ARIN XXII Members Meeting Draft Transcript - Friday, 17 October 2008 [Archived]

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

Meeting Called to Order

MR. PLZAK: Good morning.

SPEAKERS: Good morning.

MR. PLZAK: You’re going to have to excuse my voice. I woke up this morning and I have a cold or something coming on. From what I understand, I’m not the only one, so I’ll be talking with a little frog with me today as well.

First of all, a reminder about the Cyber Café. It’s open this morning and you can take a break. It’s located where it was all day yesterday, at the top of the stairs in the Heinsbergen Room.

There we go. Okay. A reminder about the surveys. We have another opportunity this morning to complete another survey and we’ll have a drawing this morning. And we had a first-time winner yesterday from a remote participant. So maybe we will have another one this morning. Remember, you have to be present in the room to win, or you must be online to win.

The help desks are open again this morning. And remember, all unselected Cyber Café entrees and respondents to the first-timer meeting surveys will be entered into a drawing for the consolation price an 8-gigabyte iPod touch. And we’ll announce the winner on the 27th of October on the ARIN website, which is a week from this coming Monday.

Let’s thank our sponsors, CGR and Los Nettos.

Rules reminder. Chair will be enforcing these rules. And the head table so far up here I have John, Paul and one of the Bills. I’m missing another Bill and I’m missing an AC chair. And I will be at the end of the head table.

ARIN Board and Advisory Council Election Procedures

MR. PLZAK: And so now I’d like to call on Jud Lewis to come up and give you an introduction and discussion of the ARIN Board and Advisory Council election procedures.

MR. LEWIS: Good morning, everyone. My name is Jud Lewis. I am the new membership coordinator at ARIN. One of the things I coordinate is the election procedures. So today I’m going to give you a quick overview – a how to, if you will – on how to vote.

All right, first off, this is the calendar here. Voting opened just now, today, Friday the 17th noon Eastern Time or 9:00 Pacific Time. It’s going to remain open one week until Friday the 24th at noon. Then we are going – a week after that on Halloween, October 31st, the results are going to be announced.

All right. What we have here is a screen shot of the election page which can be found at http://ARIN.net/election . Or if you go to the ARIN home page, up on the upper right-hand corner there’s a little election ribbon and you can get to it that way, as well. There you can view candidate biographies and statements of support, which can also be found – at least the biographies and the election guide – which is included in your meeting packets.

All right. What we here is a sample ballot. When you go to the site and log in, if you’re DMR, you’re going to see the ballots. We have four candidates for the Board of Trustees, and select up to two candidates for the Board. For the Advisory Council we have 11 candidates, and you may select up to five for that. And they are listed alphabetically.

All right. Voting procedures. Each member organization has one DMR, or designated member representative, and they’re the person that is able to vote on behalf of the organization. The deadline to establish voter eligibility was the 3rd of October. You need to be a general member in good standing at ARIN, and in order to vote you have to have an e-mail account that has a domain name that matches your organization name and also must include your name or your initials like Jud@ARIN.net or JLewis@ARIN.net.

Today, this morning, an e-mail was sent to the DMRs eligible to vote reminding them, hey, voting is open. It’s time to vote.

All right. Here are the three easy steps voting procedures. First, you go to the website at ARIN.net/election I mentioned earlier. All right, the first step is you register to vote. If this is the first time with DMR voting, you need your first and last name and the e-mail – the DMR e-mail we have on file for you. And that will create a user name and password for you. If you voted in previous elections you can log in, and if you have forgotten your information and you have voted in previous elections there is a little link there that will prompt you. It will e-mail you that information if you have forgotten your password or user name.

The second step is vote. There is a vote now, a yellow button now button. You click on that and the ballot will pop up. And you can select your candidates. And the most important step is to confirm your vote. Remember, just because you clicked all the applicable names of the people you wanted to vote for, it doesn’t actually cast your ballot until you click confirm. So make sure that you do that.

All right. As I said, the deadline is the 24th at noon. And while you have a week to do it, we encourage you – I couldn’t stress this more – please vote early; better than late.

Do you have any questions about voting procedures? If you do, you can find me right outside after this meeting at the election help desk, or you can e-mail info@ARIN.net. And I will turn it back over to Ray.

MR. PLZAK: Thanks, Jud.

Candidate Speeches (AC and BoT Nominees)

MR. PLZAK: Now, as has been our custom, we will hear the speeches from the candidates that are present here. Candidates were given the opportunity if they were not going to be here to submit a written statement which will be read by me. And only one such statement has been given to me to read. I emphasize I’m reading it. I’m not going to deliver it the same way the person would have delivered it with whatever emphasis and things they want to do. I’m just going to be the recorder reader.

So, first will be the Advisory Council candidates. These are the candidates for the office. The only one that’s not here is Alex Rubenstein, and he did not submit his statement.

So, we will begin in alphabetical order. Dan Alexander. Here’s his reason for motivation, and here’s his biography. All this information is available on the website, as well as any statements that may have been posted regarding him. And so I would like to call Dan, who is a current member of the AC, to please come forward and take about three minutes and give us a talk. Thanks.

MR. ALEXANDER: Hopefully this won’t take three minutes. I’ve been thankful for the opportunity to serve on the AC this past three years. It’s been a really good learning experience. Many on the Board, the AC, and the community have provided me with a lot of insight and knowledge that has helped me to make a lot of decisions that have had to be made. I hope that I have provided a similar value in return.

I think the next three years are going to see some major changes in the way this Internet operates. The AC and the community, we’re going to have to find a way to change with the times and come to terms with a couple of issues that we have not had to deal with in the past. I’m hoping to continue my work on the AC and assist with this transition.

One goal is I think I would like the AC to develop a better, high-level plan that we can come to terms with. This way we can work on policies that actually work towards that goal rather than just filling gaps or trying to solve pieces of a larger problem. Those who know me understand that I do take this seriously and I put in the time needed.

And my intentions are for the good of the Internet and not just the company that I work for. And I hope I get your vote. Thanks.

MR. PLZAK: Thanks, Dan. Oh, by the way, I failed to mention we will not be entertaining any questions of the candidates. Since they’re not all here it would not be fair.

The next candidate is Scott Beuker. Here is his motivation and biography. And so, Scott, if you would like to come up again. Information about him is on the website.

MR. BEUKER: Thank you. I will keep this short because as Ray said there is a lot of information about all the candidates online. And if you’re going to vote, I hope you’ll read it. That’s an important part.

I’m Scott Beuker. I guess I’ll just give you a brief overview about me. I have been involved with ARIN for three years. I’m a senior network architect with Shaw Communications in Canada, and have been working there for going on nine years now.

I’m running for the AC, because I’d like to get more involved. I have been involved in the community for awhile now and I think it’s time to take it to the next level. I don’t have a particular agenda as far as policies are concerned.

I’m not coming in to further a certain cause. My goal here is simply to preserve the atmosphere in ARIN for open discussion and help mediate the policy proposals and get things done. I know that there are a lot of sometimes there are heated discussions on the PPML. I’m not somebody who likes to get heavily involved in those. I’d rather for my role in it help people find a happy medium, and get a good proposal, and keep the whole process flowing.

So that’s it. I hope you’ll vote. Thank you.

MR. PLZAK: The next candidate is Kent Claussen. Here is his motivation and biography. Again, the information is on the website. Kent?

MR. CLAUSSEN: Hi, I’m Kent Claussen from CCS Technology Group. I’ve also joined Enhanced Telecommunications here recently.

I represent a fair number of ILEX and CLEX in the Midwestern United States, basically Tier 2 and Tier 3 providers. I have 15 years of experience in the access and regional networks, and with that, I’ve managed a lot of IP and associated resources. So I understand where ARIN has been, where we’re at currently, and I have an idea of what the future is going to hold.

I believe that there’s challenging times ahead of us, and I think these next several years are going to be very interesting, to put it mildly. I think I can bring a unique perspective to the AC, and hopefully we can all work through this. Thank you.

MR. PLZAK: Next up is Marc Crandall. Here is his motivation and biography information. Again, the information is available on the website. Marc?

MR. CRANDALL: After standing up here, I wish Ray would read my statement as well.

I know some of you out there, but not all of you. I’m Marc Crandall and I’m a product counsel at Google. I’m not an engineer and I don’t work on networks regularly. And I was a little bit concerned about whether that would be a problem if I served with the AC. But I will tell you a little bit about my background and you can decide whether you think my background might be suitable.

At Google my job is to serve as a lawyer for the engineers as they develop new technology – the engineers specifically for g-mail and also for our abuse people. Before that a principle legal advisor for the FBI Cyber Division advising the Bureau on legal issues related to network infrastructure and security. In that capacity I had the privilege of working with ICANN and serving on the U.S. delegation to the GAC, and also participating in WSIS and WGIG in Geneva and Tunisia. So I had a lot of insight into what was going on insofar as let’s say other organizations that are interested in the work that we are doing here at ARIN.

