ARIN XXX Members Meeting Draft Transcript - 26 October 2012 [Archived]

Opening and Announcements

John Curran: Good morning. I’m John Curran. I’m the president and CEO of American Registry of Internet Numbers. This is where we do the reports of the organization. We’ll have our reports from various departments and then the Board of Trustees report, the ARIN Advisory Council report.

Rules and reminders. We will have a chance to have an open mic. Please state your name and affiliation each time you’re recognized at the microphone. Please comply with the rules and courtesies in the Discussion Guide.

Don’t forget the meeting survey. We try to do a good job. One of the things that really helps us do that is filling out the meeting survey. If you need a paper copy because you don’t have an electronic device, raise your hand now. Maybe you left it in your room, okay, we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. If you don’t have an electronic device and you need a paper copy, raise your hand. We have paper copies.

All respondents will be entered to win a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1.

The election remains open. If you’re a Designated Member Representative, you can vote now, www.ARIN.net/app/election. If you have any questions, see Jud at the election help desk.

There is elections going on for the Board of Trustees seats and for the ARIN Advisory Council seats.

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(Applause.)

John Curran: Okay. Today’s agenda: departmental reports, the Advisory Council report, we have an ARIN financial report, and then the Board of Trustees report.

At the head table I have Board member Bill Woodcock, ARIN Advisory Council Chair John Sweeting, and ARIN Board member and Treasurer Paul Andersen. Wow. Three board members. I can pull it off. Very good.

We’ll have the ARIN report start. The first report will be Registration Services Department, and we’ll have David Huberman come up and give that.

ARIN Updates: Registration Services

David Huberman: Good morning, everybody. Here today to talk about registration services. I hope you’ve all enjoyed the meeting as much as I have. It’s been really nice getting to see some old friends and make some new ones.

The Registration Services Department is the ARIN registry. It’s tens of thousands of actual customer requests every year, requests for v4 and v6 and AS Numbers, updates to Whois, WhoWas. I keep trying to ask for WhoWillBe so we don’t actually have to go to work.

(Laughter.)

David Huberman: The Registration Services update is normally given by Leslie. It’s a staff of nine with one manager. And that manager’s not here today, so we get to talk about her. Hopefully you’ve gotten to know her. She’s the Director of Registration Services. She’s served that role for about 12 years or so. Getting the nod from Mary K., so that’s right.

Leslie has an exceptional passion for ARIN’s mission. She feels the registry in her bones. There aren’t a lot of people who feel that way. It’s one of the reasons John is such an extraordinary and exceptional man – or I mean CEO.

John Curran: Thank you.

David Huberman: You’re welcome.

But, seriously, Leslie feels the registry in her bones. She cares about two things: ARIN and its customers. If you’ve ever had a good experience at ARIN, it’s because of Leslie. It’s because of the work she does.

If you’ve ever had a bad experience at ARIN, I’d like you to refer you to Andy Newton, the Chief Engineer in the back of the room.

(Laughter.)

David Huberman: Leslie works and fights every day for you, our customers. She only wants the registry experience to be great. She only wants the customer service to be exceptional.

I’ve had the privilege of working for Leslie for nine and a half years. And if we had more Leslies, the world be a better place.

Then there’s the rest of us. The first person normally mentioned in these presentations is depending on how you count Kim Hubbard. She’s basically ARIN employee number one. Cathy Clements has worked for the registry for 15 years, currently with the fancy title of Principal Analyst.

In my adult life as a working adult, I’ve never had the honor of working with a better employee than Cathy. Not only does she know the entire registry history from its customers to the interesting things that have happened, but she’s our rock. She continues to guide us down the right path to ensure that we’re doing the right thing for you.

Back at – Cathy’s back at the office along with Jon Worley, Senior Research Analyst; Doreen Marraffa; Sue Dobert; and Chad Eastman. While we’re here partying and watching John make a fool of himself at the bar, they’re back at home working. Because the registry never stops. The requests keep coming in. People still need v4. People still need v6. And they’re back at the office working really hard to make sure that we can have a good productive meeting.

And, guys, if you’re watching this, get back to work.

With us today is Eddie Diego, who is at our Registration Services help desk right now, and Lisa Liedel and Mike Pappano. And together the staff of nine and one manager perform the registry function.

That’s about it for the interesting parts of this presentation.

Currently we’re doing IPv4 depletion planning. As you know, we’re quickly going through our v4 resources. And with that is a staged approach to make life – I don’t want to say make life difficult, but that’s not really true, it’s just to make sure we’re doing the right thing as ARIN, looking at things more judiciously, making sure that the those last resources go to the people who ask for them first and justify them first.

Life at ARIN is more and more about transfers. We are seeing an increase in 8.2, 8.3, and now 8.4 transfers. It’s becoming a dominating part of what we do every day, and this is a good thing, is keeping Whois up to date.

Of course business as usual, working on policies and, working on the registry, and we’re always improving to make ourselves better.

The phased countdown plan. We’re in Phase 2. We have 2.8 or something like /8s left.

Every time you request space, if you put a /16 down on that form, you don’t get an analyst anymore; you get a team of analysts.

We’re doing things on a truly first in/first out basis. If there’s any escalations, the whole queue comes to a halt and we don’t move forward until the thing at the top of the queue moves forward.

We’ve changed the payment in RSA windows down to 60 days. When we approve you or your customers for a request, they have 60 days to make payment on an RSA or their request is closed. That’s nonnegotiable. They go back to the bottom of the line and start over again.

We have an interesting scenario where people return address space. We revoke address space for nonpayment, and sometimes we recover address space due to fraud.

What we do is we put it into a little bucket where we hold it for a little while. And that’s essentially to, A, allow people to come back and take the stuff back if they want to pay for it, because all of a sudden their IN-ADDR has disappeared and they’re like, What’s going on? Or they return space and maybe they didn’t want to do that.

That bucket used to be a year; now it’s down to 60 days. And the closer we get to v4 depletion, the smaller that bucket’s going to get.

So one day if you’re bored, you’re sitting on your routers, take a look at some of your customer routes. If you don’t see them in Whois, maybe you want to nudge them. As we deplete the space, we go through more phases.

Transfers. So we talk a lot about transfers. We’re doing them all the time. The blue bars on this chart, these are for 8.2 M&A transfers. The blue bars show the number of requests, anywhere between 40 and 50 a month. The white line shows how many we complete. The number we do really has no bearing on the number we complete. We’ve always completed about 50 percent of the transfers we’ve approved.

8.3 and 8.4 transfers. This is an interesting graph. 8.3 transfers requested is the predominant graph here, the bar. The ones we’ve completed are in the gray. Clearly bear no relation to the requests. And the little red stub on the right is the first 8.4 transfers which we completed last month and continue to do this month.

Churn. As I said, addresses come back. Since 2005, when we first started tracking it, we’ve actually recovered three and a half /8s, which, think about it, that’s actually quite a lot of space. Today we have – as of September 30th, we have 2.82 /8s in inventory. We have about four /16s being held just to clear the 60-day number. And there’s a /10 that’s not in inventory that’s reserved for the RFC 19 – sorry, dedicated v4 block for v6 deployment.

This is a year-by-year chart on how many v4 blocks and ASNs come back to us. I want to stop a minute and talk about ASNs. The RIRs get ASNs 4-byte – excuse me, 2-byte ASNs in blocks of 1024. We get a lot of ASNs back. In fact, I think it’s been – I think we went from 2006 to 2010 on a single block of 1024, because we get more than a thousand back every year if you count the churn and you do an average. So we’re always just recycling ASNs over and over again. And in six years we’ve barely drawn down from the registry.

Every year we talk about the legacy RSA requests. We’ve had a thousand requests to sign the legacy RSA. Half of them are signed. Some are approved. Some are still pending. Some actually didn’t turn out to be relevant. And some were abandoned.

We saw this slide or we talked about this slide during the Public Policy Meeting. There are 6.5 million 24s in ARIN’s Whois that are directly registered. Half of them are not covered by any Registration Services Agreement whatsoever. That means we’re providing IN-ADDR and Whois services to folks who we have no contract to do so with.

Most of the ones that are covered are covered of course by our Registration Services Agreement. And about 8 percent of the registrations in ARIN’s database are covered by an LRSA. We currently serve about 35,000 organizations. For the most part, one organization is one different company.

About 44 percent of the organizations in Whois are not members and really have no direct relationship with us, 12 percent are ISPs, and about 44 percent are legacy.

Oh, I had that backwards. How about that? 44 percent are actually end users, 12 percent are ISPs, 44 percent are legacy. Okay.

V4 and v6, this slide every RIR gives at every RIR update. About 58 percent of our customers are v4 only. 36 percent are v4 and v6. And, interestingly, you think about that, 6 percent of our customers are v6 only. That’s a pretty high number.

And there’s no more slides.

John Curran: Microphones are open for questions. Mr. Vegoda.

Leo Vegoda: Leo Vegoda from ICANN. Could you give more information about that six percent of customers that are v6 only? It’s very interesting and I’d be grateful if you could say some more about it.

David Huberman: I’ll be honest with you. I don’t know, v6 only, four percent.

