ARIN XX Public Policy Meeting
Draft Transcript
Wednesday, 17 October 2007

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

Meeting Called to Order

MR. PLZAK: This is ARIN XX, and I'm going to go through a set of announcements and so forth, so let's get started on that. And first of all this is what we're going to be talking about real quickly. And so -- we've had about 203 people registered for our meeting. There were about 452 registered for the NANOG meeting. We've got a crossover this time of about a 139. It's a growing number; it works real well, so I think we'll keep on doing this. In regards to this ARIN meeting, we have 78 first-timers, so first-timers welcome. Please come back. (Applause)

MR. PLZAK: Okay, here's a breakdown of attendance. Ten people from four provinces of Canada, 162 people from 30 states in the District of Columbia, one person from the Caribbean portion of the ARIN region, and we have 40 people from outside ARIN representing 15 countries. And, welcome first-time attendees. We had a -- once yesterday they get to meet the elected representatives, i.e., the Advisory Council and also the Address Council persons, met with ARIN staff, we had -- all had lunch together, and they've learned something about ARIN. And they also were asked to fill out a survey and so there's a going to be a prize for that -- filling out that survey and completing it, so Susan would come up with the bag. I would ask someone in the audience who was not at the meeting -- at the lunch yesterday, and is not a member of an RIR staff to please come up and draw from the bag. And the giveaway is an IronKey Flash Drive. So, you're a member of an RIR staff?

MR. VEST: Not me. (Laughter)

MR. PLZAK: So Axel, did you fire him? Okay. (Laughter)

MR. VEST: ANY?

MR. PLZAK: RIR.

MR. VEST: I pick any?

MR. PLZAK: Any. (Laughter)

MR. PLZAK: All right, draw this. (Laughter)

MR. PLZAK: Drawn. (Applause & laughter)

MR. WOODCOCK: And if you were, you aren't now, oh.

MR. PLZAK: Yeah. (Laughter)

MR. PLZAK: Okay, ah.

MR. VEST: Yes.

MR. PLZAK: Brian Murphy? There he is, uh-huh. (Applause)

MR. PLZAK: A speech is not required here, Brian, but you are welcome to come to the mike during policy discussions. If you come up here, I've got a little goody for you.

MR. MURPHY: Thank you very much.

MR. PLZAK: Welcome. Okay. Let's welcome our Postel Network Operators Scholarship awardee, Ayitey Bulley, are you in here? Okay, let's look at your meeting reference materials and other goodies. Oops, backup. You got a bag, and inside that bag you've got a folder, and inside that folder is a number of things. We are asking for you to complete surveys. There is a brochure on elections, and also a sheet on using PGP with ARIN. If you recall, we recently implemented PGP capability, and also a copy of the ARIN service level commitment report that was -- has been asked for by the community. On the right side, you see -- invitation to come to the Cyber Café. We will again be having the prize wheel, so as you fill out surveys during the course of the week, you'll be asked to go try your chance there. We have a "Welcome to ARIN XX" member packet brochure. You also will find a copy of the IRPEP, and you'll also find a copy of the Number Policy Resource Manual. Also in your bag, just so that if you feel the urge you have to have something to eat, there's a bag of M&Ms. And also you have the ARIN XX tee-shirt, and this is the tenth year of ARIN and ARIN's birthday is in December, and we're not McDonalds, we haven't done a "Billion Served," but ARIN's done a lot of things over ten years and so there's some statistics on the back of the shirt. So, anyway, happy tenth anniversary to ARIN, so happy tenth anniversary to all of you. (Applause)

MR. PLZAK: Okay, let's introduce the Board of Trustees, John, Scott, Lee, Paul, Bill, Bill, and me. And of course not a member of the Board of Trustees, but providing advice is our general counsel, Steve Ryan, who is in the corner. The Advisory Council, here are the 15 hot chili peppers.

SPEAKER: Hear that.

MR. PLZAK: They are all here, and I won't name them off. If they could all just quickly raise their hands or stand, so you guys get an idea where they are. They are here to help you, assist you, and please take advantage of them. I'll leave it up to you to decide what advantage is. (Laughter)

MR. PLZAK: The Number Council, three people, Sandy, Marty, and Louis. This is Sandy's last meeting as a member of the Number Council and he is over there in that corner. And we will have -- we're discussing shortly, the election to replace him. RIR colleagues, AfriNIC, Earnest and Harry; Sunny and Jeff from APNIC; Pablo and Ricardo from LACNIC, and five people from RIPE? No, six -- see, Tom you're around there. Okay, and the ARIN staff. Difference this time is we have a new director of engineering, the chief technical officer for ARIN, Mark Kosters. (Applause)

MR. PLZAK: Bob is not here, he was here earlier in the week, but he had to go back -- back home but the rest of us are all here. So let's thank our sponsor One Connect IP. (Applause)

MR. PLZAK: And of course, you, we can't do this without you. Cyber Café. -- we've got the help desk, Internet access material, Internet access, we've got ARIN materials, we've got presentations. If you've never visited a Cyber Café., do so; there's a lot going on there, it's a good place to congregate and meet and get information. It's back by popular demand -- the Prize Wheel. And you'll be asked to be filling out surveys and at every break or thereabouts, there's going to be a drawing, and not everybody is going to win. So, there are eight lucky winners over the course of two days. However, and as I said not everyone's going to win, so we do have a consolation prize. So, all non-winning entries are placed into a raffle and there'll be one name drawn during the Friday morning announcements. You must be present. So, what this means is, is that if you enter the raffle on today and say you win this afternoon, because you entered that one, and you did that survey, but you filled out all the surveys you didn't, you are a non-winner for all those other events, so you would be eligible for the consolation prize. So, you fill out the consolation prize survey and the consolation prize is an iPod Shuffle. So to take a look at the prize pyramid, for answering all these surveys, go out to the Cyber Café. and good luck to all. Help desks: Besides the registration services and billing help desk, we've added a new one -- an Advisory Council information desk. It will be managed -- manned Wednesday and Thursday during the breaks -- morning and afternoon breaks -- and also during the lunch hour. There will be at least two Advisory Council members there. It's a good chance for you to meet up with the Advisory Council and just get to know them. They are there to help you. Also because this is an election meeting, we have an election help desk as well at the Cyber Café. Ours are as appointed billing will do theirs via, appointment only. Please complete the meeting survey and we have a raffle prize for completing this survey as well. One entry per person, and so one lucky winner of a four gigabyte iPod Nano with video screen, and one lucky winner of a four-port broadband VPN Router, which is added on as courtesy of Shaw Communications. So, we actually have two lucky winners. Well, thank you Shaw for donating that. (Applause)

MR. PLZAK: And tonight, Los Amigos Roundup is a social. It's a ranch on the Sandia Indian reservation. We have food and beverage. It's a buffet dinner, open bar, and for entertainment we have DJ and dance groups. We've got a bonfire; we've got some sand volleyball. For those of you at the ARIN meeting in Orlando, you can remember playing volleyball in the sand there, so you get a chance to do a reprise in the desert sands of New Mexico. And also, if you weren't here for the balloon festival, this is your opportunity to go on a tethered hot air balloon ride. Bring your camera along; you will be able to get some very, very good pictures. So, please join us tonight and more information will be forthcoming during the day, as far as what goes on. And here's a rules reminder. At this point I'd like to turn it over to the chair for a brief discussion of the rules.

MR. CURRAN: Thank you, Ray. Ah, I see these pretty pictures. I'm going to guess each one has a meaning. Next slide?

MR. PLZAK: No, that's it.

MR. CURRAN: That's it? (Laughter)

MR. CURRAN: Well, I guess not. (Laughter)

MR. CURRAN: Well, I will try to translate the rules. We conduct the business under Robert's Rules of Order and what that means is that for each one of these, you are to keep your comments germane to the topic at hand. You address your comments to the entire -- myself, or the entire membership, there's no personal attacks on each other. You are to, you know, use the microphones, identify yourself when you are the microphones. Please recognize the fact that I will maintain decorum. Please limit your comments on the matter to a short period of time -- 3 minutes is our standing rule for comments on a policy proposal. If you need to respond later, you can get back up to the microphones and respond later, but we have a number of policy proposals out there and those policy proposals all need to have adequate discussion. Additionally, when you approach the microphones, in addition to giving your name and your affiliation, or organization, please state whether you are in favor or opposed to the policy proposal. This is important information. Again, all of this gets to the Board and the Advisory Council and lets us understand where the membership feels about a given policy proposal. I ask that everyone respect these rules and will maintain decorum. If necessary, if I ask you to step down from the microphone, please move briskly. That's it, thank you.

MR. PLZAK: Thank you, John. So, let's get our kicks on Route 66, and on to ARIN XX. Welcome to Albuquerque. At this time I would like to turn the microphone over to the general counsel for a brief report. He's got about 4 or 5 minutes, which I think he is used to, having been in court a few times.

MR. RYAN: Thank you, and good morning. Couple of things -- first of all, the name of our institution, ARIN, is trademarked and recently ARIN filed its first ever affirmative litigation. We filed a pretty serious lawsuit for trademark infringement and other violations of law to recover our name. I'm very pleased to tell you that the domain name arin.com is back in the family. We've always been arin.net and someone had set up a WHOIS related business at arin.com and we have now successfully recovered that and voluntarily dismissed the lawsuit as a result of that. So, I want to sort of say to people who are cyber-squatting on our name, we're coming for you. There is a series of people out there who are using the ARIN name inappropriately and this was the first and perhaps the most important of those activities to recover our name. Second, you may have noticed a modest, small issue on the mailing list that we proposed a Legacy RSA and I know that that's creating some heat and light. Let me just say that on Friday morning, in the open policy time, people will get to express their opinions to each of you about the terms of the Legacy RSA and the thought about it. But let me say where -- where we are on this issue. We have an RSA. I think we are on RSA Version 9, if I'm correct that over time has changed and morphed, but is our standard RSA. And so, as an organization we have almost 12,000 contracts with members of the community -- sometimes, we have multiple contacts with one company. So, the registration services agreement changes and morphs over time. This is a different document. If you lay the two documents side-by-side, if you take the current RSA or even an earlier version of the RSA and lay it side-by-side with the Legacy RSA you'll see very quickly that the terms are quite different. And that's because the terms under which we're seeking to have Legacy holders decide to stabilize contractually through an RSA their relationship with ARIN is laid out there. And the Board is doing something here that we have not done with the RSA. Normally you don't ask people how they would like to contract with you. You don't, you know, debate that. You have to write a contract and an agreement that's based on the policies of the organization. In this particular case with the Legacy RSA, we have announced this -- almost, if you will, in Washington-speak -- and I'm a Washington lawyer -- almost like an administrative procedure act rulemaking, where we've shown you what the intention of the body is, but we're eliciting comments from people. So, those comments that are made either to me indirectly, in other words, I'm open for business for the next three days to meet with people who'd like to talk with someone about it and I'll be sitting either, here in the back row -- if I get here early enough I get the back row, this morning I was late I got the front row -- I invite you to talk to me, I invite you to talk to other board members, I invite you to write to the list and let's see how good a product we can come up with that meets both the needs of the community and of the Legacy address holders. With regards to the content of the Legacy RSA, I think its best left for you to read. Don't necessarily -- there maybe other lawyers in this room but I'm the lawyer who can tell you what the intent of the document is and can work with you on that. So, on the Legacy RSA, look forward to working with those of you who have strong opinions about that. Let me say that we're seeking Legacy RSA holders who are in this service region. If you read that it's not the worldwide Legacy address RSA, you know, based on our experience, may be one of the RIRs will want to do something, it could be very different than what we do, but basically we're looking for people within our own service region. So if there are any questions that's my current legal report, let me just add one final note. In the Montreal meeting, we were sued by someone for $45 million in an antitrust violation and I was able to report to you at subsequent meetings that we had achieved a dismissal of that case. I can now tell you that that case has been dismissed at the court of appeals. The matter is over. ARIN prevailed in that matter. I am very, very pleased with that result. So, while we're not in the business of law suits, we will respond to any aggressive legal action against us, as you would expect, as a fiduciary of the community's activity in this area. I'll take any questions quickly. When I say I'll take questions, I'm not asking if you -- you hate the Legacy RSA wait till Friday. If you want to ask a question about it you're more than permitted to ask a question about it. And I will rule whether your thing is a question or an opinion. (Laughter)

MR. RYAN: Thank you.