The reason why I became specifically involved in ARIN – I think some of you were here back in I think it was ARIN 15 – ARIN 15 in Orlando. But there was a policy proposal that was floating around the PPMLs that had a side effect of having an adverse impact on law enforcement cyber investigations and infrastructure security from the government perspective. And when I read it I thought oh, my God, I’m sure this was completely unintentional, but I really fell backwards in my chair. And I found out that we were in a position from the government perspective where we had this situation and the only way to deal with the situation was to join with the community and present our viewpoint out in the open. And for law enforcement, especially FBI to do that, I don’t have to tell you, it’s not so easy.

But I rallied the groups in Washington, I think, with two days noticed. I grabbed a few of my colleagues by the ear from DHS and ICE and DOJ. And we came and we stood in front of the floor with our hat in our hands and basically spilled our guts. I don’t know if any of you remember that, but it was kind of an exhilarating experience and it hit home that making your case to the community and having the community heavily involved – and I don’t need to tell you this – it’s critical. And since then, I think there’s probably been a lot better communication between the government, and organizations like ARIN, the other RIRs, and ICANN.

So I think my government background, the background at Google, starting to under issues like privacy and resource allocation. You know, when I went to Google it wasn’t as big as it is now by the way. And I just want to see if I can help with my background, try to mediate solutions to a lot of the very, very difficult questions. As a lot of my excellent co-nominees stated, I don’t have an agenda. I tried very hard to deconflict myself and checked around at this before I accepted the nomination. And I think I can help mediate something, at least to the best I can to keep the discussion focused in the right direction.

So, I do ask for your vote. And the other thing I should add is I’ve had a chance to meet some of my fellow nominees for the AC, and the people that I’ve met so far are also, I believe, excellent candidates, so you can’t really go wrong I think. Thanks very much.

MR. PLZAK: Next is Bill Darte. Bill Darte is an incumbent. Here is his motivation and biography statement. And as is everyone else, the information is on the website. Bill?

MR. DARTE: Good morning, again. I’m Bill Darte. I represent Washington University in St. Louis, and I have been lucky enough to represent you since the beginning of ARIN. I submitted a volunteer statement early on and was selected to participate on the first Advisory Council, and I have been re-elected since. And so that may disqualify me in some people’s minds that I’ve been there too long, and for that I respect it.

But I do think that the experience and the objectivity that I bring are indeed going to be important. Almost every candidate will tell you what you are already aware of, that the next three years are going to be very important to ARIN, its role in the industry, and will have impact on each and every one of you individually and as you represent your organizations.

There is also the issue, and I asked the question late yesterday in the open mic session, about the new Internet resource policy evaluation process. And that’s changing. And what it’s doing is concentrating more power for policy development, evaluation, and perhaps promotion to the community.

And I suggest that that is something that you all ought to pay attention to, because it does shift the way things work a little bit. And so, I think it makes what is already an important decision more important to you to make sure that you select, again as Marc said, from a good slate of candidates here, the people that you want to represent you.

I respectfully request your vote. I’d like to have it. I’ve quipped to some of my colleagues that I’ve read the first 10 chapters of the book that really I came to ARIN to read, and that, because of my academic interests in policy and standards, I wanted to see how the IPv4, IPv6 transition took place. I can’t think of a better seat in the house than this one. And so I’ve read 10 chapters, and if you’ll let me read the last chapter, I’d appreciate it. Thanks a lot.

(Applause)

MR. PLZAK: Thank you, Bill. Next is David Farmer. Here is his motivation and biography statements. Again, the information is on the website. David?

MR. FARMER: Well, I’m relatively new to ARIN. I came to my first ARIN meeting back in Denver. But I’m not new to the Internet community.

I know a lot of you from other endeavors. I’ve volunteered to host several IETF’s, AND ITU plenaries and a few other things. So that’s sort of who I am from that side of it.

I work from the University of Minnesota. I’m a senior network design engineer and network architect. And I have primary responsibilities for the University’s strategies for things like Internet II, and our external connectivity, and relations with all of these kinds of organizations from a technical aspect.

What I think I can bring to ARIN is the view of a large-scale end-user. I understand the scale problems of ISPs, but I also understand the problems of an end-user organization in dealing with the large-scale Internet. However, I think I can be – we’re more than just an end-user. We’re a service provider as well, internally and externally.

So I’ll just leave it at that. Thank you for your consideration. And I agree there is a great slate of candidates here. You can’t go wrong.

(Applause)

MR. PLZAK: Thank you, David. Next is Christopher Grundemann. His motivation statement and biography sketch is here. Again, information about him is on the website. And he had to walk the farthest way so far. No problem.

MR. GRUNDEMANN: Good morning. Yes, I’m Christopher Grundemann.

I was sitting there thinking about what I could say up here to introduce myself to everyone in less than three minutes. And my thoughts wandered back to 6th grade and a session on debate. It was an interactive class project. We were tasked with debating an issue and then switching sides to argue the opposite view. I remember the day as the first time I realized I had a knack, I guess, for not only seeing the strengths and weaknesses of the arguments of both sides of an issue, but also being able to bring an energy and excitement to either side as well.

And I think that skill as a devil’s advocate and as a mediator, as well as my passion for the Internet and its bottom-up grassroots structure are why I accepted the nomination and threw my hat into the ring. I believe in the Internet not just as a tool, but a revolution in communication. And probably more relevant to your vote, I believe in the way we’ve gotten to this point. That organized anarchy as some have called it, which allows anyone who wants a voice, to have a hand in shaping the future.

As a member of the ARIN Advisory Council, it would be my goal to preserve and protect that open community-based system that served us so well.

I think I can do that in part because of my experience as a network engineer, which has given me a fairly in-depth understanding of how the Internet works and how organizations and individuals make it work for them. Coupled with that experience is the skill I talked about, to be able to see the flaws in an idea that I agree with and to see the merit in ideas that I don’t, which I think lends itself very well to the policy process. And that’s why I think I can play an integral role in helping to build consensus around strong forward-looking policy that preserves and grows all the things we love about the Internet and ARIN’s place in it. Thank you.

(Applause)

MR. PLZAK: Next is Matt Pounsett. Here is his motivation and his biography statements. And again, information about Matt is on the website. Matt?

MR. POUNSETT: Hi, I’m Matt Pounsett. I got up here three years ago and basically asked everybody to vote for me because, well, I’m Canadian and there weren’t really – we had one Canadian on the AC at the time and felt we should expand that a bit more. And you know, I think we’ve done that. There’s been a couple of us there now. We’ve got a new Canadian up for the Board this year, which is going to be great.

I am looking forward to – now that we are spending more time down in the Caribbean – trying to get some people up from there and get more exposure from all of the different regions here.

But different from three years ago when I got up here is that we’ve got some new pressures on the community and the AC. We’re down to the last couple of years, as everybody knows, of the v4 world working the way we are used to it working. So we’re going to have a lot of important decisions that we are already looking at that are going to have to be made in the next couple of years. Not only because we need to find the right way forward for the Internet to continue functioning in a productive way for all of us, but also because, I think, that we’re going to have external pressures on us to not only make the right decisions, but be seen to be looking at all of the alternatives. If we are not spending all the time and energy we can on these things, we’re going to have people, especially once managers and accountants get concerned about the fact that they’re not getting the IPv4 addresses that they need, that we’re going to get a lot more interest and involvement from people who just haven’t been here and don’t really understand how well the system works.

And they will put pressures on us to change the way the system works to things they are more familiar with. And I think in order to in order to have some control over that we’re going to have to do a lot of work to show that we’re – that we really are in control of things and handling the issues as they come up.

And so, my hope is that on the AC I am able to continue, you know, providing guidance to the community, as well as listening to the community and getting ideas from people, and helping to incorporate those into our policies. And, you know, I think the new IP rep is going to help with that a lot.

Well, the fact that we have a great slate of candidates this year is going to help with that a lot. Like Bill said, there’s a lot of good people up this year. And so while I’m quite happy to accept your vote, I think it’s more important that you vote. And so please, you know, pay attention to everybody. Read everyone’s bios and make your selection. Thanks.

MR. PLZAK: Thanks, Matt. Next is Alex Rubenstein. He’s not here and he did not take the option to provide a statement. So I will do as I have always done in the past, which is read what you see before you on the screen.

Alex is currently a member of the Advisory Council. His motivation statement –

SPEAKER: Past member.

MR. PLZAK: Past member. Past member. I’ve been around too long, guys.