John Curran: Is there anyone in the room who is v6 only who wants to step up and say why?

Scott Leibrand: Definitely not v6 only. Scott Leibrand. I think we’re talking about people who have v6 from ARIN but don’t have v4 from ARIN. Is that correct?

David Huberman: Yes.

Scott Leibrand: So they’re probably just PA on the v4 side.

David Farmer: David Farmer, University of Minnesota, ARIN AC. Scott hit the nose on one of them. And I don’t know how you count it, but there are quite a few of us organizations that are v6-only members and legacy not member –

John Curran: We’d still see that. I think Scott got it. It’s the you have an assignment but you don’t have an assignment, you have provider –

David Farmer: Yeah, okay.

Owen DeLong: Owen DeLong, Hurricane Electric, ARIN AC, legacy holder and v6 holder. As a result of being both a legacy holder and a v6 holder, I am DeLong and DeLong-Z. It’s entirely possible that I therefore count as an IPv4-only ORG and an IPv6-only ORG rather than an IPv4-v6 ORG.

John Curran: If you have them as two ORGs.

Owen DeLong: I wasn’t given a choice of not being two ORGs.

Bill Woodcock: You’d have to give up legacy status.

(Laughter.)

John Curran: There’s an agreement for that.

Dani Roisman: Dani Roisman, SoftLayer. Could you give a brief overview: What is the behavior when we go into the phase, the last /8 at ARIN?

David Huberman: The last /8. So the last /8 is every single request is reviewed by a team of analysts. And what does that mean? Well, for I guess 14 years now you would submit a request and it would be assigned to an analyst. Let’s say it would be assigned to Lisa. And Lisa would work with you at her pace and your pace, and the two of you would work at a pace and you’d get a ticket and it would be done.

Now it’s reviewed by a team. To give you an idea, the team is Cathy Clements, Jon Worley, and myself. We only meet twice a day. We meet at 11:00 a.m. and we meet at 4:00 p.m. And because of the American corporate culture with lots of meetings, sometimes we don’t meet at 11:00 a.m. Sometimes we only meet once a day.

And we sit there and we work on the tickets in the order they’ve come in, and we make sure that all three of us have done the same analysis. So we do the work three times. Or if we’re doing it together, we’re just making sure we’re doing it right.

We want to get to the same numbers independently when doing counting for utilization. We’re ensuring that we are providing the same experience to you as we would to the next ticket and the ticket before.

It turns out to take a lot of time to do something as a team. It’s good, because it’s ensuring there’s absolute consistency in the registry and that there’s no way to jump the line, which is extremely important as we get down.

But the opportunity cost for that is – it’s a little bit slower. So in the end every single request will be like this, whether you’re requesting a /24 as an end user, a /32 for your IX and our new great CI policy you’ll be passing, or a /8.

Importantly, and this can’t be understated, when we recover resources, we’re going to hold them for 30 days. Think about that. We’re in a v4 depletion. There’s no space left. Somebody wants a /20. We have a /20 to give you that’s been recovered. Guess what? It’s still routed. Do you want it? Well, we’re going to give it to you because it’s the only /20 we have. It’s only been in the bucket for 30 days. It still has route announcements.

In some cases it might be found on block lists and it doesn’t matter. It’s all we have, so we’re going to give it to you 30 days after we recover it.

The old company is still using it and wanting it back because they finally found out IN-ADDR doesn’t work and they want it. It’s been 30 days; they can’t have it, and now it’s yours.

Think about the implications of that, if you will, for a minute. There’s some scary things in there.

So that’s what the end of v4 looks like.

Sandy Murphy: Sandy Murphy, SPARTA. Owen brought up he has different Org IDs. An organization with which I’m pretty familiar has many different Org IDs from time immemorial. I happen to know that they’re related because I know that there are offices in the different cities of the Org IDs.

I presumed that it would be extremely difficult for ARIN to try to associate different organizations with different addresses and this is all really one organization.

Going forward even, you would have no way of knowing that something in Mountain View and something in Arlington were really the same.

So I was thinking yesterday about the new fee structure, whether people could – people who were on the boundaries and suddenly their values are going up, could change their fee structure by becoming multiple organizations and whether you had thought of that.

David Huberman: It’s possible. To speak real quickly to something you said, actually it’s easy for us if these customers or someone on their behalf comes to us. We’d like to consolidate. If you know customers who have multiple organizations and it really should be one, all you have to do is contact us. And we do this every day. We’re happy to put it all together in a nice one clean record with one fee. Very easy.

Bill Woodcock: And just to be really clear, that’s one of the outcomes of this new theory structure; that there’s now a significant benefit to consolidating all of your records under one organization.

Sandy Murphy: Thank you.

John Curran: Any other questions? Thank you, Dave.

(Applause.)

John Curran: Next up we have the HR and Administration Report from Mary K. Lee.

ARIN Updates: Human Resources And Administration

Mary K. Lee: Good morning, everyone. I’d like to start by thanking everyone back at the office for keeping things running while we’re here in Dallas. We really appreciate that. And, as always, Therese and Misuk take care of us in many ways.

Some updates about what we’re doing right now. We’ve made some changes in our About Us section. Just current items going on in the office and staffing, because, of course, obviously that’s my main area.

This is the new and improved and – I’ll take a quote from Hollis – a bit sexier About Us page. I had lots of help from CMSD doing this. They took an idea I had to make our section a little more robust. Have a lot more information, passing it along to people.

Because ARIN is just really a great place. So I looked at our About Us section and a lot of other companies and thought: Why don’t we have more information about ARIN up there? So I worked with Hollis and Erin and Jason, and they were great and got the section going for us.

And some of our current items again. A new travel company. We switched to a new travel company about six months ago. (Therese) was the lead on this, working with the new company, all the details. So far we’ve been very pleased with them. They have better reporting for us, things we need internally, better at giving notifications to the travelers. Excellent response time. So right now we’re very happy with them, and we’ll definitely continue working with them.

401(k). We did an analysis of our current 401(k) plan. ARIN started off with three what we call managed portfolios. We added two more to that. So there are now five managed portfolios. So you can go from fairly conservative to fairly aggressive in your investment strategy.

And you don’t have to pick those funds yourself. You can allow the retirement company to do it for you. We also added some more funds and we replaced a couple of the poor-performing funds. So we really have a much balanced structure. And I worked on that some with Nate, but mostly with Bob, because, as you know, he is the money guy.

And, as always, we do support the annual budget process. I work with compensation data, look at benefits, improvements, and what the increases will be year-to-year and facility items and provide those to the Financial Services Department.

The bad news is that Lily Tomlin is still answering the phones at ARIN. I know you all thought she went away, but I checked in the back closet wondering why our phones were so clunky and slow, and that’s why we’re still doing that. However, we said yes, it is time to begin looking for a new phone system.

So last December Tammy and Val went out and got proposals and looked at various companies. We brought them in, evaluated the proposals. And then the Steves, that’s Steve Bambling and Steve Scally from Engineering, they took over all, did all the – looked at requirements, equipment specifications, what we needed. We currently have most of the equipment in and some of the installation done, and we’ll be doing training and installation the first week of November, and before the end of the year we’ll be completely switched to a new phone system.

When we – when we renewed our lease, one of the biggest things we did was we had money included to do an eventual HVAC replacement pretty much total for the building. That’s two separate units in the computer room, and one for the main building. So right now we’re evaluating proposals for those. And because it’s a little cheaper to do it then, we’ll probably have this work done in the winter. So we’re planning on that sometime in January or February.

And WCIT preparatory meetings. You’ve heard a lot about this. We had a really fabulous panel here on Wednesday morning. I hope everyone saw that. And because it is so busy and so involved and we have not yet been able to clone Cathy Handley, although it’s on my list of things to do next year, she has got me working with her a bit.

So I’ve been to Geneva and I’m becoming involved in the IG process and the WCIT process. Quite fascinating. I’m enjoying it very much.

Employee tenure. We continue even with some turnover a couple of years ago to be just a really strong tenured company. We have a wealth of knowledge. We have wonderful experienced staff. As you can see, we have ten people kind of in the beginning stage here. So that’s some new hires we added. But we still have 22 people who have been at ARIN more than six years.

Staffing and recruitment. Working with a new company. They have a little different method and a little different pricing method which is actually kinder than the standard 15 to 25 percent fee for hiring. We’re pleased with them and they’ve done some good work for us so far, so I think we’ll continue working with them.

It’s very odd about the unemployment rate. It might be high overall in the country, but it’s not high across all job categories. So it’s amazing that in some, very easy to find people. You get dozens and dozens of resumés. And in others, you place ads in three places and you’re lucky if you get more than spam. So it’s still difficult for ARIN to do some hiring right now.

I always like to recognize the anniversaries. In particular, the big ones, the ten-year and five-year. Earlier this year we had two ten-year anniversaries. One is Jason Byrne sitting up front here, and the other is Tanya Gomez back at the office.

The five years, the other ones we like to talk about, we had one earlier this year, Lisa Liedel. Lisa, I hope you’re in the room. I saw you at the desk earlier. Maybe not. Anyway, Lisa is here five years. I’m going to go out on a limb and take a risk and I’m going to recognize two people whose five-year anniversaries won’t be until December, so this means you have to stay now, and that would be Pete Toscano and Andy Newton. Thanks to them.

