.?

MR. SEASTROM: I’m going to – this is Robert Seastrom. I’m going to risk being a little bit more snarky than my colleagues and say that based on the number of AC conference calls I have been on where I have uttered the words, ah, no change, haven’t been able to get in touch with the author, I do not believe that there will be a net increase in my workload.

MR. CURRAN: Aaron? Aaron Hughes? You had a point of information to the AC members? Oh, wait, we’ve got one more. Wait. Do any other AC members wish to talk about whether or not this impacts the workload? Alec?

MR. PETERSON: Alec Peterson, ARIN Advisory Council. To the comment about the additional workload, I will just echo what the other AC members have said in that there’s been a good deal of nonproductive work, meaning spinning, trying to get things done and working within what the perceived constraints of the existing policy process were and having to do that sort of back and forth. I will say that this particular change would only make me more likely to run for the AC again, not less likely. (Applause)

MR. CURRAN: And any other AC members wish to address the point of information? No? Aaron, has it been adequately – okay. Mics are open on all topics on this proposal. Center mic.

MR. FARMER: I’ll just go back to the issue of – oh, David Farmer, University of Minnesota – back to the original proposer issue and their role in the development. I like what I’m hearing. I would like a little explicit that the AC is going to work with them and maybe just a couple of words that they’re working with them, but clarify that the AC is in the lead role and the proposer isn’t?

MR. BRADNER: I think that message has come across pretty clear. I agree with it and certainly we’ll have to put something clarifying in there to be specific about that.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Microphones remain open. You’ve spoken once on this topic, correct?

MR. WEILER: Yes, I have.

MR. CURRAN: So I’d prefer people who haven’t spoken to have a chance to speak, but then you’ll be right behind them.

MR. BICKNELL: Leo Bicknell, current Chair of the ARIN Advisory Council. I support the proposal, but in the interest of transparency, I wanted to bring up a semi-related issue. I think most people got from the transfer proposal that the Advisory Council had a retreat. There will be some more information on that in my presentation tomorrow. And so while doubling our salaries from zero to zero probably won’t be a huge financial burden, it seems likely this new process may in the future lead to more retreats or at least coming in early before a meeting, which we did a half-day before this one, and that will definitely be a financial cost to ARIN to do so. So I just wanted, in the interest of transparency, to make sure that everyone who was considering this was aware of that fact.

MR. CURRAN: Yes. Good point.

MR. BRADNER: You’re easily worth an extra lunch.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Go ahead, Sam.

MR. WEILER: Do you want me to pick on details now or would you rather have that later?

MR. BRADNER: If there are – if it’s really details, then it doesn’t make any difference. I mean, you and I can just work on it, but if there’s concrete issues, then sure, bring them up.

MR. WEILER: We’ll work on it later.

MR. CURRAN: Microphones are open. Any other comments on this? In particular, does anyone think changing the policy process is a bad idea? If so, I’d like to have you at the microphones. Yes?

MR. CASSIMIRE: Nigel Cassimire, CTU. I don’t think it’s a bad idea, and I think most of speakers have mentioned the points that occurred to me as well, except for one. Early on in the presentation you talked about sometimes the proposals that come are not earthshaking, some are very narrow and so on, and maybe some of them will get judged as such in this new process. I’m not sure what happens to them if there is a different course that they will now follow or what.

MR. BRADNER: Well, if the AC decides that we should abandon something for whatever reason, narrowness or whatever, then it can be petitioned to get around the AC.

MR. CURRAN: Do you want to respond to that? Does anyone – are you trying to respond to that directly, Cathy?

MR. DARTE: Well, this is about that same issue.

MR. BRADNER: And you are?

MR. DARTE: And I’m Bill Darte, and on the current Advisory Council. So in your presentation one thing that did occur to me in petition, and I know you haven’t gone through all the details of the petition process, but it occurred to me that if Bill Darte decided he didn’t like the originator and convinced all my colleagues that it was a bad idea and so we just abandoned it even though there might be merit, it could be petitioned around. But I think I heard you hint at the scale of the petition. The hurdle gets higher as you go along. And so if it then comes back to the Public Policy Meeting through the petition process and we get it and we own it once again and we decide that we abandon it for the same silly reasons we did the last time, they have to petition once again only even a greater hurdle. And it seems to me that the process just gets more onerous for the people who are getting stepped on in that, not that it’s ever likely to happen.

MR. BRADNER: That also was brought up here. It’s very real and designing the levels, the thresholds for a petition is going to be difficult. Our current petition process does have a sliding scale, but I think somebody clearly wronged by the AC would have a lot of support in the community. The AC might not. So telling terror stories out of school might have quite an effect. But it’s a very legitimate point. It’s very seriously taken, John, and Ray and I had quite a lively discussion over this whole issue yesterday. We foresaked (sic) the company of everybody else for lunch in order to do this yesterday because it is that important. And we didn’t – I specifically did not want to put those in this proposal because I wanted the theory and purpose of the proposal to be talked about rather than the minutiae of the particular levels of petition, which I do believe needs to be discussed.