His motivation to serve on the AC is that he feels – I feel that my operational, and most importantly, business experience will be useful to the AC and the ARIN community during this time.

Short biography notes – my experiences in the operations of the regional Internet company, Net Access Corporation, since 1995. Prior to that, I worked for Planet Access Networks, an early commercial Internet company. I have also served on the ARIN AC from 2005 to 2007.

So I encourage you, since Alex did not have the opportunity to travel here, that you go to the website and read further his information.

Next is John Spence. Here’s his motivation and bio information. Again, you’ll find everything else you need to know about him on the website. John?

MR. SPENCE: Good morning. My name is John Spence. I’ve been working for – in the IT and networking community for quite a long time. I work for a company called Command Information where we do professional services, and training, and consulting application things around the transition from v4 to v6.

So, the place where I hope to be able to lend some expertise to the AC would be in that transition period, and managing that transition period, and kind of the dove-tailing of the policy with the work we have to do on the ground technically.

But mostly I am really kind of running on a platform of having worked on a lot of high-tech teams. I think all of us have, and there’s a lot of people on high-tech teams who have very firmly-held views on how things should be done. And I’m kind of an engineer through and through. So for me, solving any problem is kind of a simple case of kind of listening to the various topics, picking out the distracters and eliminating those, picking the good elements and trying to meld those into one good solution.

So on a team, I’m never the guy who is the most outspoken, but I’m the guy who is usually listening the hardest to try to find the most practical, kind of pragmatic solution that will help us move forward. So that’s what I hope to do on the AC. Thanks.

MR. PLZAK: Next is John Sweeting. Here’s his motivation statement and his biography. And he had this to say. He was a past member of the AC. John?

MR. SWEETING: Good morning. I am John Sweeting. I’ll give you a little bit of my background.

I’m currently working for Time Warner Cable, which I just started in the last few months, and I’m thrilled to be there. Prior to that, I spent seven years at the same company but under a few different names. It started out as Teleglobe owned by Bell Canada, and went on to be owned by a financial company, sold off to VSNL, and finally became Tata Communications.

My goals for running for the AC are that I like to be able to help ensure that all ideas are given equal time and consideration over the next critical few years. Also, to help the smooth transition to IPv6. While I was at Teleglobe, we were one of the leading networks in deploying IPv6 on our backbone and allowing customers and peers to connect to us throughout IPv6. And also to ensure that IPv4 resources remain a viable and accessible resource for all continued valid requirements.

I feel the experience that I gained over the six years that I served on the Advisory Council in the past and the 10 years that I’ve spent coming to ARIN meetings, and talking to people, and listening to everyone’s ideas and opinions, has given me a very good background to help get us through these next critical years.

I did want to leave one thought with you that’s actually an excerpt from General Colin Powell’s speech that he gave at Sears Corporate Headquarters in Chicago in 1999. And it goes, “Don’t be buffaloed from experts and elites. Experts often possess more data than judgment. Elites can become so inbred that they produce hemophiliacs who bleed to death as soon as they are nicked by the real world. Policies that emanate from ivory towers often have an adverse impact on the people out in the field who are fighting the wars or bringing in the revenues.”

And I think that some that is pretty good advice for what is going on in the Internet community today. Thank you.

MR. PLZAK: Thanks, John. So, that completes all the candidate speeches from the candidates for the AC. The bad news is that there is a whole lot of good candidates. The good news is that you get to pick five of them. Okay. And the hard task before you is to choose. And the thing that’s most important is for you, or the designated representative of your organization, to vote.

So, if you are the representative from your organization, please vote. If you are not and you know who it is, please get to that person and encourage that person to vote. If you don’t know who it is, contact Member Services at the election help desk here before you leave, or else send them an e-mail or give them a call, and they will tell you who it is. But the most important thing is to vote.

So now we move on to the speeches from the Board of Trustees candidates. You will be selecting two from the list that’s here. There are four candidates. Richard Swee is not here, but I do have a prepared statement from him that I will be reading later when it’s his turn.

So, the first person up is Timothy Denton. Here is his motivation and biography. And you can read more about him on the ARIN website. So, Timothy?

MR. DENTON: Good morning, everyone. My name is Timothy Denton. I’m here from Canada. I am a commissioner at the CRTC. I used to be self- employed, but they put me in a government job.

So I’ll deal with this first. Basically, in terms of the Canadian government, we have no interest in doing anything but to sustain and help the self government of the Internet by Internet institutions. And I’m not here in any official capacity whatever but as an expression of my personal interest deriving out of my career, which I will explain shortly.

So, I’m not here from government, and I’m not here to help you in that sense. I’m here as an individual who has had a lot of experience in assisting Internet service providers in their struggles against large telecom carriers.

About 10 or 12 years ago, my current employer, by coincidence, hired me way back when, when I was a consultant to study the Internet, and that was the basis of the conversion to understanding that something very important occurred here in the design of communication systems whereby, as we’re all aware, power was put to the edge and the kind of controlled communications organizations of the 20th century like telecom and broadcasting as we all now know threatened fundamentally by this newly and vitally important way of empowering people with communication devices. And I am firmly, firmly, firmly of the net head persuasion of the importance of the Internet and its revolution that it has accomplished and will continue to accomplish in providing freedom, power, and knowledge to people to use it.

In that respect then, it’s important for us to maintain the institutions of the Internet, of which ARIN is the essential one. And so my second study that was relevant was doing a study for the Internet Society this past summer which gave me the occasion to talk to Scott Bradner, whom I’ve known from a different association. And Scott and I got to talking and the subject of ARIN came up. And here I am, you know, nominated to be a member of the Board.

So, experience. I’ve sat on the Board of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority. I have been in the Registrars Association in the ICANN structure. I’ve had considerable background in domain names and dealing with the issues related to Internet service providers. For my pains, I have been selected out of – I don’t know how the process works – to go to the CRTC where my work will probably continue in the sense of defending the Internet against those who seek to regulate it in the Canadian context by the Broadcasting Act.

So, I have a very good degree of experience and an interest in things Internet. And it is a very great privilege to be asked to run for the Board of ARIN. And I look upon it as an opportunity to serve and give back to the institutions in a way that I think and hope will be useful.

So I have – if you examine what I have done in the past – I have a good agree of experience in matters related to the Internet from many different sides and perspectives. And I would now really like to get to what I think needs saying, which, of course, is that the transition to IPv6 is going to be extremely vital. That we’re entering into a period of flux and instability.

And I would like to give you an indication if I become a member of the Board the criterion by which I would wish to judge proposals. And the way I look at it is that these numbers must flow at the lowest possible price to the people who need to have these numbers – Internet service providers and thence on to their customers. And when we sit as the Board of Trustees examining proposals – be they markets or whatever that forward, transit mechanisms – I think the overriding concern that we need to have is to make sure that the continuity of the institutions and the continuity of the flow of numbers to those who need it, and that there not be any kind of price or other disruption to that flow.

Now remember, it always comes to mind how many people have remembered Dune? Hands raised. Dune, right? Remember the expression in Dune, “the spice must flow.” Well, IP numbers are the spice of the modern age, and nothing must be allowed to disrupt the flow. Not the emperor, not the Baron Harkonnen, not the International Telecommunications Union. And so to defend this institution, to assist it to work well, to make sure that the spice must flow, that’s why I’m here. And I don’t want any kind of disruption to that process or to these voluntary institutions that we uphold with our time and our effort. Thank you all.

MR. PLZAK: The next candidate is Vikas Khanna. And here is his motivation and his biography notes. And again, the information about him is on the website. Vikas? You have no slides, correct?

MR. KHANNA: Hi, my name is Vikas Khanna. It’s easy after you say it a couple of hundred times. Before I kind of get started I want to thank ARIN for allowing me the opportunity to come and talk before all of you.

I really want to kind of convey a couple of points. My position on the ARIN Board of Trustees is that it is not necessarily a technical position. There is an Advisory Council. That Advisory Council’s job is to ensure that the Board of Trustees has the right information to enact change in new policy, and that’s primarily where my focus is. So it’s really more in corporate government, fiduciary responsibility, and ensuring that there is a really successful long-term strategy for the business. Because that’s basically what ARIN is. ARIN is a business.

I have experience sitting on for-profit boards, non-profit boards, and I understand the challenges associated with all of that.

Lastly, the second point, I am very committed to, if elected, making sure that things work as they are supposed to work. And candidly I am all about doing the right thing because it’s not about me; it’s not about you as a service provider.