And then there’s two more anniversaries. They actually occurred here in October. And normally we have a little get-together at the office and do some public recognition for them. So I’d like all of you to help me do this, and I’d like Mark and Hollis to come up to the stage, please.

(Applause.)

Mary K. Lee: And there’s one more very important anniversary coming up. ARIN will be 15 years old in December. So congrats.

Thank you to all of you for making ARIN as successful as we have been.

(Applause.)

John Curran: Any questions for Mary K.? No? Thank you.

Next up we’ll have the Government Affairs and Public Policy Report, and that will be Cathy Handley.

ARIN Updates: Government Affairs And Public Policy Support

Cathy Handley: Good morning to everyone. It’s been really nice this week. I realize after talking to some old friends that I haven’t seen in a while that I haven’t been to an ARIN meeting since Toronto. And if I can talk my boss into it, I may do this again. It’s kind of fun. Keeps things going. He can go to the WCIT meetings and I’ll come here.

John Curran: Oh, yeah, we’ll see if that works.

Cathy Handley: You all heard him. He said yeah. We’ve got that.

Hopefully you all enjoyed – those that were here enjoyed the panel we had Wednesday. And when you do your reviews of what you thought of the meeting, really would like to hear what you think about doing things like that.

It was the first time we’ve tried it. And this one was focused a lot on WCIT. And I understand in talking to some folks, their having nightmares. But don’t. It’s bad. But it’s a wake-up bad. It’s not a bad-bad. It’s not like the hurricane that’s coming up the East Coast bad.

It’s a time for you to take a look and an opportunity to really, really participate and continue with the community-driven policymaking process.

Now let’s see if I can – okay. It has been a hectic year. Not the worst for my travel, but probably ranks close. There’s a lot of things going on this year. As a matter of fact, I leave November 17th for Dubai for a fun-filled month. And starting November 20th is the World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly. Up front, these are all ITU-related conferences.

This takes place every four years. It is – it defines everything that’s going to happen in the T sector, which is where we would be interested in. It’s the telecommunication standardization sector.

And that’s where any funny stuff could take place. That’s where we had the infamous IPv6 working group that we worked on. This is where one of my favorites, Study Group 2, which does unfortunately numbering, naming, and addressing, if you’re familiar with those terms. It’s a bad name for a telecom-focused study group.

But they talk about misuse of addresses and telephone numbers. But keeping in mind, once we do this a lot more and you’re familiar with all of the kind of double meanings of things, that they look at telephone numbers as addresses also.

Each study group, of which right now there are ten, identifies what their meeting schedule is going to be, what they’re going to study, and that over the next four years – it’s kind of an administrative sort of schedule.

Now, you notice Mary K. was working on the WCIT with me, and Susan – I’m just grabbing people; once they go to a meeting, they’re stuck because I’ve got my hooks into them.

Susan is going to help with the WTSA. She went to the Plenipotentiary Conference in Guadalajara two years ago and made the unfortunate mistake of telling me: That was really interesting. It’s like, well, you’re going to have more opportunities to be interested.

So here’s some of the topics that are up for study. Now, in looking at them, a lot of these involve writing definitions and what they really mean.

And the one that you see down there for spam, they’ve been working on that for about eight years. And spam is – I think we could pretty much all agree is in the eye of the beholder. And it will continue to be like that. There isn’t one accepted definition which will give them something to talk about.

And the other one that’s kind of interesting is the last equitable distribution for study group management. They don’t want to have all of the heads of the study groups from one geographic area, because the head of the study group has a opportunity to drive where they want the discussions done.

So there’s been a real effort and a lot of discussion this year that we don’t want things driven throughout the ITU by just one geographic area.

And here’s the biggie. World Conference on Telecommunication Regulations. It follows directly – we end on Friday with WTSA and Monday morning we start WCIT.

WCIT is different than WTSA. As we talked about, it’s a treaty conference. WTSA is more of an administrative conference.

We’re going to look at the International Telecommunication Regulations. We – when I say “we,” Mary K. will be there, she mentioned. I will be there. There will be other representatives from the other RIRs. Paul Rendek unfortunately now lives in Dubai, so we’ve got our hooks in him to be able to be there and attend.

So RIPE will be represented. LACNIC, AFRINIC. APNIC will all be represented. ISOC will be there. I found out that there will be representatives from ICANN there. However, they can’t be in the meeting room because given rules – a lot of it has to do with UN rules and regulations. They don’t belong. And they haven’t been invited. So they won’t be there. But they’ll be outside if anything comes up, and we can go talk to them.

These are binding principles in the treaty. They are binding on the treaty signatories. They are not binding on operating agencies or recognized operating agencies. However, if the country you are operating in decides that they want to put any of the agreements regarding WCIT into place and something on the ITRs, then having worked at the government, my best bet is they’re going to make you follow those rules.

Even though, like I said, it’s not – the treaty is not binding on you. It’s only binding on the member states, because treaties can only be signed between sovereign entities.

So, as you heard again in the panel, this was last discussed in 1988. Things have changed a bit. 1988 the Internet was there, but most folks looked at it as a lab experiment. So now it’s there and people are having a hard time remembering what an old circuit switch looks like.

Some of the issues, general updating of terms. And that’s just kind of a definition of terms in there. That in itself is extremely harmless but needs to be watched, depending on how they choose to update those terms.

There was a push earlier in the year for – early in the discussions that all ITU recommendations be made mandatory. That really has gotten no support. It had originally and there was a lot of discussion.

There was one intervention that I think really took hold of folks when they said: You can’t do that because the recommendations that are there now were developed by technical people and they weren’t developed with the view that they would be mandatory.

And that may mean that now you’re going to have a whole different group of people come in and do recommendations that are going to be mandatory and the whole process will probably fall apart. So that kind of went away.

Some discussion about commercial arrangements. There are some countries that feel they are on the short end of commercial arrangements. They’re getting taken by different providers. That is not something that belongs in the ITRs, and there’s a lot of agreement on that from various member states.

Probably one of the most important ones to us and where the greatest concern that I’ve had come in is the ITRs should not be used to determine and define terms. That is where I said on Wednesday that there has not been a contribution come in that says very explicitly the ITU should take over the Internet.

It’s the defining of terms where we get into problems. There’s a term, ICT, which we were at a meeting last week and I told the audience, I said, We know what the three letters stand for, but – and those aren’t even consistent. A lot of people, if you have 100 people in a room, you’re going to have 200 different definitions of what ICT would be.

Fraud is something that has multiple definitions. Misuse. All of that. And, again, this is where you really have to watch and follow what drives the contribution that comes in to define something somewhere.

Clearly do no harm to the network is a big one. And that just kind of centers around people making recommendations that they don’t understand how the network works. So we’re spending a lot of time going around trying to explain things like that.

We don’t want to change the definition of telecommunications or international telecommunications service, because they were talking about adding terms like processing in it. And it looks like it’s come out, and not a big one, but it’s not 100 percent.

And, again, we don’t want terms like the ICT and the ITRs. We do not under any circumstances want the ITRs to impose routing.

There was an interesting contribution from one of the member states that they felt if a commercial provider A had an agreement – in country A had an agreement with commercial provider B in another country to deliver traffic, that the regulator should have the opportunity to say at the terminating end, no, I don’t want you to deliver your traffic there; I want you to deliver it here.

That isn’t the way things work in an IP network. And so there’s still a lot of discussion about that, but we’re gaining more and more people going, That’s not a good idea.

Again, the outcome is it is a treaty between member states. Not service providers, simply the member state. It does not automatically go into effect. It has to go through a ratification process. One of these interesting trivia points, the United States has not ever ratified the ITRs.

So I don’t know what will happen if they will or they won’t. Some countries have ratified them. There’s 193 members in the ITU and only around 100 – somewhere around 170, I believe, had actually ratified the 1988 treaty.

Proposals. Just because one country has a proposal, it doesn’t mean that it gets accepted. It has to get accepted from the greater body. Countries can take reservations if they don’t support what’s in there, and there has been a growing rumble from administrations about taking reservations on some parts. Interestingly enough, there’s nothing in the ITRs that can’t be done by a member state today in their own country. If they want to do it, they actually don’t need the ITRs to do it.

Some things are probably going to end up optional because you can’t really tell – actually, member states get quite offended if you tell them what they have to do. So that’s where you don’t use words like “must” and “will” or “shall.” You may use words like “may” do something.

Very importantly, whatever is in that treaty cannot override national sovereignty. And that’s very important, because the direction of some of the proposals come close to doing that. They skirt the edges. But they come close to doing it.

Good news for most people is if you’re in the US and/or Canada or parts of the Caribbean, you may not see any effect of this at all, if you don’t do business in countries where they may have ratified this and want to put some stronger words into effect.

So, like I said, you may – midnight December 14th may come to pass and nothing looks any different. As I said, it’s most noticeable if you focus on international business.

What’s next? There’s more and more interest in the Internet and our world, and one should expect that. There are billions and billions of dollars that go across the Internet. That’s old hat. We all know that.