MR. CURRAN: And I want to pick up on that, the one most important thing is that upon petitioning, once something makes it to the public meeting, it would be – the AC would find itself in an interesting conundrum taking a proposal that comes out of the public meeting, which they again own, but one that has strong show of support and trying to explain, for arbitrary and capricious reasons, why they’re sending it down since their actions will be very visibly documented. So if someone is wronged, hopefully once they get to the public light, if it truly is a worthwhile proposal, it’s going to build momentum on its own in any case. All right, microphone front and center.

MS. ARONSON: Cathy Aronson, again, ARIN AC. There’s a big difference between narrow in terms of a small part of the community, like, for instance, the Caribbean, because the policy is already being worked on, and like “the” needs to be changed to “an” and we’re happy. I mean, I think that the policy proposals that affect a small amount of the community, like we wrote one for Africa, you know, that’s really important, that’s policy work. That’s what we should be doing, but the amount of proposals that say in paragraph 7, change “the” to “they” and “us” to “them” is, you know, really kind of – well –

MR. BRADNER: The first bullet here is trying to address that, to serve an actual need to some portion of the community. It’s just because it’s a few people in that piece of the community doesn’t mean it’s not very important and needs to be brought forth. But if it actually is theoretical and doesn’t actually serve an actual concrete person’s needs or concrete organization’s needs and it’s just a theoretical fix, let’s not do that.

MR. CURRAN: Right. What will happen is that in that case, because the staff will work with the author, something that’s an editorial correction or something that’s caught, those will get rolled up by the staff and then eventually will be presented as part of the staff report and say, we have a complete, omnibussed, fixed punctuation proposal and that doesn’t need to occupy this body’s time.

MR. WILLIAMSON: David Williamson, Tellme Networks. I generally support the intent of this policy and the details of it seem as good a guess as you can, you know, reasonably make for how it should really work. I was curious, though, about if we get into this process and find there’s some piece of it that’s just not working, what’s the method available for modification? And secondary to that is, when would this take effect?

MR. BRADNER: I think both of those are very real and important questions. This particular proposal came, as I said, from experience in the last couple of meetings, but also – people coming to me directly and saying, you know, we ought to change some things. And so, there’s certainly that venue, that mechanism. We discussed quite a while ago having a process for changing the process. And we got twisted around our axle pretty good, the Board did. Got twisted around our axle pretty good about that, and decided that putting in a heavy-handed process to do that was – had not been shown to be necessary. That certainly if, as part of a discussion, you or somebody else brings up on the mailing list saying, hey, this thing is broken because of X, and if we don’t listen, well, you know what to do. But it’s a very real and important point as far as the how to change the broken pieces of the code. Debugging the code is important. As when it would take effect, that’s something the Board and the staff have to work on. I would like it to be in effect so it would be active for the next meeting, but we’ll have to see whether that’s feasible.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Cool, thanks.

MR. BRADNER: There are some transition questions of what do we do with the proposals that are sitting there now, and all that kind of stuff, and we’ll have to address all of those.

MR. CURRAN: Okay, center room microphone?

MR. HANNIGAN: Martin Hannigan, Verne Global. I support this change and I want to just make two points. I want to echo Ed Lewis’ concerns about transparency. The mailing list won’t cut it as a vehicle to inform us as to what’s going on and I think that something much better is going to need to be put in place, like whatever, that’s your problem. And secondly –

MR. BRADNER: That’s the first task for the AC and staff, is to figure out how to be transparent.

MR. HANNIGAN: Yep, I think it’s a good task. Secondly, do you foresee any changes to the election process? And I think it might be interesting to insert a step where there’s some two- way communication in the process, now that the AC has a lot more power than they have had in the past. So we could ask questions like, do you plan to work with authors when these 300 proposals are challenged? So, if we’re going to politicize the process at all, we should do it as little as possible and I think that that would be one of the better ways to do it. Thanks.

MR. CURRAN: I’d like to pick up on the latter point that you mentioned, regarding the election process. It has occurred to the Board of Trustees that while we do have a nomination committee and a nomination process, and we have a slate of candidates, we don’t know if we have the sole time we have to talk to a candidate is when he comes up here and he does his brief 30-second speech.

MR. BRADNER: Or her.

MR. CURRAN: Or her 30-second speech. I’ve actually looked at a number of different bodies and seen how they go about electing advisory groups and trustees. Some of them actually request a formal position statement. Some of them have a list of questions that are agreed for the candidate’s asked, so you have some idea of their views on topics. This is all definitely something that’s going to be discussed over the next few months. I will say, we have a little bit of a conundrum because significant changes to the election process require a little bit of public review, so it’s hard to make that happen and make it happen soon, because the current election process is going to kick off very shortly for the end of the year. But we will probably have to move in that direction because the AC members that you’re electing, their perspectives on issues become more important if they’re directly involved in development, as opposed to advisoring. That’s not lost on the Board at all.