To some extent it’s about your customer and the impact that they will also face. So in lieu of that commitment, or an example of that commitment, I was kind of thinking about this this morning. I got done last night at about midnight. I’m based in San Jose. We were doing some 2009 plannings at Covad where I work. I woke up this morning at 4:00 to drive 30 minutes to the airport to take an hour flight to come here to take another 30-minute cab ride to this Biltmore hotel to stand in front of you for 60, 120 seconds, to turn around, go back to the airport, catch another flight, go back to the office, and finish up the 2009 planning.

So that I will leave up to you as a commitment to myself in terms of being here, and you know, asking for your vote, or as a demonstration if I should just be committed. So I’ll just leave that up to you to decide. That’s it.

MR. PLZAK: The next candidate is Richard Swee. Here is his motivation and biographic information. As I stated earlier, he did provide a statement for me to read, and I will do that at this time.

My name is Dick Swee, and I want to thank you for nominating me to the ARIN Board of Trustees.

I am sorry I could not attend in person today. Please vote for me to be on the Board of Trustees. Being an outsider, I will encourage ARIN to be more open and get the entire membership more involved with greater participation in the elections and policymaking. Let’s harness the energy of the entire community and bring fresh ideas to the IPv4 to IPv6 transition.

Some have likened this transition to the current financial crisis we find ourselves in. So we must draw on the best talent from all sources to accomplish this important and critical step in the evolution of the Internet. It is important to provide a focus for the transition and minimize tangents that will draw energy away from what we know must be accomplished.

My background includes over 30 years of experience as a corporate officer starting, developing, and managing engineering support, manufacturing organizations and growing companies, start-ups, and turn-around situations. I have taken two companies to acquisition, one to Cisco, and have taken a third company to IPO. They include products from massively parallel super computer systems to Class 5 switches with millions of subscribers. I have also started up companies from scratch and taken them to be profitable with millions of installed customers in 40 countries around the world.

As a result of my experience, I understand the complexities and implications of accomplishing technology changes worldwide. It must be done carefully, and it must be done right. But most of all, it must be done.

I was part of the group that defined the initial OSI 7-layer reference model that is widely used today. I also participated in the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, CNRI, that provided the highly successful privatization of the Internet.

I hope you vote for me so I can help accomplish ARIN’s goals and harness the entire community’s talents to move the Internet forward as it expands into new uses and applications, both wired and wireless mobility. Thank you. Dick Swee.

(Applause)

MR. PLZAK: And the last candidate is Bill Woodcock, who is currently a member of the Board. Here is his motivation and qualification statement. Bill?

MR. WOODCOCK: Hi. I’m currently serving on the Board at your collective will and hope to again.

I think you’ve already heard from a lot of people speaking here about the importance of the v4 and v6 transition. That’s something that’s consuming a lot of the Board’s attention at this point; something that will continue to over the next three-year term.

I think something that probably has received less public attention is the thinking that the Board has been putting into membership structure and how that can be improved. The thoughts that I have on that that I would like to share – hoping that you’ll see things the same way and consequently put me back to work at – I would like to see all RSA signatories given the same voting rights that the ISP’s have right now. That is, we have a huge pool of end-user user ARIN resource recipients who right now are disenfranchised from voting on Board and AC issues. I would like to see that fixed. I would also like to see a much higher rate of participation in the voting. Those are two things that the Membership Overhaul Study Committee has been looking at.

A much more minor thing that I started talking with other Board members about after the last meeting and have a little bit more at this meeting is carbon balancing the organization, particularly the meetings. We have big meetings with a lot of people who fly to them, and environmental responsibility is one of the things that the Board should provide some guidance on. So, like I say, that’s a minor things and perhaps a hobbyhorse, but one that I will continue riding in the next three years if re-elected.

I presume most of you in the room know basically who I am. I have been running Internet service providers and content delivery networks since 1989. Before that, I did inter-enterprise e- mail gatewaying across the Internet, but of course nobody knew that the backend part was the Internet because all they knew that their e-mail was mysteriously somehow getting to other organizations.

So I have been doing this for awhile. I think I have a background that is very similar to many of the other people who have the biggest stake in the outcome of address policy. I think you understand what my motivations are and how they are similar to your own. So I think you probably also understand why it is that my positions and work go in the same direction that yours would if you were sitting in my stead. And I think that’s the essence of representative democracy, and I think that’s why you’d be well served if you vote for me again.

So thank you very much. And I hope to serve again.

MR. PLZAK: So, reminder, one vote per general member in good standing cast by the designated member representative of the organization. You vote for two candidates and five Advisory Council candidates. The polls have already opened. They opened at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time, and close one week from today at noon Eastern Daylight Time.

So, any questions you may have, there’s an election handout flier in your meetings folder. And you can also go to the website, and we do have a help desk. So with that I’ll say thank you.

Member Services

MR. PLZAK: Now, let’s move on to the reports from the various ARIN departments. We will begin with the report from Member Services. The director, Susan Hamlin.

MS. HAMLIN: Thank you. Thank you, Ray. Good morning, everyone.

I’m going to talk about some of our current activities and member services, and some things coming soon. First of all, this is a picture of the department. We have two new members since our meeting in Denver. Jud Lewis, Membership Coordinator you heard from earlier this morning, and Scott Gordon, our Web Designer, joined us this summer. So all of Member Services is here. I hope you’ve had a chance to meet everyone.

Take a look at the membership statistics. This is a chart showing the past three years and a breakdown between members. Oops, this is flipped, sorry. Two membership categories. The majority of members are what we call automatic members. Anyone who receives a direct allocation from ARIN of IPv4 or IPv6 space becomes a member automatically. Membership in addition is open to anyone by simply filling out an application form on the ARIN website and paying annual dues. Regardless of how one becomes a member, you have the same rights and privileges.

This is a look at our membership by geographic distribution. We have the three service areas – United States, Caribbean, North Atlantic islands and Canada. And then we have a few members from outside of our geographic area.

Looking at the services we provide, these are the main categories – communications, corporate documents, elections, outreach, policy development.

Just a few things I’d like to call your attention to. The graphic on the upper left is the cover of the annual report. And this year, we published it in a different format, in a flash version available on the website. So, if you haven’t had a chance to see it, I would encourage you to go take a look. It’s on the About Us Annual Report, and we would love some feedback as we look to develop a process for next year.

And also call your attention to the ARIN consultation and suggestion process. It is indeed active. We’ve had 21 suggestions this year. You can find an archive of all suggestions received and their resolution on the ARIN website.

Some of our projects we have been undertaking the last couple of months. Obviously you have heard a lot about voting. Earlier in the year, we solicited feedback from the designated representative asking those who haven’t participated what it would get to or how we can encourage them to vote. A lot of the feedback was we need more communication, more e-mails, more mail. So we took that to heart and developed some new materials, and we hope it will be effective.

We have also held two additional public policy meetings this year in the Caribbean region. You’ve heard a lot about that, and we are going to continue with a new one next year. And I reported in Denver that we are working on a new website redesign. We are indeed still working on it. The secure login button on the homepage will at least give you a clue of the new color design coming forward. If the roll-out doesn’t get caught up in the holiday mail, we hope to deliver it by the end of the year. If not, you’ll see it early next year.

Coming soon, we are going to introduce a meeting fellowship program. You’ll be seeing details about this on the website before the end of the year. But basically, ARIN will offer the opportunity to participants from each of these geographic sectors to attend their first meeting. And we hope to encourage more participation and more diverse participation. ARIN will be funding hotel, flight, and meeting registration fees for these individuals.

In February, next year, we will be holding another public policy meeting in Barbados. Like the two we held earlier this year, the information will be fed to the Advisory Council and published on the public policy mailing list.

April of next year, we’ll be going to San Antonio. The dates are announced on the ARIN website, so we look forward to seeing you there. And for those who are participating remotely this time with our enhanced remote participation, we hope it’s been a good experience and you will join us again in April.

Looking ahead, further down the road to 2010, we are going to try something a little different and are talking about three meetings based in geographic areas. So we will work to have a meeting in February in the Caribbean, in June we’ll be going to Canada, and then in October we’ll be in the U.S. And again, it will be a back-to-back meeting with NANOG. This is can experiment of sorts to see if we can gain greater participation in these geographic areas.

We are hoping with the continuation of enhanced remote participation, those that are unable to attend physically all three meetings, will be able to online participate just as fully as if you were with us in the room. So we look forward to seeing how this works.

And that’s it. Any questions?

SPEAKER: Microphone.

SPEAKER: I’m at the microphone. WP: Did you get a read on having the back-to-back with NANOG was effective in getting additional participation this session?

MS. HAMLIN: Absolutely. And for the past four years when we’ve held back-to-back meetings we’ve had an overlap. The first time of about 50, up to this time almost 120 participants that stayed over. So we’ve heard nothing but positive feedback.

Any other questions? Thank you.

(Applause)

MR. PLZAK: Thanks, Susan.