There’s national security issues. There’s all sorts of things. But consequently you’ve got governments getting more and more interested in wanting to help.

I’m trying to be nice. There are governments that are more comfortable in an ITU environment where they’re on the top of the pile and their words are louder than our words. Some governments – I think you can all figure out governments that aren’t really fond of a community-driven model.

There are folks that go apoplectic about the fact that private sector people are doing what we’re doing. We have – they look at us and they say, They’ve got the Internet in their hands.

So I charge all of you to, if you get a question from a government person, could be your state regulator, could be anybody, if you have the opportunity, don’t just tell them that’s a stupid idea and it won’t work. They’re not staying up nights to ask you questions to spoil your day. They have questions and they don’t understand things. And what we want to come out of this is to preserve the community-driven process where all voices are heard and go into the decision-making.

Thank you.

John Curran: Any questions for Cathy? Thank you, Cathy.

For the next department report, I’d like to have the Financial Services Report from Bob Stratton.

ARIN Updates: Financial Services

Bob Stratton: Good morning, everybody. I’m going to go over the staff in FSD, what our ARIN Online experience has been, what’s going on with our work related to the possible new fee schedule, what our operational experience has been, balance sheet I’m going to review and maybe a couple data points. I’m going to be pretty quick.

Paul Andersen is going to give you an update on where we are in the P&L statement. So I’m going to be a setup man for him.

It’s a very good staff in FSD. Val, Michael, and Tammy are here. Amaris, Tanya, and Amy back at the office. It’s been a challenging year. They’ve worked very hard. Very proud to work with them, and I will leave it at that.

Our ARIN Online experience: It’s been very good. You can look up your invoices. You can administer your billing POC. It’s increased our efficiency due to the transparency throughout the organization. And it’s transparency for you as well.

Planning for the possible new fee schedule. We did a lot of legwork. There was a lot of different views. We’re working with engineering to automate the interaction between the database and our accounting system, and, for lack of a better term, I call that a database as well.

The details were presented yesterday. We’re going to be flexible and we’re going to work with CMSD on communicating this throughout the year regardless of what the end product of all this is.

Our operational experience this year, as I said, Paul will present the revenue and expense trends. We just improved our credit card process online. What this means is if you enter your invoice, it will give the correct amount. It will prepopulate some fields for you. This is going to help mitigate the problem we had with double payments.

While we can always use the funds, and we had some good ideas on what to do with the extra money, we had to refund almost all – in fact, all.

(Laughter.)

Bob Stratton: Too bad, but… and I just wanted to mention in this current investment environment, it’s been a real challenge. Financial repression is a term where all the central banks in the world are driving down interest rates, which means our financial investments or financial instruments that pay interest are paying less and less interest. But, on the other hand, the stock market has had a fairly good year. But it’s a whimsical investment environment, as they say.

Investment types. We mainly get checks and credit cards in equal amounts. As you can see, the monetary value of the checks we receive exceeds the credit cards on a per-transaction basis.

What’s interesting about this is when I talk to my cohorts in other RIRs, they don’t receive much in the way of checks. So I guess we in the US and Canada are still using checks, per se, to pay for larger transactions. Just an interesting data point.

Invoicing structure. V4 is still the lion’s share of our revenue. As you can see, the blue means the number of invoices and green means the money. So on a per-transaction basis, the v4 transactions represent more money per transaction. From my standpoint, from a business standpoint, that’s a more efficient structure. On the maintenance side or v6 or all other, ASNs, it’s more invoices and less money per transaction.

This is just the registration revenue mix. This really just shows you that v4 still represents the lion’s share. Paul will go into the specific details. But the other item here is that assignments and v6 and maintenance are increasing incrementally. But still it’s v4, which is – v4 allocations which are the lion’s share.

Here’s our balance sheet as of August. The only thing I want to point out here is the second through the fourth line are our investment reserves. We have a legal reserve to show that we are more than willing to defend ourselves in any type of litigation. We have an operating reserve which we used to draw when we needed money from the reserves to meet our operating expenses.

Over the last several years, as you all well know, between ARIN Online development and RPKI, we’ve had to draw on the reserves. Perfectly reasonable. So in both of those cases, those are liquid investments, mostly CDs. And refer back to my earlier statement about the lack of interest that we received from those. So these are pretty much holding pens for money until the interest rate environment improves, as they say.

Long-term reserve is split between equity and mutual funds and bond mutual funds, debt instruments, and actually an interesting point here is that as interest rates have declined, bond face values have increased. Which will reverse itself when interest rates go back up.

The only thing I want to point out here is software costs, second from the bottom. This represents the efforts that we’ve done, and we’re capitalizing the RPKI and the ARIN Online work. It’s over five years.

If we stopped the work tomorrow, we’d have about 800,000 per year going forward in terms of expense recognition. This is on the liability side of the balance sheet.

The only thing I want to point to here is the line that refers to deferred revenue. 6.2 million. We recognize revenue on a deferred revenue basis. If you pay us 18,000, we recognize 1500 in the month that it begins to be due. Next 11 months, 1500 each month. So the 6 million represents services to be rendered to you for payments that we’ve received from you.

So this will be recognized over the next 11 months. This is a just chart of world GDP from “The Economist.” It just shows the unpleasantness in ‘07, ‘08, and'09, and we really haven’t recovered from it. Hopefully the bars will go upwards starting next year.

But, again, it’s an interesting environment, and I just wanted to point out that even though it’s been an unpleasant couple of weeks, from what I understand – I’ve been on travel – the stock market is still up for the year and far in excess of any interest rate you may have received from any interest-bearing account, whether it be a bond or a CD.

And I told you I’d be quick, so thank you.

John Curran: Any questions for Bob? Thank you, Bob.

(Applause.)

John Curran: The next report is the Engineering Report. Mark Kosters will give it.

ARIN Updates: Engineering

Mark Kosters: So I guess I’m known no longer as the CTO but the Chief Goose Target.

So let’s get started here. Engineering theme. Our success so far has been aided by a number of contractors. It’s been a lot less. We’re letting many of them go mainly through attrition.

But our offices are not near as full as they were in the past. Engineers going away. The search is on for filling up some engineering slots. Mary K. kind of alluded to that. And if you know of any DBAs in the audience, anyone here a DBA, welcome to have you come join us.

We have a lot of work to do yet. I’ll go through that. So here’s what our staffing currently looks like. Operations has five people and the manager. Down one since ARIN XXIX. We have two DBA slots open right at the moment. We’re actually really lean in that particular area and would really like to see those positions filled.

In development, we’re basically fully staffed, from an ARIN staffing perspective. We’re down to two development guys that are contractors, which is down three since the last meeting. Quality assurance, we have three QA and a manager and four contractors. Those contractors, three of them are part time.

Project management, we have one filled. Peri Baykan has joined us. She’s come to her first ARIN meeting to see what it’s all about here so that she can get a better idea, help integrate ARIN together back in the office, and, of course, me.

So what is operations doing? Well, we are doing a number of things. One of the continual things is looking at upgrading the end-of-life equipment. We have all these penguin servers that I’d love to see gone, and they’re a distinctive color in our operations environment. And I just count through them on the number of boxes. Many of them are over five years old and are getting close to the end of their days. I’d certainly like to see them gone.

We’re maintaining various environments so that we can – actually, when we deploy new software, we feel pretty confident that it is correct.

And so we have production and we have an operation testing evaluation environment that you can use to test right now Reg-RWS commands against. You can also look at Whois service to see the information that you put through the RESTful API Reg-RWS to see if it actually worked. And we will soon do the same with RPKI so that you can actually test RPKI transactions through it as well.

We have development QA and staging as well. We have some load balancer challenges, mainly in the v6 environment. There’s not really the parity we’d like to see between v4 and v6 on their services. And that’s something that we’re continually battling with our vendor on, trying to get this parity sort of equalized.

We’re also moving production to a colocation facility in this coming year. And the reason for this is that we’ve had some near misses. And the most recent one is for some reason ARIN’s located in an environment where electricity seems to be kind of single sourced. And if there’s ever a maintenance sort of development, our site goes down in terms of not having electricity and we have to put our generator on.

Now, the last time the generator test fired just fine, but when it came to the planned outage that Dominion Power put into place, the generator decided it was not going to fire. Basically the ops guys on staff and one other who came along actually figured out what was wrong with it and were able to actually fix it and get it going without any sort of – we did have some mechanical intervention.

We were able to get it going. So there was really no outage, but we were very much concerned about that, because really ARIN Online actually is driven by our Oracle database on the backside, and that database is actually housed in our headquarters. We’d really like to move that out.

Of course, we have other things, IT support and RPKI rollout are – have been some of the big initiatives.

Whois-RWS traffic loads. This was a big issue a couple of years ago. We’re actually running at a very normal sustained rate of 405 queries per second, which is actually pretty cool.

The thing that I find most interesting on this is the RESTful calls. You have Whois on port 43 you can do with regular traditional clients, or you can use the RESTful service over port 80 and get the same information.