MR. BRADNER: In addition, one other complexity is that we’re – in the bylaws and in our processes, we’ve tried to keep the processes for selecting – electing the AC members to be as identical to the processes for selecting the Board members as feasible. So it’s all of the same mechanisms. And if you’ll look at the bylaws, it’s exactly the same text except for Board versus Advisory Council. And it’s in almost every place we could possibly do it. So, thinking seriously about election process per se is probably a good idea. And what John was just talking about could just as easily apply to the Board as it does to the AC.

MR. CURRAN: Yep. Particularly as we go through the next few years. Yes, end of the table, Ray.

MR. DeLONG: Owen DeLong, ARIN AC. I wanted to comment on Scott’s suggestion that we might have this in place in time for the next meeting. How do you see gauging community consensus around the completed proposal when we don’t have things like the petition thresholds to find yet, between now and that time?

MR. BRADNER: Well, my next step here was going to be working with Ray to polish this up, in response to the discussions here. To come up with a draft of things like petition thresholds. Discuss it with the Board – we’ll probably – we won’t wait for meeting, we’ll discuss it on the Board mailing list and then put it out to PPML for discussion there. And with some period of time for discussion, and then the Board would evaluate the discussion and modify as necessary and vote on it if the support is there for it.

MR. CURRAN: All right, recognize we also do have a current petition process. So to the extent that those thresholds are unchanged, you know, we’ll be changing them, but we don’t need to change them to the same extent. So –

MR. BRADNER: There’s more steps here.

MR. CURRAN: There’s more steps. We could replicate it, but obviously if we change them substantially in either direction, we’ve got to get out – back out to the community. Okay, on this change – yes, Bill?

MR. DARTE: Yeah, I’d just like to say – Bill Darte, ARIN AC – we do already have in the current election process asking candidates to, you know, give some biographical information. And it seems to me that it wouldn’t be out of line to look at the kind of information, biographical or otherwise, that the community might want to see from these candidates by just maybe tell us a little more than you have in the past kind of a thing, which would be a good first start.

MR. BRADNER: You could do that. You could set up something where questions could be posed to particular candidates that is, you know, separate mailing lists, separate websites, or something.

MR. CURRAN: There’s a lot of prior work to borrow from here. Okay, any other comments to this change to the resource policy process? Yes?

MR. SCHILLER: Jason Schiller, Verizon Business,NRO NC. I was kind of holding this for the end because it’s on slightly a different topic. At one point Scott asked for other advice on how we could shorten the cycle, and one of the things that I would like to see is some time for the policy to be rewritten in this cycle and then represented to the community in this cycle. So, I think sometimes we get into trouble where a policy is good, but we need a little bit of wordsmithing, or a policy is good, but there’s one particular feedback that we have to take into consideration. And I think for things that are fairly simple changes, it should be relatively easy for the AC and/or the originators of the policy to get together in the evening, have some workshop time to do a rewrite, and then represent it to the community in this cycle. So that would be something I’d like you to consider –

MR. CURRAN: We tried –

MR. SCHILLER: – at the same meeting. Yes, at the same meeting. So, the idea here is, the policy is proposed in front of the membership, the membership gives feedback, and the feedback is such that the ARIN Advisory Council and/or the originator, together, believe that they can quickly do a rewrite and respond to all of those concerns, whether it’s a simply word change or striking a piece of the text. And then that policy gets, on the last day of the meeting – probably today – gets re-proposed in front of the membership and possibly can move forward in this cycle.

MR. BRADNER: I’ll leave it to John to talk about running the meeting, but this particular thing was specifically tried to address that. Not within a meeting, but so that the AC does the last call review and can put out – for another modified version – out for another last call. But I want to defer to John for running the meeting.

MR. CURRAN: So, we think trying to accomplish that with the meeting requires a couple of very exciting things. You need a policy proposal that is presented early enough that you can get the feedback, you can engage the originator in a constructive manner. You can know what the changes you need to make are, and they need to be sufficiently well understood to be supported by the community that you don’t feel a concern about rushing it through the process. I’m going to assert that if you have all those things, the AC is free to proceed in exactly that manner without coming back to the meeting and putting the revised proposal out for last call, even though the change was a change based on the feedback you heard in the room today. Okay? So, if the AC feels comfortable because it heard feedback that the community wanted to do ‘X’ in line 7, and they changed the proposal and adopt it with that one change in it, there’s no reason that has to necessarily go back to last call. You’re raising – addressing the points raised on the mailing list and the PPML. If that’s what you’re doing and the changes are a result of this feedback, you still go to last call.

MR. SCHILLER: So, I think I heard some concern from the community that changes could be made to a policy, which may or may not be deemed significant, without coming back to the membership. So, what I’m suggesting is –

MR. BRADNER: No, it goes – well, just before you – two nits: One, it just doesn’t – it’s not membership, it’s community, because it’s specifically not restricted to ARIN.

MR. SCHILLER: Yes, absolutely.