MR. CURRAN: Microphones are open.

MR. RYAN: Thank you very much. (Applause)

NRO NC Election - Candidate Speeches

MR. PLZAK: Okay, so on to the first order of business on the agenda, which is the NRO NC election -- the Number Resource Organization, Number Council elections. And we've got one open seat. It's a 3-year term, will begin on 1st of January, 2008. Who can vote? It's all registered ARIN XX attendees and the voting period is open today, from 9:00 to 5:00 Eastern Time, which means it's from 7:00 this morning to 3 o'clock this afternoon, local time. The election headquarters is online, as all of our elections, is done electronically. So, the election headquarters has a voting booth, has the candidate biographies, and has statements of support. So, here are the candidates. Vikas is the only one that is not here to present a statement, the other four are here and now I'll be calling them up in alphabetical order. And so, let's start with the candidate biographies. First is Andrew Dul. Here is a statement of motivation and his short biography. I am not going to read it to you because Andrew will be coming up here to talk to you. So Andrew, if you're in the room, please come up, you have about 3 minutes.

MR. DUL: Good morning everyone, welcome to Albuquerque as well. As many of you know, I have been an active member in the ARIN community for -- I had to look back at my calendar because someone asked me this question earlier in the week -- over 7 years now. And it's been a privilege to be working with everyone here in the room to create this community that I think is really valuable and we are changing the way that, you know, not only that Internet as governance works, if you want to use that term, but also the way that Internet community cooperates together. So, just a few brief comments about myself and why I'd like to serve on the NRO NC. As many of you know, I have in the past served on the ARIN Advisory Council. I think that's a good experience base that allows me to take that also into the bridge between the RIRs and ICANN, which is what the NRO NC is. I believe I have a balanced experience. In the past, I have represented not only a service provider, a large enterprise, but I currently represent a rather small enterprise. So, a balanced background I think is important to represent all members of the ARIN region in this global forum. The most important thing that I'd like to say is that global cooperation in the next couple of years is going to be extremely critical. With IPv6 coming -- coming to its time of -- it's got to come or something else is going to happen, we need to really think about what the global impacts are of our policies, not only the global policies, but, the globally coordinated policies as we've been talking about recently. How those will impact not only our businesses, but the routing table as well as the financial impacts of what would happen if we aren't able to provide number resources appropriately to individuals and organizations that need to operate in the Internet space. And last the -- the IPv6 transition is going to be a very challenging one for a number of reasons, and I'd like to take the analogy of a large multi-variable equation and try to figure out -- solve what the answer is and I think that that's what we're facing is a large matrix of many decisions. And unfortunately, I think, what will end up happening is we will have to choose a path and drive down that path and have to deal with the consequences of that decision as they come on, because at this point I think we are continually spinning our wheels, trying to solve this equation that may not be solvable without moving down the road and moving toward deployment. So, I'd appreciate your vote and most of all, take the opportunity to express your opinion in voting. Thank you very much.

MR. PLZAK: Thank you, Andrew. As I said, Vikas is not here. His motivation to serve is stated here. He says, "My primary objective would be give back to the Internet community. Currently I'm involved with ARIN as a customer who would like to contribute more by supporting and executing the NRO NC's objectives." His brief biography -- he is currently director of engineering Wireless, Covad Communications. Previously he was a director of Internet engineering and a founding team member of NextWeb. He is responsible for architecting one of the nation's largest pre-WIMAX networks during the period 2000 to 2006. And he has more than 10 years of experience in the Internet wireless industry. And unfortunately he could not be here with us today, but I will say this, you should not count that against him. He has -- his statements are here as I said. Next is Jason Schiller. Jason, if you are here? And you see Jason carrying up his laptop. He is not giving you a Power Point presentation, that's -- it's his notes; and he also has about three minutes.

MR. SCHILLER: Good morning, my name is Jason Schiller. I'm a senior Internet network engineer for Verizon Business; formerly UUNET and I have had a lot of industry involvement. I have been an active participant in the ARIN public policy process. I read PPML, I've proposed policy. I've studied the problems of IPv6 multihoming and routing table scale concerns and I have given a number of presentations at NANOG as well as GROW on this topic. I've been involved in IETF, a number of working groups and am a member of the Routing and Addressing Directorate. And we're tasked at examining the routing table problem and solutions base. I also have experience ranging from enterprise LAN, enterprise WAN, all the way up to carrier grade ISP. As an engineer, I have a strong technical background, and you can see this from some of the projects I've completed, such as re-architecting our BGP topology in each of our continental networks. I have architected and designed our IPv6 network, our Latin American network, and our multicast network and also set routing policy standards. The reason why I want to run is, because, I think there a number of important issues surrounding IPv4 exhaustion and IPv6 adoption that we need to solve. Issues like should we have a soft landing or should it be business as usual? Should we attempt to engineer an equitable run out? Should we give all the RIRs the same amount of space or should we give them a amount of space that's roughly the same amount of time of allocations and assignments? Should RIRs give out smaller fragments once large blocks are no longer available and what's the impact on the routing system? And should we try to extend the life of IPv4 by trying to make it more difficult to get the addresses, or does by making it more difficult to get the addresses cause a premature exhaustion, as networks find they can't get v4 addresses, even though they are still available? I understand these issues. I understand the tradeoffs. I understand the technical implications of these decisions. As such I am well suited to act as an information conduit between the community, the ASO AC, the NRO NC, and to coordinate with the other RIRs. I can process global policy proposals and maintain the open process and I'm well-suited to advise the ICANN Board Members on a number of resources as I understand the technical implications of these decisions. I wanted to thank you again for your time and your consideration and please do vote. (Applause)

MR. PLZAK: Thank you Jason. Now I would like to call on Michael Smith. Ah, there he is. And you've got about three minutes, Michael.

MR. SMITH: Good morning everyone. I'm Mike Smith, as you can see; I'm the CTO of Adhost Internet. We're actually a colocation and hosting company in Seattle. We don't host ads, we don't host spam, we don't host porn, but the name dates from 1995, when you had to be first in the phonebook, so that's why we're Adhost. I could stand up here for three minutes and just say IPv6 over and over again. That's kind of what my focus is. Adhost is actually in the global routing table with our /32 and I think the next three years are going to be critical for implementation and understanding about the IPv6 in the community. My focus is mostly on the smaller providers -- enterprises and users who don't really have an understanding of what they are going to need to do, to be able to implement IPv6 and what they are going to do when IPv4 runs out; and that's really all I have. I thank you very much. (Applause)

MR. PLZAK: Thank you, Michael. And Sam Weiler; Sam, and you have about three minutes as well.

MR. WEILER: Good morning. Some of you may have seen Steve Ryan talk yesterday morning, talking about threats to the model of Internet governance that we're currently using. I think that the NRO is going to have a much broader role in the next few years than it has recently -- largely, in explaining that to the world and making the case that what we're doing here is not only a credible and adequate way of doing what we are doing but is in fact superior to what some people are proposing. I think I'll bring a different voice to that process than one that we often get in this forum. Most of my career has been spent working for end-users of address space, particularly Legacy address space, not for carrier class networks. And those of you who have followed what I have been doing in ARIN and in ICANN the last five years, may have noticed that I have particular passion for making sure that those voices -- those smaller voices aren't lost to those of the big players, to the PTTs and to the carriers. If elected, you can count on me to continue to be an active participant in this world. I have been active in the IETF for over ten years, I've been active in the ICANN and the RIRs for about five years. I would very much appreciate your vote. (Applause)

MR. PLZAK: Thank you Sam. So, a little exercise. If you are not a member of an RIR staff and that's all the RIR staffs, I would ask you to please stand?

SPEAKER: Including the head table?

MR. PLZAK: No, the head table doesn't count. They can still stay down.

SPEAKER: Good.

MR. PLZAK: Okay, now why would I have you do this? Because, who can vote? (Laughter)

MR. PLZAK: You can. So please do so. Thank you. Voting procedures are three easy steps, you can find them at election headquarters at this URL or if you want to talk to someone, Erika will be manning the Election Help Desk in the Cyber Café. So, very simple, you register or log in, you vote only once, only for one person, and you confirm your vote; one, two, three. So, again a reminder, the polls are open and they will close at 3:00 'o clock p.m. local time. So, I'm not going to go through this -- the instructions are on the website, and Erika can provide clarification. There are handouts that also describe this. And as I said the handouts in your meeting folder, please take time to read it. But above all please vote. And again, go to the election Help Desk if you have questions. And with that I'll say, thank you. Okay, now, let's move on to the next item of the agenda. First of all, there is -- anybody have any questions bout the election procedures at all?

Regional PDP Report

MR. PLZAK: Okay, so the next item on the agenda is the Regional Policy Development Process Report, and now it will be presented by Einar.

MR. BOHLIN: Good morning, my name is Einar Bohlin, I'm the policy analyst at ARIN. And this is the regional policy report. It's essentially -- policy and proposal activity at the other RIRs since the last ARIN meeting. And before I start, I want to mention that every RIR has a PDP, and they are very similar, in that they have fundamental core components of posting to a list for discussion, presentation at a meeting, consensus evaluation, last call, ratification and adoption. So, on the following slides, I've got status of the proposals and that kind of tells you where they are at in the PDP for the region -- that will be indicated. All right, the first category of proposal is IPv4 and the first proposal here is the end policy for IANA IPv4 allocations to RIRs. And it's a global proposal, and of course it's going to be discussed here -- at the ARIN meeting. And essentially this one is to reserve the last 5/8s at the IANA, and when the IANA is -- has run out of /8s to issue one of those to each of the RIRs. And the second proposal here is very similar and it would reserve 10/8s and when the IANA pool has run out issue two to each of the RIRs. More v4 discussion, the first one there is IPv4 address transfers and this is the -- in the APNIC region, this would allow members to transfer address space from one member to another. And it was presented at the recent APNIC meeting and it's going back to the list for more discussion. The second one is IP assignment sizes for end- users and it would establish that /24 is the minimum prefix size for multi-homed customers. The third item here is 12 month allocation period. We have that on our agenda this week as well. And that policy is for allocations to ISP's and it's going to be adopted in those three regions. The eGLOP in LACNIC region is back on the list for more discussion. And this one is kind of complicated and directing that resource assignments to end-users. The RIPE, NCC does not issue assignments directly to end- users, they have to go through a member LIR. So, when an end-user switches LIRs there is sometime some confusion about the relationship between the end-user and RIPE -- well, actually there isn't one yet, so this would establish that relationship. In v6 discussions, we move our requirement to announce a single block. In the LACNIC region of proposal was submitted that would -- that would allow ISP's to receive allocations to pull it up and announce subnets of their v6 prefix. It was presented at the last meeting and it's going back -- it went back to list for more discussion. And end sites can request allocations. What this means is that in the current IPv6 criteria, you have to be an LIR or ISP and not be an end site. And in the LACNIC and RIPE region they have removed the requirement that you not be an end site, so that you can go to those RIRs and request an allocation, if you are -- for example at University or something like that. At the bottom of slide here, a manned IPv6 assignment and utilization requirements. Of course here in the ARIN region we have adopted and implemented this policy. Basically utilization for a v6 bases based on the.94 HD-Ratio, and the issuances of -- or the assignment of /56 is to customers. And in the different -- at the RIR listed, it's going out slightly different way. In the AfriNIC region they have adopted the change to the HD-Ratio, but there is still this assigning /48s. APNIC adopted similar proposals -- similar policy that ARIN has. LACNIC is also going with the.94 HD- Ratio, and the RIPE region, this is fairly close to adoption, it's in the -- it's in the -- it's finished last call and it's in the ratification process. Lot of v6 discussions, IPv6 has been adopted in AfriNIC and APNIC, and it's been discussed at LACNIC and RIPE. That's /48 directly from the RIR to the end-user. Removal of plan to assign 200 /48s, this is also on our agenda this week. When the AfriNIC -- when AfriNIC was created they adopted a basic v6 policy set, and when they worked on that set, they removed this piece. So AfriNIC has never had this as the part of their initial criteria. It's been adopted in the RIPE and LACNIC region, and it wasn't presented at APNIC, I think it's still under discussion. Second IPv6 allocations, /32 to do something bigger, this is -- if you are an ISP and you went to the RIR or to LACNIC and got a /32, perhaps a couple of years ago, and to test it out and use it -- see what v6 was about. Well, if you are large ISP and you actually discover that you want or need more than a /32, you can go back and exchange a 32 and request something larger. It's kind of mulligan proposal. Removal of in term status is under review at LACNIC, a ULA-central is kind of still being discussed. This is the one where half the ULA space is pretty close to being unique. This ULA central is actually unique, /48 space. Of course there is the global proposal for assigning ASNs from the IANA to RIRs. It was adopted in the RIPE region, it's in last call in AfriNIC and APNIC, and it's close to being adopted in LACNIC and it's on the agenda in a few minutes actually. AfriNIC is modifying their policy development process. They are talking about adding a moderator group, which is kind of a small AC. It would act much as -- much like the ARIN Advisory Council in evaluating consensus. And finally this is -- the point and this is to make you aware what's going on outside the ARIN region. This document -- this is the -- the RIR comparative policy overview is reference document. And essentially what it is updated approximately quarterly by the NRO secretariat. And if you are interested for example and what the IPv6 initial allocation policy is for the different -- the five different RIRs, you can go to this document, look at the v6 initial allocations criteria and it's got all five listed right there. It's got v4 policy, ASN policy et cetera. Here are references links for -- where proposals can be found at the different at the RIRs. Thank you. (Applause)