Registration Services

MR. PLZAK: Next will be the Registration Services report from Leslie.

MS. NOBILE: Good morning everyone. Am I doing something wrong? Oh, I was. Sorry.

Okay. So what is RSD up to these days? Besides our daily work with lots of templates and phone calls, etc., we work on projects – a lot of them.

Right now we have been working on outreach to legacy address space holders. And we’ve gone through the series of sending letters to class A, B, and C registrants to notify them of the legacy RSA.

So we’re now in the process of sending the letters to class C registrants. We’ve got a little over 14,000 identified, and are in the process, as I’ve said. I have a stat letter that shows the results of these letters in this outreach effort.

We are working on something called Suggestion 2008.17. It said if ARIN would add a last contacted date to the WHOIS database and begin a process of contacting ORGs that have not been contacted in over a year, it would help the rest of us who use the WHOIS database. So we examined that, and we thought we could probably do this. This is kind of a light version of an outreach and contact effort, but we can do this. So, we looked at the database and we found that there’s about 35,000. This is incorrect, I’m sorry. Its not POCs; it is ORGs in ARIN’s database that directly registered resources. Now, that includes legacy and non- legacy. And it includes v4, v6, and autonomous system numbers. So we thought we can start sending letters. We’ll stagger it and ask people to update their records. Go into WHOIS, look at your record, and update it if it is incorrect.

So that’s starting in January of 2008. And we’ll also be adding the last contacted field to WHOIS per the suggestion so that will be updated as we send these letters out. And you can see when we’ve attempted to contact organizations.

We are doing a lot of work in lame delegation, testing, and follow-up. I went over this on Sunday in the policy BOF. But the process is that lame delegations are tested daily until they test good or they’re removed. If they’re still lame after 30 consecutive days of testing, we notify the POCs, and if still lame 30 days after the initial notification, the POCs are notified again. So that’s a 60-day bucket at this point. And if they’re still lame 30 days after the second notification, which is going on 90 days of being lame, the delegation is analyzed manually and tested manually by an analyst. And the name servers are stripped if the delegation is determined to be inoperative.

The stats are here as of October 8th. We had roughly 25,000 total lame delegations, 19,000 plus had tested lame for 30 consecutive, and 612 had tested lame for 60 consecutive days. We’ve sent notifications – the 30 and 60 day notifications to over 5,000 ORGs, and there’s 547 name servers waiting to be stripped. And we stripped 95 of them thus far.

These are our usual statistics as of August 31st. So a monthly average of about 48,000 templates for processing, and that includes all types of templates. Non-template e-mail, which is host master stuff where you actually have to answer questions, and this is real questions. There’s no spam included in that. That’s 757 average a month, and a little over 1,000 phone calls – 1,100 phone calls per month.

I keep getting asked are we seeing an increased demand for the IPv4 space? Are people hoarding space? Are they clueing in that it’s running out? Are they coming in? I’m also being asked what about v6 space? Are there more people coming in for v6? So we looked at requests received and space issued. The IPv4 requests received – it’s sort of all over the place. But ultimately, when you look at the bottom numbers – this is just the past two years I looked at – but I put the year-end totals at the bottom. About 2,200 requests for v4 space in 2006, about 2,300 in 2007, and 2008 is probably going to be very similar. So we really haven’t seen a lot more requests coming in at this point – not over the past couple of years.

Are we issuing more v4 space? Well, no. It’s pretty flat. Again, ups and downs. When the big ISPs come in, we issue more. In 2006, right around three /8s were issued in total; 2007 about three; and 2008, maybe a little over three again. So there’s no indication that people are, you know, hoarding, or asking for more, or trying to stock up.

Not at this point anyway. But v6 requests, this is kind of encouraging. We are receiving more v6 requests. 2007 was our year high, and 2008 we are going to receive more than 2007. At least it’s trending that way. And as far as v6 allocations issued, there is a clear growth trend in here. And yeah, obviously, 2008 we’ve already issued more allocations than we did in 2007, and we still have a quarter of the year to go. So v6 is definitely happening in our region at this point.

Legacy resources. We’ve been talking a lot about legacy resources and how much work does ARIN do on legacy records. So we looked at ORG templates processed over the past year. We’ve only gone back a year. Seventy five percent of the new ORG templates and ORG modifications that we are doing are for ARIN-issued resources only. So they have a direct relationship with ARIN – a contract if you will. A RSA. Sixteen percent of the ORG mods we do are for legacy resources only. Nine percent of the ORG mods we do are for ORGS that have ARIN-issued and legacy resources – ARIN-issued space and legacy resources.

But when you look at net modifications, that’s where we’re doing about 50-50. We’re processing net mods for 51 percent of the ORGs with ARIN-issued space, and 49 percent of the time we’re doing them for organizations with legacy space. And that’s a total of 4,000 templates over last year that we’re talking about.

Legacy RSA requests. This is where I was going to go back to. We had sent over 4,400 letters to the Class A and B holders at the end of February and the beginning of March. And that’s when our requests spiked. So that was really actually successful, we thought. And we’re anticipating – well, I can tell you that we’re having quite an increase in the number of requests coming in now as a result of sending out the Class C letters. So these numbers will look – our monthly totals will spike again, I believe, with these letters.

Right now, as of August 31st, we’ve had 317 requests for legacy RSAs. There are still 174 pending because, as you know, we vet them very carefully and make sure that the registrant is the correct registrant. One hundred twenty nine have been signed, and 14 – it says not required, but really what that was was people with reassignments or people that just – we cannot verify that they are the original registrant, and we can’t let them sign the Legacy RSA until we can verify that they are the person that is holding the resources legitimately.

That is all I have. Are there any questions?

MR. PLZAK: One over here.

MR. WOODCOCK: On Suggestion 2008-17, it looks as though the wording and your interpretation of the wording are both what is being published. Is the date on which you last attempted to contact them rather than the date on which anybody has heard from them. And I can see there is a danger in publishing the date anybody has heard from them, but it seems much more meaningful.

MS. NOBILE: That date already exist it’s called last updated date. We have it.

MR. WOODCOCK: Wait. Is the last updated date the last date of change or the last time anybody heard from them?

MS. NOBILE: Well, it’s the last date of change. Yeah.

MR. WOODCOCK: Right. So if you contacted someone and found out that their data was still accurate, that’s the date that isn’t being published and still won’t be.

MS. NOBILE: Correct. There won’t be any correlation between last – yes. That is very true.

SPEAKER: Last successful contact.

MR. WOODCOCK: Last successful contact seems interesting.

MS. NOBILE: Right. To be honest, our reply on this suggestion – you can see it in the ACSP – was this is a huge undertaking. If we were going to go full on to a re-registration and really follow up in contact and really do this, it would require membership input. It would require Board direction. This is not something you can do with eight people. So I think it’s something that needs to be discussed more. The person who sent in the suggestion was happy with our reply as is. But we sort of all understand there’s more work to be done.

Okay.

MR. PLZAK: We’ve got someone there.

MS. NOBILE: Hi, Randy.

MR. BUSH: Randy Bush, IIJ. Gosh, you East Coasters sure do talk fast.

MS. NOBILE: Oh, did I? Darn. Sorry.

MR. BUSH: The lame delegation stuff. Don’t mean to create serious work, but there’s a curve in, you know, they were lame; you tested them over time; and they responded after five days so you dropped them from the list.

It would be interesting two see that curve in time which would give you some confidence that you really had milked it for what it was worth. And it’s a long-tailed distribution and you’ve got the elephant, and the long tail can go to hell.

MS. NOBILE: Okay.

MR. BUSH: Am I making sense?

MS. NOBILE: Yeah, probably to Mark more than to me. Yes, we can look at that. Thanks, Randy.

MR. KOSTERS: Just to follow-up on this. We’ve gone about this very conservatively because of all the really sort of very interesting cases corner cases that we’ve seen in DNS regarding this.

So in that regard, David Huberman has actually gone through and said, okay, is the e-mail actually working for this lame delegation? Are they receiving the notices? And are they ignoring it? If so, let’s go ahead on work on getting those delegations stripped. And that’s the last step of the process that Leslie talked about. And actually that’s pretty aggressive in terms of someone’s DNS may have been working and we turn it off. And we certainly don’t want to do that.

So as we go through this, hopefully people will say, hey, look, these guys actually do have a stick and they may use it, so we really do need to get these things fixed as opposed to ignoring these messages.

And Randy is right. It would be good for us to do a graph showing how things get better.

MS. NOBILE: Okay. Thank you.

Financial Services

MR. PLZAK: Next will be Bob Stratton with the financial report.