MR. BRADNER: And second of all, last call is going to the community. So, nothing can be done without it going to last call.

MR. SCHILLER: I accept those two nits. I still believe that I heard significant concerns that changes could be made to a policy without it coming back to the community in this forum, and what I’m suggesting is that if we could set aside some time to do a rewrite, sort of a workshop sort of a thing, and if we could have time to reconsider a proposal in the same meeting?

MR. CURRAN: Okay, so let me just say, I heard the same comments you heard and I also heard concerns from the community about something being changed and not coming back to this particular Public Policy Meeting forum. I heard that, as well. The last call opportunity allows someone to say I think that needs to go to last call. That needs to go back in front of the community. Last call allows anyone to turn around and say that. Now this is going to go back to the AC and the Board before it gets advanced, okay, because the AC sees the last call comments and still sends the recommendation based on that to the Board. The Board sees the last call comments. So, it’s possible that we can see someone who says, yeah, I understand the vote supported that. I still think this is so important it needs to go before a public meeting. The Board is well-suited, actually, to make the call as to whether or not that’s something based on the need the community faces, and the need for openness, to make that call. So, I think we’ve got a mechanism to address it. And I’m very concerned about the ability to make editorship within a single Public Policy Meeting actually create a useful result.

MR. BRADNER: Speaking with some experience on trying to do something like that in other forums, it’s very difficult to edit on the fly, even with what you believe is a clear message from a meeting, and then have an adequate discussion of that later on. It does work, sometimes. It fails to work more often than it works, in my personal experience. So, I would find it likely to be mostly negative to do that. But I would hope that the policies that come in front of the community are clean enough that when it goes out, they can go out to last call based on the discussion and we can, the majority of the time, perhaps not all the time, have a useful discussion on the – during the last call. That means that we don’t have to come to another meeting. I can – coming to another meeting is slowing down the process a lot and we’d certainly like to avoid that whenever possible. But cycling in a single meeting is rushing it a lot. Rushing it a lot. Okay?

MR. CURRAN: Okay. More comments at the mike, front and center.

MR. LEIBRAND: Scott Leibrand, ARIN AC. In response to Jason’s comment, I’m all in favor of more workshops and more opportunities to work with originators and other interested parties in a face- to-face environment to improve the policy. Great, let’s do it. Schedule time on the schedule, whatever we need to do. I – and my own personal experience is it’s really hard. Witness the fact that I had to present 2007-21 again. It’s really hard to get things cycled quickly, because we’re all dealing with so many different issues and have our brains so full and our schedules so full. So, I would rather have the 10 days to figure that all out after the meeting –

MR. SCHILLER: Uh-huh.

MR. LEIBRAND: – including a weekend or two, and not have to try and cycle it fast.

MR. CURRAN: You’ve got 30 days now.

MR. LEIBRAND: Okay, 10 to last call, 30 days total, yeah.

MR. CURRAN: Okay, thank you. Far mic?

MR. WEILER: Sam Weiler. As the person who raised the point of information about whether a significantly revised proposal could be acted on without coming back to a physical meeting, I wanted to make it clear that I think that’s a really good thing. I do not think we should force everything back through another six-month cycle. I have very mixed feelings about doing fast revisions at a physical meeting, primarily because it make the mailing list less relevant. Having the 30 days after for the AC to act, and go back to the mailing list for confirmation helps, but it still makes the mailing list less relevant, so.

MR. BRADNER: The mailing list should be relevant if the – the whole point is that you go back to the mailing list for relevance. I’m not sure what you’re –

MR. WEILER: I’m saying that if you have quick revisions here in this meeting, that makes the mailing list less relevant.

MR. BRADNER: Yes, I agree with that. But then you went on to say the 30-day period made it less relevant and I didn’t get that one.

MR. WEILER: The 30-day period helps.

MR. BRADNER: Okay, sorry.

MR. WEILER: The 30-day period helps. However, there are – the policy process you’re presenting, it’s likely that we’re going to be doing less editing on the fly because we’re going to get clearer things in the door. However, I think we’ve seen cases where we may want to decide between two different versions of things. And I wanted to make sure that whatever you do – and there was the text freeze comment that was worrying me. I want to make sure that whatever we do is helpful there. And that may mean bringing two concrete versions of text to the meeting.

MR. BRADNER: Uh-huh. Yes.

MR. WEILER: Perhaps have an AC split a proposal, but having two concrete or three concrete versions of text up on the screens in front of us, and in our packets, could actually help.

MR. BRADNER: This is one of the things John and I discussed. This can certainly happen if there were results of a petition, that if an originator petitions to get their version in front of the meeting, as well as the AC version. And one of the things that John and I discussed was that would have to be done as a discussion of the proposals rather than a discussion of each proposal separately, just for the very point that you’re making: So that they’re both in front of us and we discuss them together.