MR. PLZAK: Okay, as I mentioned during the opening remarks, we have members here from all of the other four RIRs. Does anyone have any questions regarding the policy discussions in the other regions -- you would like some clarifications or would like to comment on at this time, because I'm sure that they would be more than happy to address them with you? Ah, we have a person.

MS. LYNCH: Not a question for the other RIRs, but -- Lucy Lynch, Internet Society -- the presentation that was just given the scorecard, will that presentation be available somewhere? It's not upon the website?

MR. PLZAK: It should be up on the website shortly, if its not there already.

MS. LYNCH: Okay, thanks.

MR. PLZAK: And by the way -- I wouldn't necessarily call it a scorecard as much as I would call it a summary.

MS. LYNCH: Snapshot whatever, it was a very useful presentation and I might take that -- thanks.

MR. PLZAK: Okay. For the information of the all the first timers, this is a regular feature of all ARIN meetings, and the fact that occurs very early in the public policy meeting, in the first morning about the same time as it did -- in the agenda suggested now. Comment please? Oh, its just adjusting microphone. (Laughter)

MR. PLZAK: Okay, anybody else? Okay. As another reminder the other RIR staffs are here and feel free to engage in a conversation in the hallway, in the break, Cyber Café. or at the social, or in the bar, you know, I'm sure if you buy them a few drinks, they will tell you a lot. So, anyway how much of that has to do with Public Policy, I don't know. (Laughter)

Internet Number Resource Status Report

MR. PLZAK: Okay, next we are going to give another one of the reports, which is The Internet Number Resources Status Report. This will be done by Leslie Nobile, Director of Registration Services. Leslie?

MS. NOBILE: Thanks, good morning everyone. Okay, operating this thing, okay. This is the NRO Joint Stats Report. This is -- the statistics of all five of the Regional Internet Registries, in a side-by-side format for comparison purposes. Excuse me -- it's updated four times a year, this was updated recently 30th September, so it's recent data. So, this is the IPv4 address space, the distribution of the IPv4 address space that is 256/8s as you know. I'm going to start at the bottom with the central registry that is the pre-RIR space, the earlier registries the SRI NIC, DDN NIC. Most of the Legacy space resides within that block. And it is global space, it's registered all over the world, but much of it does reside within the ARIN region, particularly the U.S. because of the early growth of the internet here in the U.S. There are 44 /8s left for IANA to reserve to -- I think -- sorry, reserved for the RIRs to issue to their customers. There is about -- let's see 32 -- 36/8s held in special use by the IETF and IANA. And then if you look at the top of this circle of the pie, we start with AfriNIC, go down to RIPE NCC, that is the /8 space that has been issued by IANA to RIRs. We are -- some are still issuing from that space, it's all our historical allocations from IANA, including space for issuing from IANA. So this goes back to 1999 that is about as much as we could fit. So, from 1999 to 2000 we have tracked the growth of v4 allocations. From the RIRs to their ISP customers, this is only ISPs and LIRs, this does not include end-user assignments. If we were to add end-user assignment the charts -- the difference in the charts would be negligible, there are not a lot of assignments being made. So, it's basically up and down but the thing that we do see is that in the recent years IPv4 allocations are growing in all five of the regions, particularly in the APNIC region. In fact I meant to mention earlier in the first slide that this year so far IANA has issued 7/8s to the RIRs. APNIC have 5 of them, LACNIC got 2 and RIPE got 2 so far this year. So this is just another way of looking at the first slide, it's just the cumulative total over the last nine years of the /8 space that we are issuing to our customers to our ISP customers. And as you can see for the first time -- actually, this is probably the second time, APNIC and RIPE actually have cumulatively issued more space than the other three RIRs. This is ASN assignments, again growth trends up and down. Really there was a lot of growth in the ARIN region earlier on, but that has leveled off in recent years. And actually I have to tell you that this title is incorrect and I have been meaning to correct it, and I haven't. This is ASN assignments to all customers. This includes our end-user customers as well. ARIN issues quite a few ASNs to end-user customers. So this is to all of our customers based. As it's leveled off in the ARIN region it seems to be growing in the RIPE region, they are issuing more ASNs over the last several years. Cumulative total seems slight, but just cumulatively over the last 9 years. ARIN has issued most of the ASNs, but RIPE is catching up quickly, as you can see. V6 allocations -- again this is a crazy slide -- we started issuing v6 in 1999. There was some steady growth in other regions over the years. But then it started going up and down and all over the place -- the one thing that's clear is the RIPE region is issuing most of the IPv6 address space at this point in time. Over the last year that you will see, 2007 ARIN has issued quite a few v6 allocations; this is only on v6 allocations. We also have an end-user policy, end-user assignments, v6 end-user assignments are we are issuing quite a few of these as well, although it's not on this slide. And cumulative totals again you see RIPE has issued most of the v6 space within their region at this point in time. Although APNIC -- actually all the regions are growing are well, issuing more and more. This is just the links to the RIR statistics, and the RIR status is on the NRO websites and the RIR websites. And then the raw data can be had at the ICANN and IANA websites. So, if you are interested in tracking in any of these that where it is. And I have nothing else. Are there any questions? No? Okay, thank you.

MR. PLZAK: Thank you. (Applause)

MR. PLZAK: Regarding that report -- that report is given at ARIN -- even ARIN meeting and actually it's given out at every RIR meeting. And portions of that or perhaps most of that is also given at every ICANN meeting to the ICANN Board during the ASO report. And lot of people just gloss over that and look at it, but they actually -- if you haven't really been -- been paying attention to it, you really should because, that is where the real issues of upcoming events is really located. And so the statistics are available. The RIRs do on a daily basis update their statistics regarding the allocation of a number of resources for that day. And there are a few researchers that have surfaced that use of statistics quite regularly, but feel free to use them to do whatever analysis that you may wish to do so, as you are going forward. So, it's very important fuel if you will for discussions -- is based upon these numbers.

2007-19: IANA Policy for Allocation of ASN Blocks to RIRs

MR. PLZAK: So with that we are now up to policy proposal 2007-19. It is the IANA Policy for Allocation of ASN Blocks to RIRs. This is a global policy proposal, which means that all five RIRs have got to ratify or adopt it. And then basically what they are doing by their adoption of these policies is making a recommendation to the ICANN Board will be made to via the executive committee of the NRO to the Address Council of the ASO then to the ICANN -- one to the ICANN Board that has become a global policy. So, a little bit of background on it. It was introduced on the PPML on the 25th of July this year. And the Executive Council -- excuse me, the Advisory Council, deemed it or designated a formal proposal on the 28th August of this year. This is the first public policy meeting discussion of it. The text of it has not been revised. The proposal text is in your meeting packet and it is also at the URL shown on the screen. Brief description: ARIN staff understands that this proposal, with great policy for IANA and RIRs regarding all the allocations of Autonomous System Numbers. Block size is 1,024, allocations for a 12-month need until 31st December, 2009 allocations are 2-byte and 4-byte blocks are separate. The RIRs will request additional ASNs when either at 80 percent or less than 2 months need. The shepherds for this proposal are Dan and Heather. Basically, there have been two posts by one person. Nobody was for it or against it -- and there have been no discussions of this proposal, as a formal proposal on the list. However, prior to the formal proposal there were four post by -- being designated for another -- four posts by four people with two of those four being in favor of it. And so from a legal perspective, Counsel has no legal concerns regarding this policy. Counsel believes policies allocating resources based on usage and need are consistent with the operating philosophy of the RIR community. Other policy proposal inconsistent with this philosophy should be subject to greater scrutiny and this was rendered in October of this year. Staff comments, first of all, the additional allocation section indicates an RIR can receive an additional ASN allocation when the RIR has assigned or allocated 80 percent of the previously received ASN block. After December 31, 2009 there will be no distinction between 2-byte AS numbers, and 4-byte AS numbers as a -- per policy. Those that previously received ASN block literally mean the most recent ASN block even if it was a 2-byte only block or does it mean 80 percent above the most recent 4-byte block and the most recent 2-byte block. If it's the latter one would -- if it's the latter, one ASN block would never be audited since it would be never be the most recent ASN block allocated. And this would be inserted into Section 10 of the NRPM. And from an assessment of implementation: Staff usage is minimal, we could do it 30 to 90 days after the Board of Trustees ratifies it. Actually, it would actually be after the ICANN Board of Directors ratifies it assuming there is been no change to this language, okay? The implementation requirements would be a guideline change in some staff training. And so now I would like to call on Axel Pawlik to present the proposal, and then we will have a discussion, but by the Chair. Axel? (Discussion off the record)

MR. PAWLIK: Good morning, everybody. I got up very early this morning and I switched this presentation from I think APNIC to ARIN and I found the wrong number and now we have the right number there 2007-19. This is a very boring proposal, it's -- (Laughter)

MR. PAWLIK: -- it's a government policy though so -- per definition that is very important. For the first time, I think, you see this very nice slide that basically lays out how global proposals go. They go through regional communities and if they get adopted in all the regional communities than the NRO Executive Council tosses it over the fence to the Address Council. The Address Council verifies that it has been going properly through all other regions, and everybody who has an interest, or stakeholders could have said something about it. And if the Address Council finds it okay, then they toss it over the next fence to the ICANN Board and the ICANN Board would hopefully adopt it. So, that's the plan. I've proposed this in all of the other four RIRs regions. Normally the RIR staff don't have any role in policy proposals. However, we think this is a gap that needs to be filled just so it's basically good housekeeping in bringing this forward. There is no problem we do --we do receive end blocks as you know. There is a documented policy, we have that for v4 and v6 and this is, you know, something we just want to have on the records -- easy enough. You've heard about the proposal, basically it is about giving the RIRs 1,024 ASNs per block to give them when we have -- yeah, that's a good point actually from staff here. When we have assigned or allocated 80 percent of the previous to receive ASN blocks -- and I'm adding the "s" here I think that makes sense -- basically would get as many blocks as we need for 12 months and 4-byte and 2-byte blocks ASN blocks to be treated 57 separately. When we started this great road show of presenting this, we looked at the statistics at the RIPE NCC. We saw that at the time a block would last one block of 1,024, as hence would lasts about half a year, just I know that. So, we would get as RIPE NCC at that time two blocks per request. A new request we would get when 20 percent would be left to be assigned. The last interaction we had with IANA on ASNs, took place within two hours so I think two months time an ample buffer there -- that's great. We did make a very small modification and to be totally truthful I'm not quite sure whether that is included in the ARIN draft here. Basically we said the RIRs should assign or allocate -- 80 percent should have assigned or allocated 80 percent of the previously received blocks. That gives a chance to APNIC basically to allocate blocks to the IANA -- straightforward.