What’s interesting is the RESTful calls have overtaken port 43. We’re seeing 1.5 billion RESTful calls for September, whereas we’ve only seen 1.1 billion calls for port 43. And I think that’s really cool, seeing a new service taking over a legacy service.

And here you can see the graphs. You can see the spikes that we endured a while back. And now it’s more of a sustained rate.

Here is what I was doing in terms of breaking out things. The blue line, if you can read the blue line, is the RESTful calls; purple line being port 43; and the red line being the calls that you can actually put through the Web interface. And that’s basically close to zero compared to the other guys.

Here’s an interesting graph in terms of what is going with Whois RWS with IPv6. And it’s just all over the place. And I don’t understand why it’s like this. But that’s the way it is and that’s the way that the numbers are coming off. You can see that port 80 at one time was prevalent over port 43, and then port 43 took over port 80.

I don’t understand that. But that’s the way that the traffic is showing up right now. What’s interesting is we said, Hey, look, let’s try to do something else. Let’s actually look at the fetches for our home page and see what comes over v4 or what comes over v6. We did this.

We were like this is amazing. Almost 13 percent of our traffic is v6. This is really cool. But then we started looking at the numbers and seeing what the sources were and saying, ah, I see what’s going on, people are looking at us as a beacon of light for v6 connectivity and actually are checking against us all the time over the Web.

We take out those guys that do the static checks, you can see that we’re down to four percent, which is still good. It’s better than the one percent we were reporting previously. So we’re actually seeing some uptake here more so than in the past.

Development and Q&A. We’re currently working on improvements to existing systems. We have RPKI out the door now. Yay. We have integrated payments that’s out the door now. We have some other improvements we want to do with it. Internally we moved from Red Hat JBoss to JBoss AS 7 Community Edition, which means we no longer have to pay licensing fees. And we’ve added some runout functionality enhancements for the staff and fixed various bugs.

Initiatives that are currently underway. You heard this from Tim the other day. We’re implementing delegated RPKI. Working on extended statistics generation, which is other RIRs and us are coming up with a way of commonly displaying the data that we actually allocate to the community.

We have improvements to internal billing systems that we’re putting together and a move from Oracle to PostgreSQL mainly, again, as a cost mitigation move.

How is ARIN Online used. And you can see that last year was a stellar year, and in terms of number of accounts created, almost 20,000. We’re on our way to 15,000 this year, which is actually pretty good for a system like this.

You can see here on the active usage of ARIN Online that great numbers of the people who actually use ARIN Online actually use it quite heavily.

You can see that over 5,000 users, almost 6,000, actually 6,000 users actually logged in more than 16 times with ARIN Online, which is not bad.

Here’s an interesting slide. At ARIN XXIX I reported in terms of here are the number of templates coming through and the number of RESTful transactions that come through reassignment informations through the RESTful API. It was respectful what you saw through the RESTful API, but now you can see that the RESTful API is actually starting to really take off and that more and more of the reassignment information that we receive from you is actually coming through that interface. Again, that’s really great news.

Now, what I’d like to talk about a little bit is evolution and deployment of RPKI. I want to talk about the pilot participation, the feedback, and the move to production.

So the pilot period was essentially three years. We had 63 users. And at times we had more than this, but we had 76 ROAs at the end of the pilot.

What was interesting the number of people who were fetching information from our repositories. They were really hitting these services pretty hard. We were seeing over 15,000 fetches per day, which is not too bad for a pilot. And after we went to production, I was trying to figure out, okay, what is the best way for this pilot to actually die. So I let the signatures expire. And then at that point I removed everything from the repository and put a message of the day on the rsync service saying, hey, look, this is no longer in use; go to ARIN’s production rsync repository to get your information. We’re still seeing 4,000 fetches per day, so it’s all good.

Feedback from the pilot over the last three years. Frankly, we just received very little. One was, hey, you got weird passwords for this. Okay. Thank you. I generated those passwords, by the way. I thought they were pretty cool.

Operational learning. Actually it was good to see that people did notice when the pilot would actually break up from time to time and signatures were expired and I would have to kick the server.

There were a few entries that were put in that other people said, hey, look, those don’t really match routing systems; could you please fix it. That was some good feedback going on there within the operational community.

Now we’re into the production RPKI. We’ve been there for about a month now, and we’ve had 27 people who have actually signed RPA, which allows you to get the trust anchor locator, the TAL, so you could refetch this information from the repositories and validate it against it.

And I know I’m using a lot of words here that Tim talked about, and hopefully you remember. I’m not going to go through that tutorial.

But out of that, what was interesting about that is if I took out the RIR members that actually fetched and signed the RPA, it was down to 17 people. And on the other side, on the provisioning side, there’s seven organizations that have come in to ask for their resources to be signed, ARIN being one. And out of those seven organizations, 19 ROAs have been created which comprised 30 networks and ASs. So we didn’t quite see the land rush that we expected to see.

So is RPKI still in the experimental stage? Some people are saying, hey, we’ll start using this in production. But there hasn’t been as much sort of anticipated sort of, hey, look, let’s join in as we expect it. Even though there was great, great sort of pressure for us to actually put it out the door.

And it’s been a multi-year effort. Cost us approximately two and a half million dollars to do this. And it’s involved some very complex code which involves some very specialized engineering to make it occur.

And this is something that ARIN’s going to have to make sure that we keep up to speed with; that we have people on staff to maintain that code. And we hope it’s a success in the long run. But maybe this will be like the IRR.

So a couple of ARINs ago we talked about the IRR we had to put out. We’re looking at this, saying, boy, the IRR, the usage is actually going down. Why are we improving it? Why are we making any changes to a system that maybe should be sunsetted? But we made the changes. If you see now, you can see that actual usage has gone up.

We’re starting to see people starting to actively maintain their data. We see people actually upgrading from mail from to crypt password so that they get better security in the system almost every day.

So we’re seeing a lot of renewed interest in IRR. And I hope that the RPKI could be a long-thing category.

There’s a number of challenges with RPKI. The protocol is mature, kind of. Validators did not allow for the extension that we had – that we put in that allows for us to – certificates policies extension to be actually explicitly mentioned in the certificate.

A draft is being written in IETF to actually take care of that. Andy is one of the co-authors.

Rsync might not be the best protocol to retrieve the data from the repository since it actually could be a DDoS attack vector and there’s some very good work underway within the regional registries that hopefully the IETF will accept to actually use http as a preferred way to go forward.

There’s still some challenges that you’ve heard about. ERX and inter-RIR transfers were well on their way. We have a document that’s internal right now that we’re going to put out. Actually IANA’s actually helping us come up with this document. We have agreed with the concept and it will be coming out.

There’s some things that we need to think about as we go forward merging to a global Trust Anchor, and there’s some interesting papers out there dealing with sort of simultaneous operation with a regional registry Trust Anchor and a global Trust Anchor and how are validators actually going to handle that, in which it’s very complex code.

We have a lot of obstacles to overcome here. We have a number of suggestions. It’s more than eight now that are pending. We have DNSSEC improvements, streamlined transfer service. We need to make some changes to some of the online systems that we do with both membership and voter functionality.

Integration of IRR with ARIN Online, right now it’s a red-headed stepchild. Lame delegation reporting, OT&E services that we like to put in, RPKI being one of those.

Alternative RPKI-like services. As we go through this, we’re saying, boy, maybe it could be done differently. Not yet. But we’d like to start looking at those things as well.

Billing management improvements as well. And we have to struggle against the community needs and policies, and we definitely have to do the policies, the code that needs to be involved there.

We have also a lot of technical and operational debt. The last thing you want to do is actually put out a system and run with it for a long period of time, and essentially we’re running off of publicly available code using Linux and that sort of thing on our systems, and we want to keep them reasonably up to date. And as time goes on, if you let your systems atrophy away, upgrading becomes much more difficult, and we certainly don’t want to do that.

We’re also dealing a lot with thought leadership. I had a conversation with a member yesterday saying, hey, we’d really like to see you more involved in RPKI and being more vocal, and, frankly, we were being somewhat quiet within the RPKI realms.

But we’re also being very outspoken with Whois-RWS in various communities. Andy has driven a number of drafts within IETF in a RWS working group.

And I’ve been involved dealing with some policy matters within ICANN. All these things are starting to work together, and there’s certainly some research opportunities involved with those as well.

So with that, I’m done.

John Curran: Any questions for Mark?

Mike Joseph: Mike Joseph, Google. Given all of the things you’re working on that you just outlined, also I could see the roadmap on the website for various features in ARIN Online and other systems, why is it that you’re downsizing your development department?

John Curran: Want me to answer?

Mark Kosters: Yes.

John Curran: So it’s not quite that we’re downsizing development. So we actually had a very good discussion of this with the Board very recently. And we use contractors because we never – we have a core staff that Mark has, but then we use contractors to do a bit of the development. We have a couple of firms we work with very successfully.

Contractors are more expensive. The reason we have used contractors, historically, is it provides staffing flexibility.

At the point in time when you get the surge done, you don’t need to have and wonder what are you going to do with this development staff.

We probably over-optimized there, because our core development and Q&A team is not capable of doing significant feature development. It’s more corrective actions.