MR. CURRAN: You wouldn’t allow agenda management such that the AC could have it’s version brought before the meeting, discussed, get a vote – oh, and that guy who petitioned, he’s Friday afternoon at 7:00 p.m. So you’d have to run them at the same time. You’d have to do – make sure people know there are two proposals covering that area and have them be consecutive.

MR. WEILER: And having suggested that you also make sure the process can accommodate the AC.

MR. BRADNER: Yeah, I was just going to say, I don’t – there’s nothing in here which would prohibit the AC from doing that. I would hope that the AC would try and engage enough discussion with the community on the mailing list before getting here, to avoid most instances of that. But certainly, as we’ve seen this week, having a discussion in the meeting saying, well, what do you think if it said this versus it says this, is a very useful thing as seen in input to the AC. So, whether it’s a completely new proposal, or it’s a not on the proposal from the AC saying there’s another possibility, put this – this text being here. I think either way could be quite valuable.

MR. CURRAN: Okay, I’m going to close the mics on the topic of the IR policy evaluation process change. So, if anyone else wants to speak on it, get to the mics now. Cathy?

MS. ARONSON: This is Cathy Aronson again. To respond to Sam, though, I think there might be a slight misconception about what “text freeze” means, because the only reason we’re freezing the text right before the meeting is not because that’s exactly what’s going to go to last call, but it’s because we had some real problems with the audience in this room understanding what text it was that we were actually discussing.

MR. BRADNER: Yes.

MS. ARONSON: So we wanted to have something that comes here and we’re all talking about the apples and not the oranges. And we’re not specifically changing the text on the fly and then taking straw poll on the whole completed document with the little change. So, I just wanted to be clear about that. And then the other comment I had was that if we were going to actually try to review this stuff again in the same meeting, we would really have to have a longer meeting and I’m not in favor of that.

MR. CURRAN: Good to know.

MR. BRADNER: You’ve had just enough fun here?

MS. ARONSON: One more thing to the – the authors aren’t usually here. A lot of them aren’t. And the Advisory Council also is no longer doing something that we used to do on Tuesday nights, specifically, so that – if we needed the time to get together with an author or spend more time with the, you know, people working on a particular proposal, we actually can.

MR. CURRAN: Okay, good to know. Okay, I’d like to thank everyone. Thank you, Scott. (Applause)

Open Microphone

MR. PLZAK: Okay, now it’s time for open microphone. And if I can get the appropriate slides up, please. Okay. I’ll go for it here. So, anyway, the same meeting rules and discussions and courtesies apply here. So, if you can’t remember what they are, John will remind you as he guides you through your discussion. One thing is that, this open microphone is not for the discussion of any policy that has been discussed during this meeting. Nor is it for discussion of anything having to do with things that may be brought before the members tomorrow.

MR. CURRAN: Okay, microphones are open. Center rear, yes?

MR. ECHEBERRÍA: Thank you, Raúl Echeberría, from LACNIC. In October 2007, I sent an e-mail to the PPML list. I did the same with the other policy list in every region. The idea was to propose the creation of a working group for – with the people from the communities relevant – people from the communities of all the LIRs, in order to discuss policies that have been proposed, issues that have been proposed under the title of Soft Landing. I was – despite a mailing in the first proposal sent by David Conrad that I think there was – there were many, many good ideas that could be considered. But those ideas could not be considered in a single version. So, I proposed that, but, of course, this is – it was not a policy proposal, it was something different. So, there was not any given process for dealing with this proposal, so I will make the same statement that I’m doing here in my personal capacity.

MR. CURRAN: Understood.

MR. ECHEBERRÍA: I will ask, in this case, the Advisory Council to consider that proposal and express their willingness, or not, to participate in an experience like that – like this that I have proposed.

MR. CURRAN: Raúl, would it be useful if we specifically asked those people interested in looking at IPv4 Soft Landing proposals to, for example, gather at the end of today’s meeting and then you would have a group, and they could – you would know the interest level of the community?

MR. ECHEBERRÍA: It could be. Thank you, it could be a good idea. I will consider that, but I think that as I have said many times, talking with people also here in this meeting, this is – we are facing something that has not happened, never in the past, and most surely will never happen again in the future. So, I think that we have to be creative in the measures and tools that we use. This is something that could be (off mike) and creative. It is to create a working group with the people from the different communities, but not my clever friends, but people that have some problem with the policy of (off mike) processing in their region. For example, members of the Advisory Council or policy chairs in other regions. But I would take consideration of what have proposed now.

MR. CURRAN: So, there is – Raúl’s expressed an interest in the fact that there may be value in looking at Soft Landing proposals. We had one come before, but it did not move ahead. To the extent that it would help him advance consideration of such, I’d like people – does anyone want to work on potentially a proposal for Soft Landing? Because I’d like to have you all get together. It’s very easy for us to work on something if there’s a firm proposal or even if a group of people get together to agree to work on such a proposal. So, I guess – yes, Ray?

MR. PLZAK: Just a reminder, that proposal never really got through the process because the author withdrew it from the process.

MR. CURRAN: Correct.