SPEAKER: Questions.

MR. CURRAN: Microphones -- microphones are open at this time. Any comments on the policy proposal? Microphones are open.

MR. PAWLIK: Thank you.

MR. CURRAN: Thank you, Axel. (Applause) (Discussion off the record)

MR. CURRAN: Good morning. As I said the discussion and the presentation and the mailing list all go as input to the IANA Address Council, so that they can do their job of making informed recommendations for policy. The microphones remain open on this particular proposal. If any one would like to speak to it -- Okay, seeing no further conversations, I'm actually going to do what we call a show of hands, which is the process by which we gauge the feeling of the room on this particular policy proposal. So, I'm going to ask the question in two pieces, I'm first going to ask for everyone in favor to raise their hands, and then I'm going to ask for everyone opposed to raise their hands. So, on the matter of policy proposal 2007-19 IANA Policy for Allocation of ASN Blocks to RIRs, all those in favor of this policy proposal please raise your hand now. Nice and high. Keep your hands up, we get better at this as we go along, but -- okay, we have a count, thank you. All those opposed to advancing policy proposal 2007-19, IANA Policy for Allocation of ASN Blocks to RIRs, please raise your hand now. All those opposed? Thank you, okay, I'm waiting for the count. Okay, on the matter of policy proposal 2007-19, total number of people in the room is identified to be 168, number in favor 87, number against 0. Thank you for participating. (Applause)

MR. PLZAK: This information will be provided to the Advisory Council and they will be using it as part of their determination of consensus on this.

RIR Update - AfriNIC

MR. PLZAK:Next step is the first of the RIR updates and that's going to be presented by Ernest from AfriNIC. Ernest, are you here? Ah, there he is. (Pause)

MR. BYARUHANGA:: Good morning. My name is Ernest, and I'll give you a brief update about AfriNIC and our recent activities. We briefly look at the membership -- membership growth and resource allocation growth, then briefly talk about our IPv6 campaigns, and related membership fees. And then I look at my AfriNIC, which is a new membership where best both of our members to manage their allocations and other registration information. Then we shall look at briefly the policies that we've implemented recently in our region and those that are under discussion. And a brief update about recent public policy meetings and the upcoming ones. This is an overview of the total growth in membership from the time we've started our RIR operations in 2005. And as you can see from about 2005 to now, we have approximately more than 300 members. That's excluding the legacy members that were brought over from the RIRs, who do not pay us any membership fees and any service fees. So, the membership has been steadily on the increase ever since we started our servicing in that region. The increase in membership has also resulted, of course, in a steady increase in number of resources allocated in the community. And as you can see these slide shows a four-year comparison of the total IPv4 addresses that we've been allocating in that region. And as you can see from the time we started operations in about 2005 up to 2007, the trend of IPv4 allocation, there has been about four times, the total number has been allocated in 2007 compared to 2005. So, this clearly shows the impact that's AfriNIC has had in the penetration of the Internet in the region. And next we look at the IPv6 campaign, and of course, noting that the AfriNIC Board has realized that the IPv4 exhaustion is biting hard, and has definitely been think about it. And in view of that, it took a resolution, which rates that noting the eminent exhaustion of the available pool of IPv4 address space, the AfriNIC budges off that efforts to draw the public's attention to the problem and potential solutions such as IPv6 should be intensified and instructs the staff to take appropriate actions in this regard. So, a few things were done for survival, the Board reviewed the schedule of IPv6 fees. I'll talk about that later in the coming slide. And we are forced to attend a few events about IPv6 like the InfoTech conference that was held in Mauritius in which we participated, and also gave a press conference about IPv6 and Ipv4 address exhaustion. And we also send an informative letter to all members on the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses, and on the importance of switching and implementing to IPv6. We also launched an IPv6 information page or portal. We've followed what LACNIC did, and I started something like that, although it's not yet fully informative, but it's online. And we are also planning to do more and IPv6 training in 2009, and the remained after 2008 to cover all the countries in our region. About the training, we've been doing more IPv6 and LIR, which is member training in our region, and I've covered many countries so far this year, including Nigeria, Tanzania, Ivory Coast, Angola, South Africa and other countries, and by the end of the year, we shall be looking at going to Algeria and Tunisia. I mentioned briefly about the changes in the IPv6 fees schedule, and the changes that the Board agreed on is that for already established LIRs, those are Local Internet Registry with IPv4 allocations. They are not bared any extra membership fees or service fees for any IPv6 address space that they hold. And for new members that want IPv6 addresses only, there's a 50 percent discount on the initial setup fee, and a 100 percent discount on the first year's membership fees. And also there is a tip at IPv6 membership fee schedule for IPv6 only members, that is 75, 50 and 25 percent discount on their membership fees for their first three subsequent years. Then we also had a memorandum of understanding with research and education networks in our region. And we decided that -- the Board decided that 50 percent of this signup fees for these -- such institutions be waived. That such institutions have to be not for profit education networks, and they must also plan to offer IPv6 services within the community. There is also an IPv6 -- sorry about that -- there's a new fee schedule that has been proposed by the Board, and has been sent out to the community and is awaiting comments right now. It's not yet implemented and I think if all goes well, it should be implemented sometime next year. This shows a growth in the IPv6 allocations in our region. And as you can see it's been steadily increasing, probably due to the awareness and campaigns that we've been doing in the community. And that map shows the areas in green where we've been -- we've been already, where we've done a IPv6 workshops. Next, we look at MyAfriNIC. MyAfriNIC is a portal, a Web-based portal that allows our members to easily interact with AfriNIC, and manage their registration related information. Some of their functions that are involved in this portal -- is managing of course the Internet number resources, v4, v6 as numbers. Our vast delegations are billing, contacts, new member registration, and many other functions that might be proposed from time to time by the community. So, we did a trial and final testing, and we launched it in our AfriNIC-7 meeting recently had in Durban. There was a live demonstration, and right now it is already active. Oh, next to look at the policies that we've recently implemented. IPv6 provider independent address assignments to end-sites upon critical infrastructure, was implemented. Then the change of the allocation and the assignment period or planning window from 24 to 12 months was also implemented. And the change of the IPv6 HD ratio from 0.80 to 0.94 was also implemented. These are the policies that were also presented at the AfriNIC-7 meeting that we recently had in Durban. And as already mentioned by IANA, this is already a repetition, but quickly go through them. The policy development process, there's a slight change in the policy development process where a moderator group is going to be introduced. This policy raised consensus. Then the global policy for AS number-block allocations from IANA to the RIRs, which Axel just presented a few minutes ago, was also presented by Axel also, at our meeting in Durban. And there was consensus on it. Then some few changes to a few clauses in the current IPv4 address allocation and assignment policy, which was presented by Jordie. The few suggestions that Jordie had made in this policy, were not accepted by the community. So the policy went back to the mailing list for further discussions. Then the global policy for allocation of the remaining IPv4 address space, a rich consensus although their value -- a few values for parameters for "N," that is the number of /8s was not quickly I grade upon. Then IPv6 we had (off mike) there and a discussion, and in the end, policy for NIPv4 allocations areas also under discussion. A brief update from the AfriNIC-7 meeting that was recently held, we have about -- we had about 150 people attending mainly from South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, and Santiago. A 22 percent rise is 14 percent Telcos, and 11 percent from government institutions. We had also a few policies -- a few things like the policy makers did and we had any intensive three-day IPv6 training. We normally have two days. Here of course, five policies are presented as mentioned earlier they reached consensus. One was presented only for discussion and informational purposes, and one didn't not reach consensus. Outcome -- yeah, the policy (off mike) reached consensus of course, and the policy makers did, there are many discussions, there were also lot of discussion, there was a wrong tempo, and it was agreed that to create more awareness in the Internet governance, the IGF and of course, there were few discussions around the IGF in Rio, and the community agreed in a few priorities that should be set by those for presenting AfriNIC or the IGF. And there was anti-spam working group, which was also setup, and of course, few other discussions around IPv6, and creating more awareness in the community around the deployment of IPv6. You are all come to our next public policy meeting which is going to be held in Morocco. That would be from May 31 to June 6 to be held back-to-back with the AFNOG. AFNOG is just like the equivalent NANOG, here, and we shall have an IPv6, in terms of training again. And there'll also the INET meeting and a few other meetings for some entities from that region. Thank you very much. If there are any questions, I'll be happy to take them.

MR. CURRAN: Any questions? Thank you. (Applause)

MR. PLZAK: Thank you Ernest. We are ahead of schedule. So we will take a break now. Please be back in here at about 25 minutes past 10 and then we will begin the first Panel of the morning which will be discussing IP markets. So please come back. (Recess)

Panel: "IP Markets?"

MR. PLZAK: We are on the first, probably -- excuse me -- the only panel discussion of this meeting which deals with a subject of IP markets. This is a panel that will be chaired by Paul Vixie. I will let Paul introduce the panel and take care of moderating, discussion, and so forth. So if those that are outside and standing could please cease their conversations and sit down it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. Paul, it is yours.

MR. VIXIE: Hello everyone, thank you for coming. We have an-hour-and-a-half, which according to my estimate, of the interest in this topic, might be way too little. It is not a fairly long panel, but looking at the PPML and the NANOG list and everywhere else that this gets discussed, it is clear that the interest in the topic is high. So we have quite a distinguished panel for you. Obviously, the owner John, he will be representing himself and his own views, rather than the shackles of representing the essence of the board today. And off goes the badge. Steve Ryan, being a lawyer, cannot shirk the shackles, he will be representing the essence of the board. Ben Edelman, a consultant to the board, will be trying to describe some of the economics. Steve Ryan will be talking about the law. John will be talking about John. And we also have Tony Li, thank you Tony.

SPEAKER: Paul, can you pretend to like the microphone a little bit more. We really can't hear you at the back.