And so recently what we decided to do is reduce our contracting staff but potentially add one or two to – a small number of development staff.

So we hope to get the same productivity, in fact, potentially even more, on a more cost-effective basis. It does increase our permanent employee count and our permanent cost basis, but it still may be lower than contractors for the next two years.

Does that answer it?

Mike Joseph: I think so. But the list seems to be getting longer.

John Curran: You folks have been requesting more things in the last two years than in the prior ten years of ARIN’s existence. And now we’re catching up.

Mike Joseph: Thank you.

Owen DeLong: Owen DeLong, Hurricane Electric, ARIN Advisory Council. As probably the lead complainer on ARIN Online, I actually want to compliment you this time. The billing integration is very nice. And while it was long awaited and much anticipated, I’m very glad to see it there and very appreciative of its operation now.

Mark Kosters: Thank you very much.

Kevin Blumberg: Kevin Blumberg, The Wire, ARIN AC. If you could go to that Whois data for a minute, or 30 seconds.

Mark Kosters: Tell me which one.

Kevin Blumberg: The multi-billion request one, talking between the – my question is: What was the time period over with the Whois statistics, the way you got to 2.6 billion?

I can’t – it’s too small for me to see, sorry.

Mark Kosters: This particular slide here?

Kevin Blumberg: So over the last two years.

Mark Kosters: Yeah, this is the last two years. The RESTful interface was actually introduced approximately two years ago.

Kevin Blumberg: My last question is: Do you have any statistics on the number of different hosts that are looking at this from a statistical point of view; i.e., is one host looking at it ten billion times and then there’s the rest, the little bucket?

Mark Kosters: Actually a really good question. Frankly, we have mountains of logs that we go through and we cull through on this.

And actually we’re looking at large – looking at sort of big pattern matching right now. We haven’t gone through that much host level and tried to figure out what’s going on. That’s something that we probably ought to be doing more of. But we’re not doing that right now.

Kevin Blumberg: We’ve been having some very interesting policy discussions related to Whois, and with these kind of numbers, it’s actually significant. Thank you.

Mark Kosters: Sure.

Sandy.

Sandy Murphy: Sandy Murphy, SPARTA. I’m, of course, interested in all the things that you brought up that you think need addressing in the IETF working group. I really don’t know what you mean about the certificate policy extension because it’s in there and it’s a must-be-present and it’s critical.

It doesn’t need to be answered here, just saying, yes, absolutely, got lots of time on the agenda, one, two weeks from today. Be there.

Mark Kosters: Andy, you were coming to the mic?

Andy Newton: So, Sandy – this is Andy Newton. The CPS qualifier, the RFC is not clear on whether you can or cannot have it. And two of the validator implementers actually flagged it as an error if you did have it.

Geoff Huston and I have talked about writing a draft to submit to the working group to clarify the situation. We wanted to make sure once we got to production what really was going on, and so far – and we did talk to the validator implementers directly, and the two that had the problem corrected the issue. And as far as we can tell, all three validators now work with the CPS qualifier.

Sandy Murphy: Thank you. I wasn’t really looking for an answer right now. But thank you for providing the answer.

But, again, SIDR is meeting on the front of IETF week, which is two weeks from today, and please do bring issues or topics.

Mark Kosters: Both Andy and myself will be at IETF. We can bring that up as a comment. I don’t think we’ll have a draft ready – we certainly have missed the draft deadline. So we’ll definitely start being a little bit more outspoken.

Sandy Murphy: There are working groups in the IETF that require a draft before you can get a position on the agenda. SIDR is not one.

And the routing area directors are pushing on us to have more discussion than presentation, so you’d be right in keeping.

Mark Kosters: Very good.

John Curran: Any other questions for Mark?

Thank you, Mark.

(Applause.)

John Curran: Final department report is the Communications and Member Services Department, and Susan Hamlin, who makes this meeting possible, will come up and give it.

Communications And Member Services Report

Susan Hamlin: Thank you, John. So I’m very proud to work with this group of professionals on this screen. They’re all here today. Most of them in the front of the room. Dé Harvey, our meeting planner, probably in the back, and Jud Lewis on the election help desk.

The one thing I wanted to call out is that you’ll see each of these folks has a unique title. CMSD covers a lot of activities and a lot of responsibilities for ARIN, and we’re a pretty small group.

Okay. Current membership, 4,255 ARIN members. That’s the geographic breakdown. Tends to grow in that proportion every year.

And I added some statistics on the number of subscribers to our major Mailing List. I thought that might be of interest.

I list the ARIN Consult. Hopefully with the current fee consultation we’ll have many new subscribers, and we encourage you to participate.

The organization services is a large part of what CMSD is responsible for. We service many, many clients. Internal clients, all of the departments of ARIN that produce services, that need documentation. It’s our group that works with the subject matter experts in those various departments to publish the information on the website, some of it with ARIN Online, and then all the printed documentation we take to our outreach activities.

We also handle the social media. And I have a slide in a minute that’ll show you that we’re growing in our Facebook/Twitter followers.

We’re also responsible for media relations. We have a – Lewis PR is our contract firm. We work with them. They provide us support for the social media and at times when we deal with press and media, looking for opportunities to pitch a story, to pitch quotes, to get ARIN’s name out and to make our key messaging heard.

We also conduct these meetings, obviously, and then new member orientation, our responsibility for facilitating elections, all outreach and training, and the ARIN Consultation and Suggestion Process.

We also handle the policy development support. And Einar Bohlin, as you all know, handles most of those activities, making sure the PDP is properly managed and providing support for the ARIN Advisory Council.

So here’s a look at some of the growth in our following on social media.

And I’d like to call your attention to teamarin.net. How many of you take a look at that site from time to time? Wonderful. Wonderful. All the time.

And I would like to encourage any of you who would like to blog for us, we’re looking for guest bloggers. If you have a subject matter that you think would be of interest to the community, just drop us a line at info@arin.net. And we’d love to work with you and get your name out there.

This is an example of some of the more recent materials we developed with the subject matter experts in-house.

The IPv4 depletion and countdown plan that is provided on the website, the counter has been there for a while, and we now have documentation of every phase. So if you read that you know what’s coming as we hit each lower /8. We also produce some materials on the IPv4 transfer market.

A lot of documentation on RPKI. And we’d love feedback from those of you who are going to look at that, if you’re new to RPKI, if we need to provide better documentation, different. Again, we’d like to hear from you.

And also we added a new section on the website earlier this year to cover Internet governance. It highlights the major activities you’ve heard about from Cathy this week, and also has a couple of pages that tell you how you can participate and some contact information for your local governments.

And from there, there’s a link to the Team ARIN site where we try to highlight some of the general news coverage about what’s going or what’s coming up at WCIT.

This is a look of some of the places we’ve been since April. We continue to go to large trade shows such as CES, HostingCon. We took ARIN on the road to Louisville and Minneapolis in September.

We’ve been in the Caribbean, Montserrat, Jamaica, and we will be at the Canadian ISC Summit in Toronto in November.

We are currently planning our activities for next year. We intend to do more ARIN on the Road. If you are interested in ARIN coming to your community, drop me a line. We’re now sort of looking for those areas. And we take the one-day ARIN on the Road show to places where we wouldn’t typically hold a major ARIN meeting.

The fee consultation opened yesterday, and we expect to open the consultation on the revised Policy Development Process early next week. We encourage you all to make your opinions known and join the consult list.

We’re going to have a change next year with the ARIN Public Policy and Members Meeting. In an effort to make these meetings even more open, we are going to drop the registration fee for individuals who are not ARIN members. We will still keep a small fee for social guests to help us cover our costs, but we’ll begin that with the April Public Policy Meeting.

And while I’m on meetings, John mentioned the other day we at the NANOG meeting coming up in February will have something new. We’re going to have a Public Policy Consultation track. It will be an opportunity to bring forth some of the policy pros for discussion in that community, and that will also be open to anyone. You’ll be reading more about that as NANOG puts information up for their registration of that meeting.

For individuals who don’t want to attend the NANOG meeting, we will have a free registration for you to come and participate in that Public Policy Consultation track, and we will also have our remote participation available as we do here with the chat room and the voting possibilities.

Okay. So next year, in April, we’re going to Barbados. We look forward to having you all with us. And in the fall back to back again with NANOG in Phoenix. And the dates are currently on the website on the main meeting page.

Can’t resist but encourage you all again to please vote. Next week we begin calling all 3,735 eligible DMRs. However, those of you who are here in the room have a bonus. We are not going to call you because we feel like you’ve had opportunity, you’ve heard from us enough, and I know you will have all voted by noon today. So you should not be receiving those calls this week.

And I just wanted to close with this quote, which I thought was very relevant. CMSD and all of ARIN puts out a lot of information. We’re on the road communicating with people. We don’t get a lot of feedback. I’d like to assume that everything’s great, you understand everything we have on the website, you don’t have a need for any other information.

But I find that unlikely. So we really would like to know: Are we getting through? We’re a service department, an organization. So if there are things you need, please let us know. And info@arin.net or Ask ARIN and ARIN Online are two easy ways to contact us.

And that’s it. Thank you.

John Curran: Any questions for Susan?