MR. PLZAK: So – yes, Raúl?

MR. ECHEBERRÍA: I was not speaking about a specific proposal from David Conrad. I just hijacked his good idea of the title of Soft Landing. But in that e-mail that I mentioned, I listed many things that had been said in different lists and that, from my perspective, deserved to be considered. If you’ll let me, I just want to leave a proposal here and I don’t need an answer right now.

MR. CURRAN: Okay.

MR. ECHEBERRÍA: So the proposal that I leave to the community is that, provided the Advisory Council could consider that in their next meeting. And if they want to drop it, it’s just – it’s good for me.

MR. CURRAN: Would it be best if people interested in talking about that find you at the end of the meeting?

MR. ECHEBERRÍA: Sorry?

MR. CURRAN: Would it be best if people here, who are interested, find you to –

MR. ECHEBERRÍA: Okay, I am very open, yes. Thank you.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Raúl is here. Find him if you’re interested in talking about such proposals.

MR. PLZAK: Raúl, will you be in the bar tonight? They could probably find you there, too. (Laughter)

MR. CURRAN: Okay? Okay. Microphones remain open.

MR. DARTE: Yeah, this is Bill Darte, ARIN AC again. One of the things that I think we’ve been discussing in this whole notion of trying to be more effective in eliciting concrete information and, therefore, using the PPML or some other mechanism to poll people and get specific inputs. And so, if anybody feels that’s a really bad idea, or something like that, or has suggestions on how we might do that, I think that would be useful. Relative to Raúl’s Soft Landing issue, my other comments are I really think we spent so much time today talking about transfer policy and we’re likely to spend a whole lot more time talking about that. And while I do think that’s important and have said so, I think it’s a minor aspect of the whole issue of Soft Landing and what we could be doing. I think that it’s terribly important to have a multifaceted approach to this that would include more and directed public relations to the topics we think are important for awareness, to drive awareness and education programs as a second element. Policy certainly is an aspect, as well, wherever we can tweak it to do the right things. But also, I think it’s possible that we could find small amounts of money, or whatever, to try to encourage people to do more research or look at lowering some kind of technical or cultural or educational hurdle to the transition to IPv6, et cetera. I think the Soft Landing comes from using an all multidimensional approach to this, not just policy.

MR. CURRAN: Thank you. If other people want to speak on this, the mics are open. And, Bill, if you have a firm recommendation regarding particular outreach, the suggestion process would be a good way to direct it. Okay, right microphone?

MR. BICKNELL: Hi, Leo Bicknell, ARIN AC IFC. I believe there are a number of people in the room who have been dissatisfied with PPML lately. For many reasons; I don’t think there’s just one. And the irony is not lost to me that suggestions were made to improve that on PPML, where they were rather lost. So I wanted to bring them up here in the meeting. Specifically, two suggestions were slipped in there at one point, and I see pros and cons to both. One was that we make more use of a forum software type thing on the web. And the other was a notion of in the policy proposal archive, where we today put the text and the history and all that, perhaps giving individuals the ability to attach a comment in support or in opposition to the policy, but limit it to one comment per person with, you know, some reasonable character limit of, you know, you get 4,000 characters or something, so you don’t have, you know, one individual posting 900 messages a day and that sort of problem. I think there’s positives to both of those and I think there’s negative to both of those. But since it was lost on the mailing list, I think this may be a good forum for some people to say if they think either of those are useful or not.

MR. CURRAN: If people want to comment on those, certainly the microphones are open. Yes, center rear mic?

MR. ALEXANDER: Dan Alexander, ARIN AC. To touch on what Bill had kind of mentioned, there’s been good focus on expanding IPv6 into our routing infrastructure and services, and the development of applications, but the marketplace is changing really quick and there is – it’s really moving towards IP enabled and nodes. And it’s not just computers anymore, you know, there’s all sorts of devices out there – the wireless television, set-top boxes – and the leaf nodes of the tree are where all the resources, IP resources, are really needed. So, I’m just curious if ARIN’s outreach has considered going towards the consumer electronics manufacturers and kind of talking to them and raising awareness. And it would provide a different prospective as opposed to these manufacturers always hearing from their customers. Just offer a different perspective.

MR. CURRAN: Sure, let me address that. With respect to the need to pay attention to the upcoming depletion of the IPv4 free pool, and the need to support v6 as a result, ARIN has picked up it’s outreach efforts. That consists a lot of me going and speaking places as it turns out. It’s – so I have done speaking engagements at VON and at NetWorld-Interop, and at a few others where I go out and I talk to people who have, traditionally, computer – a little bit consumer now, looking at, for example, voice. But there’s a whole set of – as you note, there’s whole industries – the whole video industry, the whole television industry – that isn’t necessarily aware that this is happening and aren’t necessarily working to build the products two years from now that have the support that they’re going to need. So, we have done a modicum of outreach beyond the classic ISP end-user community to some segments of equipment manufacture. We could probably do a lot more. I hesitate to push ARIN that way automatically without hearing from this community because there’s expenses, there’s travel and so on and so forth. It also is a significant load on the staff, the Board members. Richard Jimmerson does quite a few of these with me. Ray does some. So, if folks think we should be doing more outreach to try to get past the ISP community to get to, for example, equipment manufacturers and the gaming industry – and we can show up at their conferences and let them know this is happening. But I need you folks to tell us that’s important. And I guess your answer would be you think that –

MR. ALEXANDER: I’m all for it.