MR. STRATTON: Good morning, everybody. Let’s get right down to it. The year to date in review. We’ll go over FSD staff. How we’ve been digitizing the RSAs. Our work with the engineers on integration of the financial information on the website for the future. Also, how we’ve implemented the financial controls from our past Sarbanes-Oxley audits. In today’s environment we’ve been carefully monitoring our financial situation and who we do business with – where we keep our accounts and such.

Here is a picture of the staff. You’ve probably seen Tammy and Amy who have been here at the registration desk. A newbie in the middle is Cathy Murphy. She’s going to help us as a contract analyst; also a legal analyst for us. As ARIN grows up, we need more and more administrative help in keeping up with the day-to-day administrative activities.

Digitizing the RSAs. As you’ve heard, we have about 12,000 of them. They were overrunning the office as it were, but also there’s a security issue in actually keeping hard-copy documents at your office in case some disaster strikes. So we outsourced the scanning of these. We’ve digitized them. They’ve been indexed by the ORG ID, thus easier retrieval. We’ve moved the hard copies off- site to an archive, and on a quarterly basis, or half-year basis, or whatever, we’re finding out how much – as the marginal new ones come in, we will then send them out to be scanned and joined in the database, and move those off-site as it were.

We’re working with engineers on integrating the accounting records to the website functionality. Bottom line here is, hopefully in the future you’ll be able to check your account to see if you owe us anything. You’ll be able to pay it. You’ll be able to see probably two years of past history on-site. This will all be tied together by ORG IDs. We’re learning all about requirements, which is we knew before, but MarK and his team love that stuff.

Financial controls implementation. In the last four years, we’ve undergone two Sarbanes-Oxley audits. ARIN as a 501(c)(6) is not required to undergo such audits, but the Board felt it was a best practice to go ahead and undergo them.

Two of the important material suggestions from the auditors are a lock box and payroll account. A lock box is you send your checks to us to a P.O. box. It goes directly to the bank operation right next to a postal service operation. The check gets processed a lot faster. The checks are delivered over to the bank processing about 10 times a day, which is a lot faster than it would hit our office, and they are immediately put in the account. And this also allows ARIN employees not to touch the checks at all, which is the main purpose of this.

Also, we set up a separate payroll account. Our payroll was coming out of the operating account. We’ve set up a separate account.

It’s funded on an automatic basis every two weeks. This sets a ceiling on how much money comes out in any given payroll, and we keep it at a minimum after the account is drained when the payroll does the direct deposits.

Monitoring ARIN’s financial position. There seems to be some minor turmoil out there. But anyway, we’ve kept management and the treasurer informed. The FINCOM is aware of what’s going on. We’ve monitored the institutions that we do business with – our bank, our investment advisor that handles reserve investments. In the midst of all this turmoil it is good to keep your head, so we’ve continued the investment program. When we get to the treasurer’s report I’ll go into more detail in that.

I look for some news that’s not necessarily negative. The economists had a chart of what the dollar has done versus the euro, and it has been climbing quite dramatically in the past few months. The dollar is still the main reserve currency. It’s about 63 percent of the global reserve currency out there. I think today the dollar is up to like $1.34, so it’s even gone up higher from the $1.40 you see there. This actually helps ARIN in the sense that our international travel will go down somewhat.

Also, in the same economist magazine they had an information technology competitive index survey, and the U.S. still remains a fairly amiable place to have an IT company, which is good news. And with that, it’s good to see everybody. Thank you.

SPEAKER: You have a question.

MR. PLZAK: Owen?

MR. DeLONG: Owen DeLong, ARIN AC. I think it’s great we’re digitizing the RSAs. Are we making any effort where we could perhaps take them via PDF and reduce our carbon footprint, forest destruction, et cetera?

MR. STRATTON: We’ve talked about that. I think right now the engineers have a full plate, but we would like to do that in the future.

One of the issues therein is, okay, if you go ahead and sign it and send it to us in a digital form, then we have to print it out and sign it and redigitize it to send it back to you unless electronic signatures are in place. And how many people have the capability of electronic signatures is another question.

MR. PLZAK: Thanks, Bob.

Engineering

MR. PLZAK: Next up is the engineer report. Mark Kosters, the Chief Technology Officer and director of engineering.

MR. KOSTERS: Thank you, Ray. Before I begin I’d like to start out with a story and history so you can see what the slides are all about in this presentation.

So, as many of you know who were at the last meeting, John came up wearing a suit. He really did look pretty dapper. And I was kind of – well, I was intimidated. So when I got up on stage I figured, well, I’ve got to say something. So didn’t I say something about taking my shirt off or something?

SPEAKER: Oh, please.

MR. KOSTERS: So I saw the look of fear. And you know what? I’m okay with that. But when I got back to the office, the fear was like doubled over in the office. So when it came time to do this particular presentation, the staff helped me out. And so please kind of look at the pictures coming up here and see if this can help sort of highlight all the good things that engineering is doing.

So here we have the staffing of engineering. One of the things you’ll notice is that we’re down to 6.5 people in operations, or excuse me, in development. And this is because Bob has taken Cathy Murphy, who is actually a lawyer by trade, and has kind of had her wonderful capabilities there in helping his staff. So we are down a little bit. We had to rejigger things a little bit. Andy is taking over management responsibilities for the development staff. In Quality Assurance we have three people, and in Requirements we have one.

So this is a picture of an ox, but I kind of wish it was a donkey. I live in the country and I have a neighbor that’s about three miles away, and every once and awhile I can hear the donkey go off because he got kind of irritated. And that’s kind of like operations. When something goes wrong, they get kind of irritated and make all sorts of noise until it gets fixed. And, of course, it’s their job to get it fixed. And it’s good to see that. Really, things are working out quite well in operations and they’ve been very quiet.

One of the things that they’ve done is they’ve rebuilt the Colo in Ashburn. And now we’re serving up all the /8s that have previously just been done by VeriSign. So now we’re doing reverse lookups for the /8s that ARIN is an authoritative for. And we plan on rolling that out on the West Coast, as well.

We haven’t announced the winner of the facility where our West Coast is going to be – where our West Coast facility is going to be. It’s in the final sort of contract negotiations, but we’re close.

We have a disaster recovery site being planned. And one of the things we like to do there is be more sort of active. I don’t know if many of you have seen ARIN’s office, but it is an interesting place to work on a couple of different front. One is it’s right off the runway. And I have a neighbor who actually works at the Dulles Airport Authority. And he kind of scared me by telling me how many parts actually come off of planes when they take off. And I imagine that some of this may hit ARIN’s facility at one point.

And if that doesn’t work, right next door also is the Fairfax County Police Force Training Academy. And it’s interesting, the fact that you hear the sirens going off all the time. Even occasionally you hear machine guns. I just hope one of those guys don’t become sort of errant and start spraying our facility. So in that case we figured that having a disaster recovery site is actually a good thing.

We also have v6 now to our desktop, so we’re trying to eat our own dog food when it comes to actually promoting the use of v6. And as we go around to all these different meeting places, we have various sort of v6 experiments that we try to do here. There was one that we were doing here that was pretty sort of low-key that Bill Manning helped put together dealing with the new sort of ALG using IVI instead of NATPT that we’ve used previously. It wasn’t quite ready for everybody for real use, but we did go around with a couple of pieces of paper and how many people actually sort of exercised the box. And hopefully it is something that can be a little bit more robust as we go forward.

Another thing that we have coming up that’s not quite ready for prime time but it’s there as projects@arin.net. It’s an open source repository. And we have two pieces of software on that right now. One of them, for you who have been here for awhile, it’s going to be kind of funny, is that our WHOIS is rehosted there now. The other one is that we have a copy of the RESCERT work that ISC has been doing for us that we’re actively working on. That’s also there for you guys to actually use and start playing with as well.

The final thing that Operations has been doing, and they’ve been doing an incredible job, is moving the legacy applications and equipment onto new modern hardware and making environments to make it easier for us to actually throw things out into the community faster.

So here you see the WHOIS statistics. This is actually one of those really good charts that is much like the Internet growth. It keeps on rising to the right. And we’re currently seeing about 87 queries per second, which is great. The boxes aren’t breaking a sweat and it’s going pretty well. No outages really to speak of, so this is really good stuff.

The IRR – the crickets still chirp here. There’s just not much use for the IRR, especially on the WHOIS interface. And it sees two queries every three minutes. So this is something that we continue to look at, but it certainly does not get much use.

SPEAKER: Are you interested in more traffic?

MR. KOSTERS: If it’s useful.

SPEAKER: Useful whom? Anyway, keep going.

MR. KOSTERS: So, okay, here we have the origin AS versus route views. This is a policy that was put in place about a year and a half ago allowing registrants to actually also record their origin AS that’s associated with that network allocation. And what’s been interesting, I’ve been doing this for about a year now, and the information under WHOIS has increased by order of magnitude in terms of the number of entries within WHOIS that actually has the origin AS associated with it.