MR. VIXIE: Sorry. We also have Tony Li from Cisco and other router vendors. He is here to talk about routing physics which, believe it or not, significantly underlie the question of IP markets. So my purpose with this panel will be to try to educate the community, get us all on the same page, give us a -- sort of a framework to debate within, kind of, in the hope that reasonable people cannot disagree about matters of fact, but also because we have some important decisions to make and we have made them with a lot of assertions and maybe even some personal comments, and that is getting us nowhere. And I would like to make those important decisions as and informed, and if possible collegial community. So before I turn it over to the panelists, so that they can each make a 10 to 15 minute opening statement, I want to tell you some things that I know. And I guess I will begin by saying what Randy said yesterday. Randy Bush said yesterday that we were not supposed to get here. The -- when the IPv4 address lifetime was noted to be finite back in the mid-'90s, and the top minds in the IETF community got together and sort of started thinking about what to do about it. What was in those top minds was very much that we should skate easily into the future, without a flag day without a period during which everybody had to upgrade to everything. And you know, the ideal would be that we would -- we would not use all of the IPv4 address space. So as I have watched various estimates of the address lifetime and I have watched the different ones converge and it is very clear to me. Everybody is pretty much planning on using the last address, every one of them is going to get put in play. I am assuming that, since there is a lot of capital represented behind those decisions, that there is some kind of planning for what you are going to do after you have used the last address. There may even be some competition, we have heard the term 'run on the bank' used to describe the, you know, how those last addresses will get handed out. So we were not supposed to reach that point. And a little bit of digging over on a website at Sun, I found a paper by Bob Briton. You know, you have to understand IPv6 was not the only proposal that was offered. There were a number of competing proposals from various people who each had, you know, some vision about how we could move into the future. And you can see it, kind of, like a beauty contest, where everybody got up there, and said, this is what I think we should do, isn't it great. And a choice was made by the IESG or I -- the -- whoever -- however these things work, and that choice was made on a certain basis, certain promises were made. That is a little bit like, not just a beauty contest but a political campaign. You know, I am going to pick the person who tells me I will have two chickens in every pot, kind of thing. So the winner of the beauty contest had this to say during the beauty contest. The key transition objective is to allow IPv6 and IPv4 hosts to interoperate. Let's get on to the -- transition mechanisms provide a number of features including incremental upgrade and deployment. Individual IPv4 hosts and routers may be upgraded to v6, one at a time without requiring any other host or routers to be upgraded at the same time. New IPv6 hosts and routers can be installed one by one. Low start-up costs addressing the structure that embeds technique for encapsulating header translation, finishes by saying the IPMG transition mechanisms ensure that v6 hosts can interoperate with v4 hosts anywhere in the Internet up until the time when v4 addresses run out. And allows v6 and v4 hosts within a limited scope to interoperate indefinitely after that. This feature protects the huge investment that users have made in v4 and ensures that v6 does not render v4 obsolete. Hosts that need only a limited connectivity range, for example, printers need never be upgraded to v6. Okay, you can understand why the people who are evaluating the contestants in those beauty contests looked at that and said, "Wow, if you can deliver that then you are the proposal we want." We don't have that. I don't think that we are going to get that. I don't think we ever could have had that. And I think that if the judges in the beauty contest had really looked at this premise and had sort of asked for a much deeper vision, a much more explicit vision about how this was all going to come to pass, they might have been able to determine that this was in the vein of an empty campaign promise. So that does not mean we get to go back and say, well v6 is a failure, let's think about something else. It does not mean that we -- that wishing will not make it so. We are stuck with v6 the way it is, we are going to move to it, in my opinion, we are going to run out of IPv4 addresses, we are going to live in a world where IANA has no more to hand out, but people still want them. So the topic of this panel is IP Markets? Some of the questions that have been bandied in every room of this meeting, and mainly last, and so forth are -- is a market in IP address space inevitable. And then somehow as if you could separate this next question from the first one, is it desirable. And it is easy to have a knee-jerk reaction and come you with what you think are the obvious answers to that. But it is a fairly deep topic, and given that it has its -- that the answers, in my opinion, have their roots in the law, economics, physics, and sort of history and culture. I found the four people best qualified in my opinion to represent those four ends of the spectrum. I guess, the format here will be that I am going to ask each of these guys to present for 10 minutes, hopefully not more than 15. I won't be brittle, but I will sort of give the hint rather than the hook if that's not going well. We should have about half an hour for Q and A at the end. I would ask you to hold your Q and A until all of the panelists have had a chance to give their opening remarks. And then I will get back up and moderate. I think we are going to start with John, then we'll do Ben, Tony and let the lawyer talk last. (Laughter)

MR. CURRAN: Could you -- going to do it from here or from the podium?

MR. VIXIE: Either way.

MR. CURRAN: I'll do it from here, I'm just a panelist. I actually agreed to be on this panel even though I really do try not to speak at member meetings on a particular topic, because the job of Chair can be confusing. The reason I agreed to be on this is because I am working on a whole bunch of assumptions and they effect how I do my job, what I end up recommending for ARIN, and I want to share those assumptions. And quite frankly this is an education process for me. I am trying to share these assumptions because some of them might be wrong and I know that there's a lot of people in the community here who can fix my faulty assumptions, okay. But I want to lay them on the table because I really haven't done that. Background, I have been doing this like a lot of people in the room, been doing this 1990 or so. And I actually get to sit on the IPMG gang along with Scott and some others who are also here. And I recognize as -- the campaign promise that we were charged with was a high one, and it was very difficult to achieve, and some would say impossible. So here is my working set of assumptions on legacy address space. The fact of the matter is that, as we all know, address space is just numbers that is all it is. And when the earliest work in the Internet protocol was being done, lots of people who participated got address assignments, they got them in a whole variety of manner in predecessor organizations to ARIN and the other RIRs for that matter. They got them because they needed them. And back then, by the way, we had a pretty simple way of assigning them, it was presider, so it was, class A, class B, class C, /8, /16, /24. Lots of those organizations were instrumental in making the Internet here a success, and I think that should be recognized and honored. By the same token, it is important to realize that there wasn't a lot of formulas back then. I was involved in some of this activity because of BBN. There was a wide range of very informal communication that ended up making address assignments happen. At this point, the community is looking at IPv4 and seeing that the generally available free pool will deplete at some point, okay. It is not the end of the world, but we are going to go into a different phase than we are operating today. This is causing a lot of attention to the legacy address space assignments. And in some ways that is appropriate. In the mid-'90s we realized that address space was going to be an issue, we instituted CIDER. And CIDER said, you don't get a class A, B, or C, you get a block appropriately sized for your need, your need and your foreseeable need. And some could say that is a change of policy, pretty significant one, you don't get a big block, you get a block that is sized based on need, it is a needs-based system. So when we made that change, some of that actually got institutionalized in some documents, RFC 2008/RFC 2050. When you look at 2050, there is a very interesting sentence at the back, there is a couple of sentences. And it basically says that the need from address block, needs to be ongoing if the -- you are going to continue to hold the address block. It says, if the requirements are no longer met, that assignment can be invalidated by the IANA. Now, the co-office of the 2050 -- actually some of them are here, but we don't have all of them with us anymore. And so the interesting statement to say if you don't have the need anymore, your block can be invalid, your block assignment can be invalidated and returned to the IANA. The way it works is the IANA is supposed to reclaim the block and then the RIR is supposed to see if they can find the holder and say, by the way, your block has been reclaimed. It is of interesting set of phrases at the back of 2050. I don't know whether or not we ever had a social contract that allowed those sentences to be enforced. Even the day they were written, and they went through many of the RIR communities, and they went through the IETF. I honestly don't know whether or not they were something that would be considered the will of the community. But there is a statement that is in 2050 that we all are supposed to honor, that says we are a needs-based system, and we continue to be a needs-based system. And any block is subject to that. So combine these facts, combine the fact that we're approaching the end of the free pool. Combine the fact that for quite some time, we've been on a needs-based assignment program. And then combine the fact that the legacy blocks were assigned based on need, but may not have been a best fit when they were assigned and may not still be in use. This has caused a lot of discussion. And I tell the discussion ranges everywhere from -- it's not ARIN's job to deal with this to, I'm going to meet outside at 10 o'clock at night with pitchforks and torches, please join me while we hunt down legacy holders. And that wide range of use may not be constructive for us. The -- we've asked legacy holders who aren't using their address space to return it. That's certainly compatible with this philosophy. If you don't have the need, you can voluntarily return it. In case, we haven't done it yet today, I'd like to point out Stanford renumbered out of their /8. Once again, I want to thank them for that. There are people who have turned in legacy address space. The reality is that we may not be able to persuade people -- people who have legacy blocks, who have them under use, that's wonderful. It's the folks who have legacy blocks and aren't making using of them at all, and as someone referred it to me the other day, have salted them away for the day when they have value, that's of interest to the community. That's of interest to the community because frankly we might want that address space back in use, in use being used for networking. I will try to keep my -- wrap up my comments briefly. I believe that ARIN needs to recognize that legacy address space holders have for one reason or another, a valid right to their block. They received an assignment, it's their assignment. Having said that, I think we need to facilitate a set of policies that encourage legacy block holders who wish to move their block to someone who can make better use of it. Now, we got to be very careful. I see Tony Li at the end of the table there, and he knows -- he's forgotten far more about routing than I ever knew. And there are huge implications, because when you facilitate getting legacy block holders who wish to put their block back to the community, when you actually make that happen, if you make a mistake, then you can create a lot of fragmentation, and a lot of churn, and a lot of routing issues. This panel is going to talk about some aspects of that, but I do not think that people should think that this is an easy topic. It is not an easy topic. There may be a way to get the 80 percent of the benefit for 20 percent of the cost. There may be a way to do it with respect to the legacy community. If we make a mistake, we alienate the legacy community who, quite frankly, just wants to be able to make sure their blocks are put to better use. There's no -- they're not trying to harm the community. We alienate the legacy community if we go too far on one side or we create a circumstance where potentially, we create runaway circumstances in the management of IPv4 space that we may not be able to control. So it's a very difficult problem. I think there are solutions out there. I think this panel will explore some of it. And that's my opening remarks.

MR. VIXIE: Thank you, John. Ben.