MR. CURRAN: You’re all for that, okay. So, microphones remain open. Far left?

MR. DeLONG: Owen DeLong, ARIN AC. It occurs to me that his suggestion is excellent and we should definitely do that. It occurs to me that what we’re calling remote participation really is more like remote viewing, with some feedback. And I would like to see us get to where remote participation is on an equal footing, or as close to that as possible, with local participation.

MR. CURRAN: Can you get more specific as to what you need to make that happen? Because we’re – we have had some pretty good remote participation in the past.

MR. DeLONG: Well, I’d like to see, for example, the show of hands include some way to count remote participants.

MR. CURRAN: Got it. Okay, thank you. Okay, microphones remain open. Front and center?

MR. FARMER: I will just add that I think outreach is a good thing. Oh, David Farmer, University of Minnesota. Outreach is a good thing. Maybe just a small suggestion on that front, is there an official ARIN slide deck that – because –

MR. CURRAN: We can do that.

MR. FARMER: Yeah. You know, an official ARIN slide deck that some of us can do our own outreach in local areas and stuff like that. In other words, it doesn’t all need to be on your head.

MR. CURRAN: Yep, I’d love that. I have a day job. Okay, we’ll work on the official slide deck, that’s a good point. Okay, center rear?

MR. HANNIGAN: Martin Hannigan, Verne Global. One, I wanted to thank Mark Kosters and his team for implementing RSS vis-a-vis the PPML list. It has made my participation in ARIN much better and much more focused. I really appreciate that. (Applause)

MR. HANNIGAN: Two, I’d like to echo Leo’s comments that – well, he didn’t really take a position, but I’ll take a position. I think we should get rid of mail, I hate it. Web-based/dot – a thumb up, thumb down type of system, if it could work in this kind of a governance environment, would be great. And that’s it, thanks.

MR. CURRAN: Okay, that’s worth exploring. Okay, we’ve got front and center?

MR. LEIBRAND: So, wait a minute, I can’t remember what I was going to say. Next person first –

MR. CURRAN: You don’t? Okay, if you’re going to be speaking, approach the mics. I’ll be closing them shortly. Front right?

MR. WEILER: Sam Weiler. An observation on remote participation. I think the audio and video things sufficiently lag the meeting, making it difficult to send back comments in real time.

MR. CURRAN: Right, the lag is in excess of 30 seconds. We know that because we’ve had some people comment on that. We don’t know what – it’s not minutes, but it is –

MR. WEILER: That would seem to be a barrier.

MR. CURRAN: Right, and there is a bit of caution being made. We’re holding some Q & A sessions open longer, so that I can confirm from the people monitoring that there’s no questions, but that is an issue we want to look at. Center rear?

MR. DARTE: Yeah, hi, Bill Darte, ARIN Advisory Council, once again. Going to Dan’s point, on the PPML recently there was someone who questioned the legitimacy of this outreach rather redundantly – you know, repetitively and loudly – and so, you just basically made a rhetorical statement, it seemed, that if there are people who support this, they should tell us. So, why don’t you ask the people in here if they really think this is a good idea and we’d get some feedback.

MR. CURRAN: First, anyone who thinks we should not be doing outreach, okay, I’d like to hear from you most certainly. That is remote, or that is at the microphones. If you believe that it is inappropriate for ARIN to be doing outreach to inform the constituency that, indeed, there’s an IPv4 depletion issue, I definitely want you to find a microphone or participate remotely. Right, or comment on outreach in either way, but I’m calling for that. And then when we’re sure that we’ve had that discussion, we can actually entertain having a show of support. Okay, front and center? Are you with us now?

MR. LEIBRAND: I am. Remote participation, Scott Leibrand, ARIN AC. I think one really important thing that’s missing from remote participation is actually being able to talk. It would be really cool if there were a way to set up an audio conference bridge, where you could paste somebody in, where what they say actually comes in over the speakers.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. That can be done. I’ve been on a 200-person call, and you get an operator and you page them and they ask their question. Okay, good point. I am closing the mics, last chance. Okay, center rear?

MR. POUNSETT: Matt Pounsett, CIRA and the ARIN AC. I didn’t actually come up here to talk about outreach, but I’ll make a short comment about it anyway. I think it’s great, I think it’s good, I think we should do more of it. The reason I actually came up here was to contrast Marty’s comment. I absolutely despise forums for discussion. They’re – it’s always impossible to figure out where the new posts are. It’s much harder to search for old ideas of text and things than mail is. It’s – they drive me insane. I really, really don’t want to see that, PPML moved to something like that. However, the other thing that Leo mentioned, the idea of having a place to have a very short, unique comment from individuals would – I think might be a good idea. That’s not so much discussion as just –

MR. CURRAN: A statement of position.