What is equally amazing is that there has not been a lot of atrophy when it comes to the data.

The data is actually fairly good there, 91 percent. That actually does much better – bodes much better than what we have seen in the IRR, which actually over time has atrophied quite a bit. And it’s basically – frankly, it’s a crap shot whether or not it is correct or not within the IRR.

So it’s something we look at. Something we continue to monitor. And this is something that we hoped to use hopefully as a bootstrap to do RESCERT, which is a much better solution coming up.

Okay, here we go into the pictures. Another picture. So this is development. And when they get requirements, this is definitely what Andy looks like. Excuse me. Especially on secure login. Secure login has been a long effort for us. It has been a great thing for us to actually move forward on so you guys can actually see us moving to the modern world. And I encourage you guys to actually use this. And Andy gave a demo of this after the meeting last night. And for you who stayed – that were able to play with it – I think that’s great. And I encourage more and more of you to use it. We love to have your feedback on moving forward. We plan on doing a lot more to it as well.

There’s been multiple improvements to the existing systems – lame being one of them – something that we are continually trying to strive to be better at. Resource certification is another project that we have going on. DNSSEC is coming, and is something we’re probably going to be doing next year, and implementing various suggestions from the community.

Here’s quality assurance. This is a new group. And so here we have Chicken Little. It’s broken. It’s broken. And they’re quite good at it. Don’t ask me why it’s naked though.

So this is something that Tim has done a great job on building from the ground up. Tim has been asked to go into this role. He actually has had a lot of sort of interesting challenges to overcome. One of which, getting really clueful people into his organization. And he’s been doing a great job at using temporaries and so on to staff his office, and they’ve done a great job.

And what’s interesting about this – I don’t know, how many of you guys have actually done sort of web browser server development? So I don’t know about you, but browsers really suck. They suck in multiple ways. And one of the biggest ways that they suck is that none of them render the same. And so this made it a big sort of effort from the QA perspective, making sure as many browsers as we could support actually render correctly. And it’s something that we strive to actually do. And we now have a fairly broad browser support. IPv6 people, good luck. But for the rest of us it’s actually, I think, quite good. There’s still some rendering issues here and there, but for the most part it seems to be working pretty well. And it’s had full regression testing, so it’s actually quite a solid piece of code.

And this is requirements. And if you knew Erica, who used to the membership coordinator, this is Erica to a T. She’s out there with a bazooka saying give me feedback on these requirements, or else. The biggest part of this is actually building testable systems, and in doing so creating sort of functional audits, and so on and so forth. Also, the bigger part of this is documenting functionality because one of the things coming into ARIN is that it’s much like the rest of the Internet. There’s a lot of things that are known by the people who have been there a long time, but for people coming out and trying to build into new systems, there is not a lot of documentation to help build these things that we’re trying to build so that we can actually impel ourselves forward and actually faster.

So, you know, upcoming challenges that we have, I don’t know who the Dude is behind – underneath the hippo. I was going to say that was myself, but I’m not sure that’s a good idea. So one of the things that we’re going to be doing is aside from the secure login features that we talked about, is that we are going to have next – a white paper coming out that is going to discuss sort of some ideas in dealing with next-generation directory services.

WHOIS is being used in multiple forms, whether it be the data that is served up by WHOIS or the protocol itself. The protocol is just way weak and does not really suit some of the things that we need to do. And there’s a bunch of ideas out there – IRIS is one of them – as terms of a protocol that can serve up the data in a more appropriate manner, maybe an alternative, but this paper that’s coming out is going to help sort of promote the idea of, okay, how can we go forward because we really need to do something about this.

MR. MANNING: Mark, that’s the ARIN general member in good standing under the hippo. Because they’ve got to pick up all this extra crap.

MR. KOSTERS: Oh, okay. Thank you, Bill. The other thing is that we’re – RESCERT and DNSSEC – they’re both dealing with complex security interactions. And you can see here that these are going to be pretty interesting projects coming out, and it’s all trying to do the right things for the Internet. Dealing with the two weak areas, both DNS and also dealing with assisting the routing infrastructure in the best ways we can.

The last thing is helping identify fraud and helping build systems that will help Leslie identify people who, frankly, take a lot of their time as they try to smoke them out and making sure only legitimate requesters actually come through the door.

So with that, I’ll end. Are there any questions?

MR. WILLIAMSON: Hey, Mark. David Williamson, TellMe Networks.

I’ve noticed again that ARIN is the only IRR with a WHOIS server that doesn’t accept cyber- style queries. In fact, there’s no CIDR to say, yes, thank you. We don’t take those kind of queries, go away. There was a suggestion made like more than a year go to fix that. I’m wondering if it’s going to get fixed?

MR. KOSTERS: One of the things – wait for the white paper. Well, it’s a question of how long do we want to keep on using something that’s kind of – is not quite right anymore. And whether or not we want to keep on buttressing and spending time and resources fixing something that’s not quite right, or do we want to go to something new? And that’s one of the reasons why I think the white paper helps tell that.

MR. CURRAN: That’s fine. That’s an entirely reasonable answer. Obviously it just seems like it’s taking a long time. So I understand there’s limited resource and everything else. I just kind of wondered if there is a time period associated with that at this point or a plan that’s published. I haven’t gone looking, to be honest. Thanks.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Just to understand, so, obviously if it was a minor problem or a little configuration change, I expect it would have been done. So I’m expecting it’s probably more than that for ARIN to change. So to help understand, how big of an issue is it for you that it doesn’t accept CIDR notation?

MR. KOSTERS: It’s really frustrating when you, I don’t know, stumble across something in a routing table and you just kind of cut and paste. And then you have to go, oh, wait, okay, I’ve got to go look again. It’s just extra time to commit online. It’s not really a big deal. It’s just a minor frustration that on the outside it looks really simple to fix. It may not be, but it’s odd that we’re the only one that doesn’t.

SPEAKER: Okay, thank you.

MR. PLZAK: It was that problem and a bunch of others that Mark alluded to, which is why I asked him to begin preparation on the white paper. As you know, WHOIS has been broken for a long time.

One of the reasons that I hired Mark was that he and I worked together at Network Solutions way back when in the ’90s when he wrote RWhois, and so I had to bring him back to nurture his own dog food there, as well.

Regarding who was under the hippo, staff had taken a vote in a chatroom and said, well, that’s Mark. However, as an alternative there’s always the little statue there wearing the pink ARIN shirt. You can take your pick.

So, with that let me – that’s the only person that Mark has not identified in his staff, so we had to give you a choice of who you want it to be.

Human Resources and Administration

MR. PLZAK: So now I’d like to call on Mary K Lee to provide the Human Resources and Administration report.

MS. LEE: Good morning. Once again I have to follow after Mark Kosters. I thought I arranged not to do that anymore. How did that happen?

Let’s see. Just a little update about the department. A very small department, some events, and a little talk about movies. We’re the wearer of many hats in the H.R. And Administration Department because in some ways we’re really more of a function than a department. We’re there to support everyone. So Teresa Woodfork has been back at the office all week long, and she, along with Cathy Murphy, had been watching the painters. The entire ARIN facility was painted this week while we were in Los Angeles.

And I think most of you know Therese, who didn’t travel to this meeting but has been taking the minutes at the various BOT meetings and some others, and keeping an eye on the Board, the AC, the exec team, and anything else that needs doing. And me, whom all of you have met many times.

We just recently completed our third salary survey. We do them every three years. Once again, we’re very pleased with the results. Our salaries are slightly above median salaries for the size of our company, the area, and technology companies. In addition to that, in our benefits, we’re in the 90th percentile. So maybe we might be considered to lag slightly in salaries with the more competitive ISPs and things like that, we more than make up for it with our benefits.

Some recent anniversaries – Richard Jimmerson, who has been in New Orleans all week just had his 10 year anniversary, so I’d like to congratulate him.

And we have had four recent five-year anniversaries. Two of them are here today – Einar Bohlin and Megan Kruse. And David Huberman was here and went to the office, and Doreen Maraffa in Leslie’s department. So congrats to all of them.

Training and education. We spend a fair amount of money on training and education. We have four people actively working on completing their Bachelor’s degrees. And training in the office – a little bit of this and that. This year, some Oracle training, some contracts management, and a few other courses.

Employee statistics. We’re currently at full-time employees, although we are currently utilizing temps and consultants more than we ever have in the past. We have 26 men, 22 women among full-time, and our average tenure is about five years.

Here’s your employee longevity. At this point 62 percent of the company has been at ARIN for four years or more. We’re very stable, which is excellent. It just means good work teams, good history, good tenure with the company. We’ve had a little turnover and a little growth in the last year and a half. We’ve actually had 11 hires in the last year, which has been very busy for me, and Therese, and Teresa.