Scott Leibrand: Scott Leibrand, Limelight Networks. The getting rid of registration fees is huge, and I think that’s a big thank you.

I would guess that there’s a lot of folks who would suddenly be very interested in coming to these meetings maybe who aren’t necessarily going to have a lot of views on policy but view it as an opportunity to learn more about the networking community, et cetera.

And people who look for fellowships and such things are often just looking for an opportunity to come, not necessarily to get subsidized and all the other stuff.

So I would encourage you, if you haven’t already, to think about ways to do outreach around that. When you’re in a local city, outreaching to people who might want to come, students, whatever, I think that would be very valuable in terms of advancing ARIN’s mission and making sure that we continue to have people involved in the process going forward.

Susan Hamlin: Great idea. Thank you.

John Curran: I think actually outreach is going to be very important to do in advance; that we’re going to be in a city and we’re going to be holding a meeting and that it is open. And we will do that.

The reason we need to do it in advance is because once we’re actually on site, there will be a walk-up registration fee.

And that’s necessary because, while we want it to be an open process, we want everyone to participate, we don’t want someone who is just looking for cookies to come across town to pick up cookies.

We want people to actually have some interest in the subject matter. So we’ll do it in advance to make sure that parties who are interested and know actually come consciously, but there will be an on-site registration fee if they didn’t bother to register in advance.

Thank you, Susan.

(Applause.)

John Curran: Our final report before break will be the ARIN Advisory Council Report by the chairman, John Sweeting.

ARIN Advisory Council Report

John Sweeting: Good morning, everyone. John Sweeting, Chair of the AC. Going to give a quick review of what the Advisory Council has accomplished over the past year. And a few other things.

So the Advisory Council is 15 elected members. So it’s three blocks of five people. They’re three-year terms, so there’s elections every year to replace one-third of the AC – or not replace them, but put them back on.

This year, well, part of the election, we serve three years, five members up for reelection each year. Terms ending December 31st of this year are listed there: Stacy, Chris Morrow, Bill Sandiford, Heather Schiller, Rob Seastrom, and we have one vacant seat due to a resignation.

So there will actually be six votes to cast for the Advisory Council in the election. Top five voters receive a three-year term. Candidate receiving the sixth most votes will serve the remainder of the vacant position which ends next December, December 31st, 2013. We have ten nominated individuals for the six positions.

And I’d like to give a big thank you to Chris Morrow for his three years of dedicated service as he has chosen not to run for reelection. So can we give a quick hand for Chris.

(Applause.)

John Sweeting: So the AC role in the PDP – which I guess we’re going to get a new one; I think John and the Board would like to change it up every three or four years just to keep us on our toes – we evaluate the proposals, develop them into Draft Policy – I’ll probably have to like reword this for the next meeting, if you’re going to be changing some of this stuff, huh? – present that Draft Policy to you here at the PPM and determine that it meets the community needs and requirements, and if it does, we recommend that to the Board for adoption.

So the year 2012 in review. We had 25 new proposals and we had four left over from 2011. Status of those are there’s two pending, one is on the docket, one we’re going to decide this afternoon what to do with, 15 were abandoned, and eight were moved to Draft Policies. Of those eight, three were recommended for adoption, and five are pending at this meeting.

I guess a good thing that shows that we are getting used to the PDP that is currently in place is we’ve gotten to the point where we weren’t moving proposals into a Draft Policy status and then abandoning them, we were actually culling them out prior to that.

But now we’re going to change all that. So who knows next year.

So some of the meetings that the Advisory Council participates in over the year. We, of course, attend both ARIN meetings, everybody. There’s three NANOG meetings. Chris Morrow attended one, Kevin. All of us attend the one that’s joint with ARIN. Two RIPE, two APNIC, two LACNIC, one AFRINIC. There’s usually two AFRINIC. However, we’re not participating in the AFRINIC that’s being held at the end of November this year.

We supported six outreach events, which usually is about anywhere from three to five days of each of the AC volunteers’ time, and four ARIN on the Road events, which is an all-day event that we have an AC member there to participate and help the ARIN staff answer questions and things for the people that participate in those.

So there’s a lot of voluntary time that the AC provides to ARIN staff, and we get great support from them in turn, and I would like to thank them for that great support.

Would just like to point out that – a really big thanks this week to Misuk. We put her through the grinder with all the things that went on with one member going into the hospital and having to change a whole bunch of travel plans due to that and some other things. But she responded well, took care of everything in stride, and we’re all on board and ready to move on.

Fellowship programs. We participate in the selection committee. We have one member on the selection committee for the Fellowship and, of course, we provide a one-on-one mentor for each of the Fellows during the meetings.

Outreach program. We participate in the ARIN booth. We focus on spreading the IPv6 gospel and helping – we actually get a lot, a lot of people asking – there’s still – believe it or not, there’s still people today, just two weeks ago, that come up to the booth and say, yeah, you guys have been saying this about IPv4 running out, and for years now. It’s never going to happen.

So we sit there and explain to them and show them the stats. And I think most people are finally believing it. Now the questions are more on what do they need to do. But there is actually people that still think it’s not going to happen, which is amazing, I think.

We participate in the Nomination Committee for the elections, the PDP Committee, and of course we have the Improved Communications Workgroup, and anything else really that the Board or ARIN requests that we help them with.

So that’s it. Thank you, and please remember to vote. And I actually – I sent this to Paul Andersen just for him to look it over to see if it was okay. He sent it back to me. He had an edit on this slide. It was: Please remember to vote for Paul Andersen. But I chose not to put that up there.

(Laughter.)

John Curran: Any questions for John Sweeting? Okay. Thank you, John.

(Applause.)

John Curran: John made a comment which reminded me of something. The ARIN Board and the ARIN AC are all volunteers and spend a lot of time getting to where we need them, meetings here, and they deserve a lot of thanks for that.

But I also want to call out the administrative staff that gets them there and gets them back and gets their reports done: Mary K., and underneath Mary K., Misuk and Therese, back at the office. Deserve a round of applause for administrative support.

(Applause.)

John Curran: If you ever have to keep 20 people on the road throughout the year, you’ll find out it’s a lot of fun. They do a remarkable job.

We’ll move into break. We have 22 minutes. We’ll be back here promptly at 11:00, at which time we’ll resume with the ARIN Financial Report and the ARIN Board of Trustees Report. Thank you.

(Break.)

John Curran: We’ll start again. We have two reports, then the Open Microphone session.

The first report is Paul Andersen, ARIN’s Treasurer, giving the financial report. Thank you, Paul.

ARIN Financial Report

Paul Andersen: I’ll be relatively quick here. Just going over current financials, talking about our reserve fund, and telling you a little bit about what the FinCom has been up to.

Through August, our registration revenue is pretty much right on target. We’re expecting to hit about 14.8 million by year-end.

As you can see, the breakdown there of ISP registrations in v4, about seven million versus other registration fees at around just shy of three million.

2012 expenses are coming in also pretty much on target. We’re expecting to be about 15.5 million by the end of the year.

The investments, we’re seeing about an eight percent return right now. We’re up about $2 million as of yesterday, which is actually pretty much double what we were hoping for, and that’s actually even given the kind of turbulent few months in the stock market.

But, of course, just like any other investment, that could change very quickly, which means we’re looking at right now net reserves about $2.3 million, which is again higher than we expected, mostly because of the very favorable investment return.

The Board set a budget that would be operating in a net loss this year, but that doesn’t look like it’s going to occur, because we’ve been trying to do some drawdown on the reserve.

And if I can read that – which one can I read better? Quick snapshot on the financials. Our communications is a bit down. Staff have found a few other solutions for colocation and connectivity at less or no cost. Software/equipment, depreciation, some delayed deployment, some delayed capital purchases have that down.

Professional fees are coming in lower because, although we have been doing a lot of outreach, we’ve reduced a few conferences; that we took a few off the list that we were going to attend but chose not to in the end.

Legal fees are lower a bit. But you’ll also notice the legal defense fund, when you add those together, we’re actually drawing from our legal defense fund.

As a background, we do keep three sets of reserves: an operating reserve, long-term reserve, and also a legal defense fund. And the legal defense has been brought down due to numerous bankruptcies which we’ve been involved in.

Members Meeting, general office, they’re all on track for this year. Travel is currently trending quite a bit under, but we expect to catch up in quarter four because we’ll be heavily involved in WCIT and IGF, and those are long meetings and unfortunately do cost a bit.

We have a favorably lower cost in our ICANN fees. That’s just based on the formula that the NRO uses to figure out – the NRO itself does a fixed contribution, and each RIR has a shared. Because the other regions have been more active than us, our cost is a bit lower.

And research is also under because we just have not initiated any new projects.

To give you an idea where we are on the reserves, again we’re trending up a little bit this year, just over 25 million.

The FinCom itself has been pretty busy. We’ve been heavily involved in the fee schedule, which has been discussed already numerous times. And we also have been involved in the various processes and filing our 990 Form, which is now filed or will be filed very, very shortly.

Looking forward, we’ll be – between now and the next meeting we’ll be dealing with the budgeting process for the next fiscal year. So that will be consuming most of the time.