MR. POUNSETT: – position statements.

MR. CURRAN: A statement of support or non-support.

MR. POUNSETT: Yeah, that, actually, would be a really good thing to stick on a website somewhere.

MR. CURRAN: Okay.

MR. POUNSETT: And would allow the AC to get a much clearer view of how wide support is for certain things. In a similar way to what polling is doing now, but with a little bit more detail in the responses.

MR. CURRAN: I believe it would be appropriate for the ARIN staff to take the comment regarding posting comments of support or non- support, mull it over, see what can be done, and then put it out to the suggestion process. Okay, microphones remain open for any topic, but they’re closing any minute now. Almost the end of the open mic session. Mics are closed. That’s the end of the open mic session, minus the 30 seconds for the remote participants to notify Richard or (off mike) that they have a question. (Laughter)

MR. CURRAN: Are we good? Okay, thank you everyone. (Applause)

MR. PLZAK: Can you put up just the ARIN XXI slide real quick? Mark, when we finish the meeting, we’re going to start the IPv6 Main Event after a short break and I would like Mark just to come up here and give a brief preview of it. I know we’ve talked about it, and there was a Pre-Game Show on Sunday. So, Mark, if you would?

MR. KOSTERS: So, many of you have probably seen already that there’s multiple SSIDs on the wireless network, and some of you have tried them and some of you have not. And what we did on Sunday is actually sort of focus on these IPv6-only SSIDs. And we’d like to do that again this evening. And I know it’s kind of late, and it’s like 5:00 and everybody’s getting really tired, including me, but I think it’s really useful and we had really good reviews on what we did on Sunday and we’d like to try it again. So, after the end of the meeting we’re going to have a five-minute break. There’s going to be some food coming in here. Rumor has it, I’m told, that it’s supposed to be really good. We’ll see what it is, and then we’ll go ahead and start the Main Event. So, that’s it.

MR. PLZAK: Okay, would you put the ARIN XXI or – put the open mic slide back up. This is a test of MSD staff. How fast can they react? Okay. Anyway, I’m going to give it back to John. We had someone come in after the mics were closed.

MR. CURRAN: So, we did get a remote participant who noted – Kirk Ismay, who noted that for IPv6 outreach, he supports the v6 outreach in non-traditional sectors, including consumer electronics, mobile phones, et cetera. Regarding the PPML, he prefers e-mail versus web phone, and did appreciate the new poll feature. So, I just wanted to let people know. Thank you.

MR. DARTE: Have you forgotten that you were going to ask for a poll of support?

MR. CURRAN: Oh, yeah, thank you. So, Bill, you’re very useful, because I was losing it. Okay, it has been raised before, whether or not ARIN should be engaged in outreach outside of the traditional ISP community. We are actually doing a little bit of that. We did it because we thought, at the Board level, it was the right thing to do. It would be good to have a show of support from the community, so I am actually going to ask for a show of hands regarding whether or not ARIN should be doing outreach outside of the ISP community to discuss the upcoming IPv4 depletion. And so I’m going to ask for a show of hands for those in favor and a show of hands for those opposed. So, I’m looking for my faithful pollsters. Yea, pollsters. They’re in high demand this season, I don’t know why. So, we’re going to ask for a show of hands. Raising your hands or a vote of “aye” on this will be a show of support for ARIN expending resources for outreach beyond the ISP community to discuss the issues of impending IPv4 depletion, and then I’m going to ask for those people opposed. So, all those in favor of ARIN doing outreach regarding IPv4 depletion to sectors outside the ISP community, raise your hand. One hand. Got you, Marty. (Laughter) Nice and high. I really think this is the last poll of the day. Thank you. All those opposed to doing this outreach, raise your hand. Okay? Thank you. (Applause)

MR. CURRAN: Regarding ARIN doing outreach regarding IPv4 depletion: Number of people in the room, 123; in favor, 76; against, 1. This will be provided to the ARIN Board for their consideration, thank you. (Applause)

MR. CURRAN: And thank you, Bill Darte.

MR. PLZAK: And with that last poll, aren’t you glad you used Dial? And don’t you wish everybody did?

Closing Announcements and Adjournment

MR. PLZAK: So, we are now at the end of the Public Policy Meeting. Just a reminder, if you have not managed to make it to the Lucky Slot or the Wheel of Fortune, you still have a chance to get the consolation prize, which is that AppleTV. Let’s thank our sponsor one more time, WildBlue. (Applause)

MR. PLZAK: Reminder, tomorrow breakfast is at 8:00, meeting is at 9:00. The agenda is in your meeting program, and we will start the IPv6 Main Event at 15 minutes past 5:00. (Whereupon, at 5:09 p.m., the PROCEEDINGS were continued.)

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