MR. EDELMAN: Thanks. Let me introduce myself briefly for those of you who I don't already know. I've met some of you in prior lives when working at ICANN meetings and otherwise. But I now find myself as a professor at Harvard Business School, largely studying market places, principally electronic market places, advertising marketplaces, travel marketplaces, the market for online trust certification verification, and here addressing, and incidentally, routing. These are great projects for me as an academic but also intensely useful. And with that in mind, I will try to give some comments intended to actually be useful in thinking through what an economist might be able to offer in this decision-making process. I've written down six goals that I think most of us share, maybe, all of us share, that would be great. And let me just go through them because then we can assess possible responses according to how well they serve these goals. Number 1 goal is preserving v4 availability for those who need it. If you contact ARIN and request a v4 address, it would be nice if there is something ARIN can do to help you other than tell you, sorry, we don't have any more of those. Just in terms of keeping the trains running for the many people who, quite reasonably and understandably, do depend on v4 availability right now, and realistically are going to want it to be available somehow, going into the future. Second, encouraging reclamation from those who don't need their v4 space or at least don't need all of what they have. And as John says, that could be, for example, because they are legacy address holders who received a larger block than they now need. In principle, it could be someone else who has more space than they need. For example, there could be some company that received an RSA block from ARIN, yet went out of business, that happens sometimes, it wouldn't be bad to see that space be reclaimed and put to use by someone who needs it. Number 3, facilitating migration to v6. We don't think we're going to be running v4, 50 years from now. And it would be nice if whatever policy we come to terms with is a policy that helps us get from here to there. Four, keeping routing feasible, certainly anything that breaks routing in a big way is a policy that wouldn't be of much use. And so we'd want to bear that in mind in whatever we do. Five, keeping WHOIS working and other ARIN services. Certainly, it's possible to imagine a black market of transfers that don't result in correct WHOIS data. That would be unfortunate, we'd like WHOIS to be accurate and that's quite a reasonable objective to have going forward. And number 6, final goal that I think most folks share, preventing a black market, generally, both because it would mean inaccurate WHOIS and for other problems that it might create. If you needed v4 space and bought it at a black market, you might find that what you thought you had bought wasn't really available to you. For example, the folks you had bought it from had sold it to several people or maybe didn't have it at all in the first place. All kinds of funny things could happen in the black market and it's hard to think that many ARIN constituents want to be subject to that kind of mess. A market that doesn't have those problems, a transfer system that doesn't have those problems surely would be preferable to one that does, leaving open exactly how the transfers would work or whether we'd want any transfers at all. So would paid transfers facilitate these objectives? Well, maybe, some more than others. There is certainly a tension as to some of them. Before I go through some of the specific tensions, let me just point out for those who are thinking of "markets" as being absolute bastions of capitalism with no rules whatsoever where people buy and sell /32s or /29s. You know, that's not quite what I have in mind, at least. I have in mind what I tend to call a paid transfer policy which would look a lot like the current transfer policy except that you could transfer to anyone, not just someone buying your whole company. And there would still be the same sorts of rules that would apply right now, both to new allocations and in principle, to transfers. For example, you'd need to show need, you'd need to show utilization of any blocks that you already have, you'd need to show a plan for utilization of the new block. There would be a minimum block size; the obvious default is to keep the minimum block size the same as the current minimum block size. We're talking about changing one policy, the transfer policy. That doesn't mean you'd have to change the minimum allocation size. We could change it up or down, but there's no reason why you'd need to change it at the same time as implementing a paid transfer policy. And we could add other requirements, too. For example, yesterday, RS on the AC very sensibly suggested a required holding period, that you shouldn't be able to sell off or transfer away addresses you just received. Because really, if you got some v4 space last week and now we see you transferring it away, it doesn't look like you made serious beneficial use of the v4 space. Looks like you are just in this for speculation, and it's not obvious that that's something we want to encourage. There are plenty of other commodities to speculate, and maybe, this isn't one where we want those folks. Separately, a required holding period as RS suggested, could prevent at least an acceleration of the race to the bank as we near exhaustion. There wouldn't be much point in asking for space you didn't need, just before exhaustion with the plan of selling it off a month after exhaustion, if it turned out you were going to be required to hold that space for two years or three years or some other period, by which point who is to say where prices of v4 might have gone. So that's just to say there are plenty of levers for adjusting a paid transfer policy to make it compatible with the reasonable policy objectives of the ARIN community. And just because there is one version of a paid transfer policy that we wouldn't like, that doesn't mean there is not some way to tweak it in order to make it accommodate the reasonable policy objectives that most of us seem to share. I've written down three specific concerns that I've heard repeatedly in talking about paid transfers and I wanted to just give some brief remarks on each of them. Number 1, as to the implication of paid transfers on routing, the natural worry is that paid transfers would be transfers of very small blocks and that the explosion of announcements of many very small blocks would lead to a massive growth of the routing table and a routing collapse or other serious routing problems. I think that's probably true if you allowed transfer of very small blocks. But one benefit of having a "white-market" rather than a gray-market or a black- market is that you no more have to allow transfers of small blocks than you currently allow initial allocations of small blocks. If it's not allowed, then it's not allowed. And so you wouldn't necessarily expect that such a policy would produce disproportionate growth or convex growth in the routing table. Now if we let the v4 Internet continue to grow, by finding more v4 space and allocating it out to operators, that will mean growth of the routing table, of course. But it's the same kind of growth we'd get if some big legacy operators happened to offer large /8s to ARIN, which would then be given out back to the community through the usual process. So some growth in the routing table, yes. But it's not clear that with a properly set minimum allocation size, that has to be an explosive growth. At least, not clear to me. We'll see what other people say. Number 2, that paid transfer policy for v4 addresses could delay transition to v6. If we keep v4 working too well, then, people won't move to v6. That's kind of an odd worry to me because if we found ourselves with 100 /8s in the IANA free pool rather than 46, I don't think we'd be sad about that. We'd be happy to hear that exhaustion is that much further away. But I do credit that we might need some Flag- Day-type event, or in any case, a big kick in the pants to get folks to realize, hey, it's time to do something about v6. And the more we soften that blow -- the more we soften that blow, the less likely it is that people will wake up one morning and say, gee, you know, it's very, very hard to get a v4 address and so I better move to v6. If it's only moderately hard, they might not feel the impetus to move to v6. So there is a real tension here, a tension between serving the communities' short run interests and having v4 available on easy terms that aren't to onerous, and the community's long-term interest in moving eventually towards v6. The final concern that I've heard, and I do take this one pretty seriously too, is a suggestion that a paid transfer policy could set an unfavorable precedent. If you can pay for the transfer of v4 space, does that mean you could pay for the transfer of v6 space? I think the answer there has to be affirmed, no, that we're implementing, we might implement --we discuss implementing a paid v4 transfer policy only because it is necessary to accommodate those goals and objectives that I set out earlier in my remarks. We don't think that paid transfers of Internet number resources are the way to go in general. That's an outlet the community has said, that's not what the RFCs say. And anyone who takes this discussion to suggest that they should be selling off their v6 space, I think is seriously mistaken. Well, all that aside, there are some clear benefits to a paid transfer policy, you'd allow v4 to keep working for longer, folks who need v4 could come to ARIN and at least for a price, get it. They might not like the price, but being able to get it for some price surely seems like a more palatable option that being told you can't have it for any price. I'd rather find the last pint of ice cream in the grocery store cost $10 than find that there is no ice cream at all in the grocery store. Let it be my decision. Thanks very much and I really look forward to a discussion; anybody who wants to flag me down in the hallway, this is what I'm here for and great fun, I look forward to it.

MR. VIXIE: Thank you, Ben. Next up will be Tony Li.

MR. LI: Thank you. Good morning, my name is Tony Li. I'm currently with Cisco systems. Please note that my comments this morning really are my personal opinion, not those representing my employer. They have their own opinions, I don't know what they are even. I'm not here to play my router is bigger than your router. There are lots of people who want to play that game. I think that's inappropriate. I do want to talk about the implications, the physics, if you will, of creating this market. Yes, we can have a paid transfer market and when we do this, it is inevitably going to have some effect on the routing table. Depending on, exactly, the physics of this market, it may or may not motivate de-aggregation. Keeping a minimum prefix size seems like, certainly a warranted thing. However, that alone does not seem like it is sufficient to preclude routing table bloat. What would happen if every holder of every /8 suddenly decided to sell off all their asset as /24s? Does anybody want to carry 16 million routes? I have a problem with that. I think there are some issues. And how fast does that happen? Conceivably, that could happen next year. Is your router ready for that? The physics, here, is pretty simple. Moore's law, states a simple thing about -- it is an observation about the growth of silicon. Basically silicon capacity grows about 2x every two years, at a constant cost. Now, if we accept already that ISPs are going to have to replace the routers, just as is the matter of technology refresh. And that Moore's law is going to apply to that, that we will get some benefit automatically through that. However, it's possible that if we get a rapid growth in the routing table, we could exceed that. Right now, the routing table is growing about 1.3x every two years. Well, within Moore's law. However, it has exceeded Moore's law for brief periods in the past. There is nothing to constrain it to say that that won't happen again. And a sudden explosion due to the creation of a marketplace, regardless of the color of that marketplace could exceed that growth rate again. And Moore's law primarily talks about the capacity of those parts. What it does not talk about is about the speed of those parts. And in particular, what's really interesting is memory speeds. Memory speeds in your laptop right now grow about 1.2x every two years. That is the RAM that you buy, that stick of RAM only gets a little bit faster, the clock speed on it only gets a little bit faster every couple of years. In fact, it's getting faster not as quickly as we're growing the routing table today, right, 1.2x is less than 1.3x. Why is this relevant? Well, when your router gets a full BGP update, we have to take all of that information and write it to memory. The longer it takes us to write it to memory, the longer it takes BGP to converge. Since, we're growing the table already faster than the memory speeds are growing; we're seeing BGP converge more slowly. Those of you who've been around for a while know that convergence does seem to take longer and longer every single year. This primarily affects the BGP routing table itself, it's the -- what's sometimes called the BRIB and also the main routing table within your routers. Now there are ways to engineer around this. You can compensate for this by adding more banks of memory. But this is completely a nonstandard, non-uniform and not off-the-shelf common part approach and it does not scale very well for very long, it gets very painful. Now, between this and the capacity, we quickly get into an interesting problem. If the growth rate goes up, then we have to do some interesting and more challenging hardware. And that can cause the costs of the hardware to go up very, very rapidly. If you start doing full custom hardware, then routers can double, triple in price from where they are today without very difficult problem. So the real question then, is what is the growth rate going to be and what is the steady state going to end up to be? I have a problem; I don't want to try to guess the speed of a land rush, okay. The market can create that land rush and without any kind of kind of back pressure on the speed of the growth on the routing table, we cannot begin to hope that that speed is something that we're going to be able to deal with. The good news is that if there is an open market, there is some upper bound to the size of the routing table. It's hard to see how the IPv4 routing table can get past 4 billion routes. (Laughter)

MR. LI: Okay, so how do we create back pressure? Well, the economics of this is painful. Every prefix holder who would actually want to have themselves routed actually ends up with their prefix in a bunch of routers out somewhere in the DFZ. By rights, the prefix holder should pay all of the transit providers in the DFZ, and other providers who are actually going to carry that route for the privilege of being in that routing table, right. If I insert a prefix, I'm causing cost to everybody else along the way. I should go out and pay all those people. Now, we've never done that because that's just frankly impractical. It's -- go out and pay everyone else for your lifeblood. But that is the correct quid pro quo for doing things. How do we do this? Well, there are several ways we could abstract and make this market simpler. We need this back pressure market so that we get some kind of sanity on the growth rate. To do this, one possible way, ARIN could act as a broker. It could be the middleman which sits in the middle, where a prefix holder comes to ARIN; ARIN somehow pays the relevant transit providers. I don't know how that would be set up but that's one possible approach. Another crazy approach might be to have ARIN create a market for routing table slots. Prefix holders pay, do you have routing table slots, the members agree to carry all the things in those slots, there you go. How many slots that would have to be decided by the members. How do we do this? I leave that open to you. I can tell you that we have a problem here. I don't have a good solution for you; we just need to address it somehow.

MR. VIXIE: Thank you, Tony. Last up will be Steve Ryan.

MR. RYAN: I'm a trial lawyer, I don't sit down when I talk. (Laughter)

MR. RYAN: I'm not that tall either, so it's hard to tell, so I'm standing now. So I'm actually not going to take 15 minutes. Believe it or not, I took an hour yesterday, and some of you had to listen to me then. Let me do a couple of issues. The first issue I want to talk about is that as a lawyer, this organization has 11,500 to 12,000 contracts that are out there that have certain legal presumptions in them. And since I'm a catholic, I'll talk about theology. There's a catholic theology and you believe certain things. Well, our contracts believe certain things and they've written them down. So if you look at the RSA right now, the -- not the legacy one, but the one that's been signed by 11,500 companies, it says that they are purchasing a service and that no one owns the IP. Okay, I want to -- I did cover this yesterday, but I want to emphasize it in this room for those who weren't there. The service bundle that people buy, if -- to make it clear is a whole series of services that ARIN provides. This room is one of those services. And somebody might say, well, hell, Ryan, all I want is the service of -- related to and I want a unique IP number. And the answer is we don't disaggregate and sell things a la carte. This is not the cafeteria where you decide that you want asparagus rather than green beans and you're willing to pay $0.50 more. You're getting a bundle. And it that service, as defined in the RSA, our services like being listed in the WHOIS, which is important for each of the persons and important for the community, the reverse DNS lookup, the variety of services are sold that way. So I want everybody here, as they listen to people talk about a market to distinguish right now, that I think you have to decide are you talking about a market where it's the transfer of the services to another party or are people arguing that we're going to fundamentally change the nature of what this thing is and say, it's owned, I own the IP number. Right now, the community says, you don't own the number. ARIN doesn't own the /8 that it's distributing from. The IANA doesn't quote -- well, I suppose, it maybe a more interesting issue for the IANA, I won't go there. But the difference between ownership of the IP number, like a Ford LTD is not what we're talking about unless you want to put that on the table, okay. So when other people propose a market, all right, they come up with a policy proposal for a market. I want everybody to be sensitized to this binary choice that has to be made. Are we talking about a market that says, I own the thing, the IP number, just like a Ford LTD or do I own the right to the services that are included there? And the way I've argued this in court to try and explain it to judges is that -- and I'm not going to here because we're on film. I usually take out my credit card, judges, generally can't see you credit card number and it's safer, but I'm not going to do it here. But imagine that I have a credit card here. There is a number on the credit card. I'm not entitled to the unique number on the credit card. I'm entitled to the service of the credit card. If the company wants to send me a new card with a different number, for any reason, for their reason, if you read their contract, which is much more difficult to read, by the way than the very clean and beautiful RSA that we have -- (Laughter)