And then I believe that is it. I would just like to take a moment to thank Bob Stratton and his team who make this the easiest job in the world, and also thank Woody and of course Scott Bradner, the FinCom, especially Scott as the former treasurer, because he was very helpful in making it a smooth transition.

And with that, questions?

John Curran: Any questions for Paul? The microphones are open.

Paul Andersen: I promise no election plugs.

John Curran: Thank you.

(Applause.)

John Curran: The final report is the ARIN Board of Trustees report. Tim actually – Tim Denton, our chair – has flown out. He had to catch a flight and asked me to step in and do this. So I will do it, and it’s fairly routine.

ARIN Board Of Trustees Report

John Curran: Since the last ARIN meeting, the Board of Trustees has reviewed and accepted the 2012 Auditor’s Report.

We impaneled the 2012 NomCom and appointed an election vote counter from the Board. We provided guidance on legal and governance matters. We revised the mission statement and revised the bylaws to clarify the election process and accommodate changes to Virginia law.

Fees. We reviewed, obviously, the proposed 2013 fee schedule.

We have a workshop every year where we review ARIN’s strategic direction, and we committed to continuing strong IPv6 outreach and education; continue education about the current Internet Registry System model, particularly externally to those who don’t understand that this process works and its strengths; we committed to working closely with operator forums in the region, example, NANOG, the meeting that we co-joined this particular time; and considered the long-term fee structures and long-term budget goals for ARIN. Very successful strategic planning session.

Registration services. The Board directed ARIN staff to send address space that’s been thus far returned to ARIN to the IANA, as noted in the global policy GPP-IPv4-2011.

The Board reviewed the Proposed Revised Policy Development Process that we covered yesterday and asked that I present it at this meeting and in preparation for call, for public consultation, and approved having Public Policy Consultations at NANOG.

The way it’s set up is that if we approve the PDP, the PDP allows us to have a Public Policy Consultation as long as it can be participated by everyone and it has remote access.

But obviously we’re not going to do those everywhere. The Board is to check to make sure we’re using an appropriate forum, and I told the Board that we would work with NANOG to have such sessions at NANOG, and they agreed that was worthwhile.

Adopted: The Board adopted three policies recommended by the ARIN Advisory Council. One is 2011-1, Inter-RIR Transfers; one, 2011-2, Clarifying Requirements for IPv4 Transfers; and 2012-3, ASN Transfers. And all those were ratified by the Board and in fact have been implemented.

That’s what the Board has done. And any questions?

Scott Leibrand: Scott Leibrand, ARIN Advisory Council. Can you provide any guidance to the community on the Board’s going-forward thinking regarding returning reclaimed space, what your criteria are for what’s returned to IANA and what’s used internally?

John Curran: Sure. The current practice right now remains unchanged. Space returned to ARIN is pooled, and I will periodically bring it to the Board and recommend that we return it to the IANA in accordance with the global policy.

If there’s some other practice that you guys would like, there’s a policy process and you can make a policy for how ARIN handles returned space, and we’re happy to apply accordingly.

But unless it’s such a policy, we’ll continue to pool it up and return it periodically to the IANA.

Owen DeLong: Owen DeLong, Hurricane Electric, ARIN AC. The Board updated the mission statement.

John Curran: Yes, we did.

Owen DeLong: Not generally a problem, except the first I heard of the Board updating the mission statement was the Board has updated the mission statement, past tense.

I would generally think that such a change would be something that might be worth having reviewed by the membership and/or the community, and I’m also curious as to how we decided to drop the principles of stewardship from the mission statement in that process.

John Curran: Let me divide it in two pieces. The mission statement was updated, and at the beginning it used to begin saying “adhering to the principles of stewardship” and continued with some other text.

The other text made it that ARIN, the organization, makes policies. And we were in a circumstance we felt it was particularly important to clarify that, because it isn’t ARIN making policy. ARIN, the organization – actually references how we’re incorporated – facilitates the community making policies. It’s our job not to make them but to help the community in the development of policies.

In the process of fixing that, the “with respect to stewardship” went away.

As it turns out, there’s always been questions about what that means. Does that take precedence over conservation and aggregation?

So the principles that the policies have to follow, rather than saying they have to apply stewardship, the principles are actually outlined in the new PDP very clearly.

I do think the mission statement is much clearer now and that principles of stewardship is where it belongs, in the Policy Development Process and the particular goals.

But let me move to the first part of your question, because that’s probably more germane. It was pointed out that we did change the mission statement. And we spend a lot of time consulting. We’ll consult on changing a field on ARIN Online, but we didn’t do a consultation on changing the mission statement.

In retrospect, I probably would have advised the Board we should send it off for consultation. We did this as part of our strategic planning process, as part of our strategic vision. And we implemented it because it was something that didn’t seem to be a major change.

If you want, we can always go to public consultation to put such out. But ultimately the mission of the organization and the bylaws remain under the control of the Board, so they have the ability to change it.

If you want a process of consultation to happen, we can make that more consultative in the future.

Yes, Board member Bill Woodcock.

Bill Woodcock: I’d like to add, nothing’s set in stone, right? Just as we changed something once, we can change it again. That will always be true. And we’re always here to listen to what you want.

The Board is not – we don’t do this to amuse ourselves. Right? We’re here to represent you guys and we can’t obviously bring every single little thing back to you guys because you would get very bored of us very quickly.

So we try and handle little things by ourselves without a lot of hassle, and we’re not always the best at judging what you guys are going to think is something little and what you guys are going to think is something substantive.

But, hey, anything is fixable. So if there’s something in the changed mission statement that you guys think needs to be different than it is, just let us know, and we’ll take that on board and we’ll deal with it.

John Curran: Microphones remain open. I’m actually now going to roll into the next phase of the meeting, which is the final phase, which is the Open Microphone session.

Open Microphone

John Curran: Microphones are open for discussion of any topic related to ARIN operation, policy. This is the final chance to have a chance to speak before we close the meeting.

Now, I do know that when we’re done, people will probably run off to lunch. Some people are going to race to airplanes. There’s an event happening in the southeast of the Atlantic called Sandy. Sandy is a hurricane. And if you’re planning on traveling today, it’s probably okay. Tomorrow, it’s probably interesting. And Sunday, well, that’s going to be an adventure. So I don’t want to hold us here too long.

Yes, Bill Darte.

Bill Darte: Bill Darte, ARIN Advisory Council. Some of you participated in the tabletop topic of improved communications. And I would just like to remind everybody that we’re actively interested in improving communications for the whole community here and particularly as it relates to the Public Policy Mailing List.

So if you have suggestions on how that could be improved, techniques that we could use or implement, we’re actively interested in it. So thank you.

John Curran: Microphones remain open.

Chris Grundemann: Chris Grundemann. Yesterday during the RPKI discussion, Mark Kosters got up and stated that ARIN is only signing routes for registered ARIN holders, I think folks who are under contract with ARIN.

So I was just wondering how that affects legacy holders. And I assume, then, the people who are ARIN members who do have an RSA with ARIN, who are getting signed by ARIN, then are responsible for signing anything below them. Right? So how do legacy holders play into that?

John Curran: You need to normalize your relationship with ARIN by entering into an agreement. We won’t – otherwise we don’t know who we’re signing the certificate for.

Microphones remain open. I don’t mean to keep everyone here needlessly, but I also don’t need people to speak without cause.

Ralph Bischof: Ralph Bischof, SAIC, NASA. Number one, I’d like to say thank you. I think this is my seventh meeting. I don’t get to go to the ones overseas, but I do get to go to the ones here in the US.

I think you all do a wonderful job. I really appreciate the time and effort that you put into coming to these and actually hosting these meetings for us to come to to interact with you guys.

I do have one question that’s been burning on my mind for about a year. I believe it’s for you, John. Did we ever find the owner of the lost glasses last year?

John Curran: (Laughter.) Not yet. Still looking.

Okay. If there are no further questions –

Closing Announcements and Adjourment

John Curran: The question was: How long does the wireless last? These people work really hard and have been here all week. Generally the moment that we close this meeting they start tearing something down. So, yeah, if you’re working on email, a good thing to do while you’re working on email, fill out the survey. Vote, another good thing to do.

But once we close this meeting, it’s going to go down in about ten minutes. So you need to pay attention.

I am going to close these microphones. Microphones are closed. That ends the Open Mic session. Thank you, everyone.

And I’m now going to close the meeting. I’d like to first start off by thanking our sponsor, terremark.

(Applause.)

John Curran: A few quick reminders: Don’t forget the meeting survey. It’s very important. Again, we have a good system here running meetings, and it’s because of your feedback. Keep giving it to us.

Please check your bill. You should not have been charged for in-room wireless connectivity. It’s one of those things it’s already in your room rate. It should already have been part of the package. It should come out. You should not be charged for that.

Please recycle your name badges as you exit. We use these again, try to eliminate our waste. So drop it off on the way out the door. Thank you very much.

Thank you for being part of ARIN XXX. Our next meeting, ARIN 31, is in Barbados. I look forward to seeing everyone there. It should be a wonderful time.

Thank you very much. This concludes our meeting.

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