MR. RYAN: You would find that they can switch that card out and change that number at any point. So what we're offering is a unique service that's related to the uniqueness of your number and the services that go there, which we call the services. So, point 1, I got to make sure that you don't allow anybody who is proposing a market to not make clear which market they're talking about, okay. Second, transition, lawyers worry about, in the immortal words of Lloyd George, leaping a chasm in two bounds. If we have a current legal regime that we have had substantially agreed upon by the community as evidenced by the 11,500 contracts, it's very hard to say six months from now, we're going to go to a marketplace where those rights will be different, because it really skews what's going to happen in the next six months. Are we going to continue to allocate at prices that frankly are less than one decent-sized router that Tony's company sells, the biggest amount of money that anybody is paying, in essence, is a very low amount for IP addresses right now. We've given those IP addresses out based on need and we have sustained this organization, the total budget of this organization is quite small. We never monetized ARIN or any of the other RIRs the way VeriSign monetized itself. I'm not casting aspersions, this is a neutral statement. But we haven't gone into the business model of aggrandizement. So I don't think there's any intention to do so. But you have to look at these sort of issues. How do you do the transition period? It's not even enough to come up with an elegant model of what the market would be. You have to tell me how I physically change 11,500 contracts into that. Is it simply that I change the transfer policy, which can be read back into the contracts? We have to grapple with the mechanics of how to do this, because we have an existing legal regime that is very important to transition correctly. The third issue, going back to that service issue, I'm very interested, and I would appeal to any legacy holder, I'm collecting as much legacy documentation as I can. And I'll agree to accept it in a redacted form so it's not specific to a company. I'm trying to figure out what anybody would argue was the promise made to legacy holders in the correspondence and/or documentation or in a government contract for the contractor who is dealing with legacy holders. I'm looking for a paper that would illustrate the rights that were given. In other words, everybody could get up and say, well, I think I have a right as a legacy holder to services for free and perpetuity from somebody. Well, I'd like to see the paper that helps me understand that lawyers are creatures of looking at documents that people created previously. It's the only profession where plagiarism is patronized as opposed to going punished. But we need to look at that. And let me just tell you. I want you to go home and talk to your general counsel at your company, if you're a legacy holder and you think you're going into a market where your v4 space may become very valuable, and that may be. One of the interesting issues I've thought about, for the first time, frankly, in the last couple of days, from a SOX standpoint, if you're a public company, may be, you better put that asset on the books before you try and sell it. Or when you make your first sale at a price, do you then have an asset that you have to value on your balance sheet? So there is a lot of funny issues that begin to run around as you start to think about the application of markets to other laws in this particular area. So for example, I would bet that no company and some of the great companies have legacy address blocks. I bet none of them have valued that on their balance sheet. I bet there is not a nickel attributed on the balance sheet to a IPv4 block. So these are the kinds of issues that may send the Ryan children to another year of college for which I'm grateful. (Laughter)

MR. RYAN: But it also, I think, illustrates, how complex a problem it is to take us from one model, which is the model of giving it to people who demonstrate that they need it and can utilize it at a very low price, at a very low price. And let's talk, in my last minute, and my last remark is about government regulation. Most markets in the United States are regulated by someone. So for example, in the insurance market, the 1952 McCarran Ferguson Act allocated most of the governance of the insurance industry to the states, but the state insurance commissioner, therefore, regulates it. In the United States, a lot of the technology issues about bandwidth and about spectrum are regulated by the FCC. The FTC has the ability, the Federal Trade Commission, has the ability to address unfair business practices. The point I want to make is, somebody in government is going to also decide that they have a regulatory right to regulate this market. In fact, I would actually argue that any business practice that the community comes up with and individual companies come up with would be subject to Section 5 of the FTC Act. So we're going to step into an area in the ARIN service region. Ray, do we have 19 sovereign nations, or 22, how many do we have? Remind me, I forget the number. So we have a number, almost two -- you know, we have -- or 20 different sovereigns who may choose to regulate this issue in their own way. In other words, one of the interesting things about the Internet is that while it is -- I mean, an amazing engineering feat. And the standard setting non-governmental operations bodies have done such a wonderful job of creating something of tremendous value to the people of the world, you know, this is going to be highly regulated in some ways depending upon how political people look at it. So I just wanted to add those thoughts and then give back the rest of the time so that other panelists could react and so you will have more time for yourselves.

MR. VIXIE: Thank you, Steve. When I was the president of PaX a couple of years ago, we would routinely get a letter from Santa Clara County asking who owns all that equipment that is in your data center and what is it worth and how can we collect 1 percent of its value every year because it is real property on which we wish to tax. It'd be very interesting if IP addresses or the right to use IP addresses becomes an asset on people's books that they have to pay property taxes on. And that's the kind of implication that I have been, sort of, listening to, kind of, in the shadows of the discussions people want to have. It's been observed by a number of folks that an IP address market already exists, that these blocks are routinely transferred in exchange for money using shell companies and there's all kinds of dodges that the people have said that they've heard of although no one has said, yes, I use that one, but everyone has heard that this has been done. And so the refrain is there's already an IP address market and ARIN can keep its head in the sand or not. I'm not sure that's true, because the implications of a fully white-market where these things are assets and you're paying taxes on them and your company evaluation can go up and down based on some sort of a commodities exchange in IP address right to use. That may not be what people want; it may be that a gray market is as far as the community wants to push. Now, in the discussion this morning of the Legacy RSA, Steve said, by the way, we're on revision 9 of the RSA, the non-legacy RSA. And it's easy to see, if we've gotten up to version 9 that there may be a version 10 out there in the future or even a version 11. It could continue to evolve. It maybe that the community, through the public policy process and the members through electing, you know, the AC and electing the board, will determine that we need an RSA that people can voluntarily upgrade to that allows transfer. You've heard up here some of the issues that I think will need to be carefully studied and considered before the community asks that that be done. I -- these are the interesting times that I mentioned in the ancient Chinese curse. It would have been much better if we would all have slid right into v6 and not have to deal with these issues. The community and the technology is just not prepared to go through the transition that we are going to go through. So we have about a half an hour. And I'm hoping to hear from folks. Primarily, I'd like to hear questions of the panelists to expand on the remarks they've made. As a secondary issue, if we have, you know, time, we have no interest in questioning the panel, but you have your own views that you'd like to share, then, you know, that is not as interesting to me. On the other hand, if you're going to, and I see Randy Bush at the microphone, I was not directing this at you, in particular, but if you're going to raise your own views rather than ask questions, get to the back of the line and then when you raise your own views, please say something here that you have not already said on the PPML, people heard you there, they don't need to hear you again here saying the same thing. Please say something different. So before we go to the microphones, I'd like to just ask the panel, does anybody -- has anybody been inspired by the comments of your fellow panelists to amend your remarks or question your fellow panelists about anything?

MR. CURRAN: I think we've talked long enough.

MR. VIXIE: Okay, Randy, you are first.

MR. BUSH: Randy Bush, IIJ. Thanks for telling me what I can say, and what I cannot say, Paul -- membership I am sure he really appreciates that. Is that a bug or a feature? (Laughter)

MR. BUSH: Thanks for telling me what I can and cannot say, Paul, membership really appreciates prior censorship. The Internet is a cooperative place or has been. It would be nice if we could try not to make enemies of each other and enemies of legacy holders et cetera, Steve. This is a cooperative place. Let's try for a win-win solution, not an adversarial solution. Tony, which do you think is more -- significantly more likely to cause routing table growth? NATv4, because you know, v6 doesn't catch on, NAT-PT because v6 catches on and everybody needs a bit of v4 space to run NAT-PT, or marketplace ignorant to that transfer. Just as he said. I see transfer as how those people are going to end up with the small bits of address space they need, which is what is going to drive it. But we as technologists haven't given them any other path out. So, the question is really what social or business mechanism is going to let them run their networks? And what's the real driver is they need those little slices and dices because they are going to run PT or 44.

MR. LI: Randy, first I think we became adversarial about 1992. CIDRD was clear example. As far as what's going to blow up the routing tables fastest. I don't see that NAT matters one with what flavor of NAT that you are going to use. You are going to run your network behind a stub, and you need to have enough unique addresses to run your NAT box regardless of what's behind that. As far as, you know, transition to v6, anybody's guess. With us handing out lots of /48s flat, we could easily blow up the v6 routing table too, because the policies there aren't any different.

MR. CURRAN: All right -- respond to Randy as well. I don't know how much of my comments you -- my initial presentation you heard, Randy, but I agree a 100 percent with the facts of the matter that it doesn't have to be a us versus them situation. Many of the people in this room are legacy holders. We are all one internet community. It is not clear to me that the policies and procedures, the documents, the RFCs, even going back to CIDR and 2050 necessarily were applicable to anyone who received a legacy block, because they postdated them. Now, it is true that those people who got legacy blocks probably had some social obligations, but we don't really have a clear record of that. So, we are one community, and I do not believe -- I don't believe it's in anyone's interest to attempt to force in either direction an answer on the other.

MR. BUSH: Thank you.

MR. DARTE: Hi, I'm Bill Darte. I'm on the ARIN AC, but I'm just speaking for myself and Washington University in St. Louis. So my -- my question is, I hear the regulation characteristics that were espoused for white markets that would control the deaggregation and the expansion of route tables et cetera. I'd like to understand how you think that that would -- that would be real control, when if people wanted smaller blocks, they could simply go to like, gray or black market to get those pieces of small address space that they want that were not within the policy of the white market. And I do think that the real regulation could come from government, of course, but the real short-term regulation is what Tony referred to is in the -- in the routing community themselves, they'd be able to filter out things that were inappropriately small as route tables got bigger and bigger, and so being able to put those together. So the question is how do you actually facilitate the control that you'd like, in the white market?

MR. EDELMAN: I think that's a very fair question. I've looked at a variety of laws and rules, some of which get taken seriously and some of which don't. Your question really gets to the core of that. How do we make sure that this rule that transfers are supposed to go through the official white market, not through some other market, a gray market, is a rule that the community complies with and takes seriously. One thing that you see across countries, across rules, across legal regimes, is that a rule that most people can follow most of the time, is a rule that's more likely to be taken seriously. A rule that is perceived to have real benefits to a community is a rule that more people are likely to take seriously. Conversely, a rule that most people need to break just in order to get done what they need to get done, is a rule that is not likely to be taken seriously. So to operationalize that, if the white market is satisfying most of the needs of most operators, and they can get most of what they need most of the time, plus they understand that if everyone else didn't do it, then we'd have a real mess on our hands, you would think most people would continue to comply with it. On the other hand, if the rule is too far from what people need in order to just run their networks and do their jobs, then you'd find that your authority tends to collapse, and it's harder to get from here to there. That's just to say, don't overplay your hand. If you can keep the WHOIS data accurate, for example, so that everyone knows you should be able to look in WHOIS to find out where a net block is being used, who is using it, and who has authority to use it, then, any transfer that doesn't result in accurate WHOIS data is sort of a pariah. It's all the way out there, it's not the way things are supposed to be. But if we let WHOIS deteriorate, where a third of WHOIS records are inaccurate, then there is no longer any strong incentive, and you might as well just do whatever gray or black market transfer you want, let WHOIS be wrong. But hey, WHOIS is wrong for a lot's of things, so it's just not a big deal.

MR. VIXIE: I want to add -- in addition to the accusation that ARIN has it's head in the sand, but not allowing transfers and, you know, ignoring the market that currently exists, I would say that you could characterize some of the complaints or accusations about ARIN's alleged misbehavior with regard to the IP market as overplaying our hand. And I think it's -- it's important to realize the reason that ARIN and board and so forth keep saying that IP addresses aren't property is -- that's what every bit of our constitution says. Our bylaws say it, our RSAs say it, 2050 says it, everything says that. That can be changed. But that's the current situation. So we are not exactly trying to prevent a market as much as saying this is the current situation. We are doing the best we can with the current situation. Now we are talking about changing it. Let's make sure that we remember which time we are talking about the current situation, and which time we are talking about the perspective situation. Far right microphone.

MR. ALEXANDER: Dan Alexander. I am with Comcast, and on the ARIN AC. But this is really just a personal query. I'm not arguing that there is a number of ways a market system could be put in place, and there's lots of different ways we can do it. But I think the general opinion is, once that does happen, it opens the door for government involvement and regulation, because we're not just talking about one -- any one particular government or economy, this is a world system. So once this regulation and government involvement comes into play, I'm curious of any of the panel's opinions. Do you think that in a predominantly v6 world, you can close that door and will have any resemblance of an open, you know, an open community type consensus once that door has been already opened?

SPEAKER: John.

MR. CURRAN: I think that there is a lot of discussion about markets and markets for IP addresses because of the situation that we face today with IPv4. If we were 70 percent through the IPv6 transition, which we most certainly are not, but if we were, you probably wouldn't have a lot of people discussing markets, because while there is some demand for IPv6 address space, we've done very well in making it available. And the reality is that the value of uniqueness and unique numbers for v6, there's a lot of them in IPv6. So it's not a question of I have to have a number, it's just, do I get a PI number or a provider-assigned or provider-independent. I don't think we'd be having a discussion on markets in the v6 scenario or v6 standalone internet. Because we are here talking now about getting through that transition, there's a lot of discussion about whether a market will make the current pressing circumstance of the depletion of the free-pool more tolerable to the community with a few enough side-effects. So, I think truly this is a temporary situation. You want to take a 20 year, 50 year world view, I do believe that long-term you wouldn't necessarily see a market, because of almost no demand in a pure v6 world. The reality is that if your provider is willing to accept a provider-independent block for you connecting, your neighbor might have 65,000 of them. He can give you one. Okay. There's such an abundance. And if your provider won't accept a provider-independent block, it doesn't matter if you go to the market or not. So, because of the assignment sizes and the number of prefixes we're giving in v6, per se the address- block may not have a lot of value, and there may not be a sustainable market 20 years out.

MR. VIXIE: Tony, what about the market you are proposing? You see that going away if v4 depletion is behind us and v6 is with us?

MR. LI: No. V6 is simply v4 with bigger addresses. If you go to a bigger address you still have -- and even if the individual prefix doesn't have value, the routing table slot is still expensive. In fact, for the v6 slot, it's more expensive.

MR. VIXIE: How does that get recovered? How is there any back-pressure?

MR. LI: We cannot support a full routing table full of /48's. It's three times ten to the fourteenth routes.

MR. VIXIE: That's a lot of routes. Center microphone.

MR. DURAND: I'm Alain Durand, Comcast. This notion of a market for v4 address is sometimes presented as a panacea to delay the day where we will run out of v4 and when we can just be happy and not worry so much about what's after. The question I have is from an economical perspective. To have a market you need to have supply and demand. I have no worries about the demand side. Every body here wants to go have v4 addresses. The question is more on the supply side. There have been empirical evidence that small and medium size block have been traded more or less openly. But what about large block? If I am here to get a large assignment because I have a lot of customers and I need to grow this, I will be looking for a large block. So the question is, have you seen any evidence that legacy holder who have large blocks will actually be wiling to trade them as large block and not simply slice them as small chunks? And if not, then what are the consequences on their balance in this community? Is it not solving what essentially will help small and medium size guys to keep growing in v4 at the detriment of larger networks, who will not be able to grow because they cannot get assignments of the size that they need?

MR. VIXIE: Anyone?

MR. EDELMAN: As you say, it does seem that the price for a large block might have to be disproportionately high, that is convexly higher. You might find that if you needed a /8, gee, that's going to cost you more than 256 times the price of a /16, because the supply is just not there. On the other hand, that is directly in tangent with, I think, Tony's worry for example, and some remarks that Paul and John gave us earlier, worrying about growth of the routing table, worrying about carving up blocks into very small blocks. So different people worrying about different things, it's not to say all the bad things couldn't all happen simultaneously. But the prevailing wisdom among most people talking seems to be, you are going to want to cut up these blocks into as small pieces as you can and use them for whatever smaller purposes. If you need a very large block, maybe you are the kind of guy who should be moving to v6 sooner, or I guess perhaps putting services behind a NAT. It doesn't seem like there's a big future for operators who need more and more /8's to run their business.

MR. CURRAN: Just to be clear. Since the value of the address is to allow you to connect to the public internet, and a lot of organizations don't feel they have to number all their hosts, just their DMZ's or their firewall works, a /30 allows an organization to get connected, and that's valuable. A /26, /24 may not for a single organization add more value, they are more valuable to an ISP who can slice them up into pieces and let lots of people connect. But if you are holding on to a block and somehow you are allowed to transfer it in whole to an ISP or break it up into lots of little slices, so lots of little entities can propose using that block slice to connect to their ISP of choice, okay. If that's actually allowed, it's almost inevitable you will get far more value out of many /30's for example than you would from the entire block. Now, there's two corollaries to this. The first one is, there's no back-pressure in the system I just proposed. There is no filters that are preventing people from accepting those. We all know filtering may prevent that, but we don't have a good track record industry-wide, and you are asking people to have filters when they can't serve the customer without dropping the filter. And all of us have a different view what happens there. My view is the filters won't survive; people will connect customers because they want to connect customers. The other assumption there is that when you add that route, because you have that /30 PA piece, that there is no incremental cost that's directly attributable that you can go back to the customer and say, yeah, you can get a /30 or a /24 from the market, but you are going to have to pay to have it routed. What Tony discusses is exactly that. Right now we have a -- we have the potential for a market in addresses, but we don't have a present market in the routing table entries. And the systems are tied pretty tightly. If you let the fragmentation of IPv4 space occur, and you don't have an answer that involves policy filters or a natural push-back by having a market in routing table entries, you've sort of let one-half of the system spin out of control with no governor from the other half. So, it's envisioned that people will do the natural economic thing, get their maximum utility value out of the resource, and break it up as far as the system let's them break it up. Does that answer your question? A little bit, okay.

MR. VIXIE: Bill.

MR. MANNING: Bill Manning, native English speaker, tempered by California public school education. So I don't understand all the words. First of all, I'm thinking of the little Bedouin shepherd who found the Dead Sea scrolls, and found out that he could get the most money by tearing them into one centimeter increments. The value of those one centimeter increments to him was very high. The value of the entire scroll was much higher later on. We've been talking about markets. I would like the panel to describe need. When I hear need-based, I think, I need the whole set, I need the numbers to -- as a resource, as a commodity to buy or sell, or I need the numbers to move IP datagrams. What does "need" mean to the panel?

MR. CURRAN: I'll go first, as soon as my mike works. I subscribe to the need -- the definition of need that's described in the concepts in 2050, which is that your documented need of a resource is your ability to use it to number network components for purposes of carrying traffic. Okay. So that's kind of a conceptual area that goes behind a lot of the policies, when we ask you why do you need these addresses in the next six months. There are other people who say there were other needs like, I need this because my investment fund will do very well if I buy it now and sell it later. That's not the concept of need I'm using, Bill. I'm using 2050's concept.

MR. VIXIE: Right-hand microphone.

MR. WOODCOCK: Bill Woodcock. Not speaking for the board. So, since the 1980s, Neocon, Bizdev, people who have read too much Ayn Rand as small children have been putting a lot of energy into convincing us of the benefits of unregulated markets not in our backyard. And as a Californian, I lived through one of the United States' very few experiments with doing that in our backyard, the energy crisis where in speculators were allowed to trade in energy rather than allowing the energy to go to the market, the utility market for the people who have the actual need. I recognize that there are vast differences between electrical power and IP addresses. I also recognize that, Ben, for instance, when he is talking about a market, is speaking in much more nuanced terms than this idea that we've all been beat over the head with, since Reaganomics. But I think probably the vast majority of the people in this room, when they hear market, are not thinking exact continuation of our current allocation policies, just ARIN's run out of space so you get it from somebody else. I think probably a lot of people have got the idea, oh, that means anybody who wants to can buy or sell to anybody who wants to at any price that they mutually agree upon regardless of whether that's, you know, Enron II and the subsidiary of Enron II double booking trades back and forth until the prices got high. I wonder if you guys could talk a little bit more about the difference between the utility value and the speculative value and how it is that we would continue to keep addresses available at or near the utility value, that is the value that corresponds with how much -- as ISP's were able to make from having them.

MR. VIXIE: Ben.

MR. EDELMAN: The speculative value should reflect something like the expected long-run utility value. It's hard to see that a speculative value could ultimately reflect the value other than what the asset is expected to be worth. But, as a long-lived asset, a v4 address should last for as long as anyone is using v4. You might find that the future income stream from a v4 address could be a lot, and could lead to a surprisingly high value if you wanted to buy one address or one block of addresses from a seller. Now tempering all of that is the fact that there's quite a bit of supply. Assuming that our transfer rules didn't in some way limit supply in a -- in a very striking and overwhelming way, there would be lots of "sellers," lot's of existing blocks potentially coming to market. Think of the big corporate legacy operators who might like to get a boost in their annual income. So if there are many sellers competing to sell, you might think the price will go way down, and sure enough, in some markets we have had that experience, think tradable pollution rights in California. Now there are ways you can screw-up paid transfers, you can screw-up electricity as California did in various ways through loopholes and laundering and speculators. Often if your rules get more complicated, there are more ways to manipulate them, think the tax code and folks who find loopholes there. A nice simple set of rules is easier to debug, and easier to make sure you haven't left too many gaps, conflicts, or ambiguities. But I certainly credit your instinct to say that not all markets have worked perfectly over time. Here the fact that there is a stock of v4 addresses that the existing operators all have, everyone can keep using their existing v4 addresses that helps a lot. That's quite different from electricity where you need new electricity each hour, even each minute, and so prices really can go crazy. There are aspects of this marketplace then to make it much easier to design and somewhat harder to screw-up than others, especially electricity. And that, you know, makes me feel more comfortable with it. If we were dealing with something as hard as electricity, it might well be above my pay grade.

MR. KAPELA: Thank you Paul. Anton Kapela. Just wanted to turn a more technical question up to the panel, and I don't know if more than Tony might want to respond. But anyone who feels able, please do. We've taken, it seems, for granted today that we have these awesome pre-populated FIBs, TCAM. We haven't had to think about Soup-1A type issues for a long time, right. No one has a flow router and a core. Do you see any movement, any change in this great place we are at right now? Do you see that moving to something where maybe we are not fully pre-populated, maybe there are caveats, maybe certain things aren't pre-populated. Maybe at the edge where enterprises might interconnect, where the number of routes is orders of magnitude large than in the makeup of the flow traffic. Maybe this would change. Maybe a million routes in the table is no big deal if it's all in DRAM and they have 10 active connections all day long. What -- do you guys see anything, anything there?

SPEAKER: Tony.

MR. LI: I live in the core, and I don't see anything changing very much there. What's going to happen to the edge is anybody's guess, especially if you look at the VPN ways -- ways that VPNs get used, and also the way that certain enterprises want to do other strange things internally. I don't think those are really appropriate topics here, because really it's not part of the internet at that point, right. That's behind the front door of the enterprise.

MR. KAPELA: Sure. With regards to the edge, of course, so in the core you would think that our standard way of doing things is not going to change regardless of how large the table over grows?

MR. LI: I'm not seeing anything that's likely to change radically. We have a routing architecture that is largely hierarchical. I'm not seeing any new proposals that would substantially alter that in any significant way.

MR. KAPELA: Thank you.

MR. VIXIE: Okay. The queues are closed. We are down to our last eight minutes here. I'm going to try and step through the rest in the order that you queued.

MR. SMITH: Mike Smith. I'm curious first on the Enron note, it's interesting because I'm from Washington State. And as a provider of power during that period, we are just now finishing settling all of the lawsuits in the public utility districts, so the provider is not without danger in that kind of environment. And then my question is do you think that continued emphasis on trying to extend the IPv4 pool through policies and procedures is going to invite any kind of regulatory pressure from all of these different governments that are involved in the Enron region?

MR. VIXIE: That's a lawsuit question.

MR. RYAN: Well, I'm very proud by the way to say that I represented the Western Power interest that beat Enron for a $1 billion, and I was the lawyer who did that case. So, I'm very, very proud of that. But, wish I'd had a contingency fee on it, and in which case I wouldn't be here. The -- I want to convince people here that governments will regulate existing -- using existing laws and/or will create new ones to address our industry. And that may not be bad. I must say, while the United States government could screw up a one-car funeral, its policies in the internet area have been particularly wise I think. And I don't know if the audience agrees with me. But generally, the Department of Commerce stewardship of the internet space through the white paper and the green paper and the process that was created, I think has enabled this room to exist, for example. And so government regulation is not necessarily always a bad thing. I know that there is an