And every ARIN meeting I send out to the staff about a month before we go, a survey. And I think you’ve all heard interesting information about kind of what we like, and what we drive, and what our background is. Well, of course we’re in Los Angeles, so we had to talk about movies.

So favorite movies. This category was action. And hands down everybody loved the Raider movies, the Raiders of the Lost Ark, and pretty much anything with Arnold in it.

Classics. This was Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, and It’s a Wonderful World.

Drama. This was the category that I had all over the map. This was the only movie that was mentioned more than once, and it was only mentioned twice. So there are about 40 favorite dramas at ARIN.

Comedies were a little easier. “Can you fly this plane and land it?”

“Surely, you can’t be serious.” “I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley.” Airplane was one of the favorites. And along with that the Rush Hour movie and a few others mentioned were Grumpy Old Men and Sleepless in Seattle.

And technical movies. Of course, lots of answers on this one, and by far everyone loved – War Games was just mentioned over and over again. But another technical movie was The Matrix movie, and that also was the most mentioned movie of any movies whatsoever.

Oh, it didn’t work. Rats. That one didn’t work.

“Unfortunately, no one can be told what the matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.”

Thank you. And see you at the movies.

(Applause)

MR. PLZAK: Any questions of Mary K? Okay. Let’s go ahead and take our break. Be back in here at 10 minutes past 11:00.

(Recess)

Government Affairs and Public Policy Report

MR. PLZAK: Okay, let’s get started. Welcome back from the break.

We will continue on. Well, before we start with the reports, I do have to announce a winner for the survey drawing. And this is sort of an unusual thing. It’s a WiFi detector t-shirt. In other words, if you wear this t-shirt, there’s a WiFi detector on it. You can walk around and people can see that you have it. And Nigel over there won it. So, if you ever want to know where the WiFi is, look for Nigel.

SPEAKER: Nigel, don’t wear it at an airport.

MR. PLZAK: Okay. The last of the staff reports is by the relatively new director of Government Affairs and Public Policy, Cathy Handley.

So where’s Cathy?

MS. HANDLEY: Behind you.

MR. PLZAK: Oh, hiding. And there is actually someone in the room that sounds worse than I do this morning.

MS. HANDLEY: Good morning. And you can guess who that might be.

This is my first opportunity to really talk to this group in my role working for ARIN. A lot of you know me from when I worked for the government. But I came to ARIN in February of this year. Boy, it seems longer. Wow. And the purpose of my department, which by the way is me, is to do, you know, some outreach sort of things, similar to what’s being done there already by Richard Jimmerson and Megan Kruse but more towards government sort of things.

It’s an education and awareness program. It’s so important right now, with everything changing and our business changing so much, that we make sure that the decision makers and the policymakers in the government – when they make a decision, they don’t make it out of fear because they don’t know what’s going on. And it’s amazing how the number of things we take for, you know, we just think that are given and the way they are, and everybody should understand that.

We had an individual earlier this week that was here from the U.S. Government, and it was his first trip. And he was fascinated by the things he learned and the people that he had the opportunity to meet. So that was kind of a win. It’s a good thing when that happens for us.

Most of the regional work I do would be with Industry Canada, the governments in the Caribbean, and the U.S. Government here in the states.

In the Caribbean, we’ve been down there several times. And sometimes you don’t see a lot of, you know, a huge big step, but every little step hurts – helps. It doesn’t hurt. We’ve got Nigel coming now out of CTU to our meetings, which is great. That’s more people that he can spread the news to down there. I was at a CANTO meeting earlier this year with Megan and Richard and we did booth work and passed out stuff to folks on how, you know, IPv4, IPv6.

Shortly after that, we had a meeting with CTU and Nigel’s folks. And we talked more about what’s going on. And the culmination with that was that there was a CTU ministerial in Barbados? Is that right? And this wasn’t us going, added on to the agenda; this was a request that we attend and tell how we do things and such. And Ray and Richard attended that. So you have kind of what I look at as the domestic side. It’s within region. I will be up in Ottawa probably after the first of the year. I have met the people I deal with there. I’ve seen them in various parts of the world, just not up in their offices.

There’s also other piece to that in that the domestic area, and those aren’t all government meetings. As I said, I work a lot with Richard and Megan. And sometimes there are industry shows, that sort of thing, where you get kind of a cross-section of people. You may have government people that could be from, you know, city, state, county, to the feds, and that sort. And it’s all those folks that we need to talk to and explain what we’re doing, and make them understand that no, IPv6 isn’t this end goal out here that some day, sometime they want to get to. It’s a lot closer to that, and they need to. And again, we want them making decisions based on as much fact as we can.

Now to give you an example of just how occupied we keep it, is from – I talked to Richard before I left – and from July 2007 to July 2008, there was basically at least one function a week. Now, that’s a lot. As Mary K told you, we are 48 in my department. John goes, Ray goes, Leslie goes. It gets down to, you know, we are sending people every place. But again, it is an important thing. It’s what we need to do to, again, get out IPv6.

The other side to the job is the international Internet governance. Most of you are familiar with the war stories out of WSIS and WGIG.

And there’s an IGF now that they have an Internet governance for that this year will be in Hyderabad, India in December. I worked very closely with the ISOC folks. The other RIRs, whether it’s through the individual RIR or the NRO, to get our voices out there, get our faces seen.

We were at Seoul in June, at an OECD ministerial. OECD is the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. It’s primarily like G-8 government countries. And they have a ministerial – it’s the first one they had in about 10 years. There was about 1,500, 1,700 people there. And it was all about the Internet – where we are, what it does for us, and what we need to do, including v6. We worked on a one-day technical seminar that took place before that.

I attend ITU meetings. For those of you that don’t know what the ITU is, it’s the International Telecommunication Union. It’s an arm of the U.N., and they develop radio regulations. They have that which is called the R-sector, the T-sector, which does telecommunication and Internet, and the Development sector, which helps developing countries.

I attend the various meetings kind of as because basically out of all of the RIRs I’ve probably got the most experience with dealing with the ITU. And I will go – I went to a study group.

They’re all divided up in study groups. And Study Group Three, which is responsible for accounting principles and such. And there comes what comes up in there is IPv6. You know, how do they bill for? You know, they want to do things like that because it’s not fair that everything’s here. So again, you spend a lot of time telling people, no, this is what goes on.

Everyone in this room, I have to believe, has been involved in the Internet longer than I have. But if you can imagine this is 2008. I can go into Geneva, to a study group meeting, and still have someone tell me that there’s a university in the States that has more addresses than China does.

And people think that this is – you know, we explain it, and we write it down. We show them pictures. We do everything. And it’s not necessarily about fixing that. Because when the complaints come up they don’t want it fixed. They want to be recognized. They want something different.

So a lot of what I’ll be doing is working with my counterparts in the other RIRs through the NRO and such to minimize damage as much as we can and get people to understand what’s really going on.

Thank you. Thank you. Basically, I have spent the last year in an airplane – the nice part is I’ve had some good traveling companions – attending meetings all over the world and assessing what it is we can do. What can our role be? How can we best help? Because while ARIN’s region is very delineated, it is as far as some things are concerned, but it’s kind of a world-wide issue. And it’s important that everybody understand, because everybody talks to each other, and we don’t want people out there with the wrong ideas. You know, we want to try to clarify, like I said.

So over the last year, I’ve attended – I don’t think I attended IETF but it seems like I’ve done about everything else. And assessing where we can really get the best bang for our buck going forward, what we need to do. And as we, you know, go down this path, you’ll be hearing more from me, probably seeing more in the newspaper – the ARIN newspaper, not the other newspaper. And we’ll be trying to keep everybody abreast of what’s going on.

I do ask if anyone has got any questions or comments, if you know of a place, or if you have dealt with government officials that you think we could help, you know, I have open arms. Ask, you know, talk to me and we’ll see what we can do. If we can’t be there to talk to them in person, everyone, you know, Megan has done a phenomenal job at papers that are available. And you really should, you know, use us for that.

Thank you. Any questions or comments or questions? Except from you.

MS. WOOLF: Well, I did promise Cathy I wasn’t going to keep her up here because she sounds so pathetic. So I’m sort of going to direct the question to any of the Board, or to Ray, or to any of the staff in the room who have also been part of ARIN’s outreach to some of these international bodies, and some of these meetings, and so on.

It’s really hard to understand, and it’s really hard to present how important this work is, and yet how diffuse. You know, you go to some meetings, you talk to some people, you don’t know what happened until three years later something is different. And I was hoping sort of for the benefit of the membership someone could present maybe an easy example of an initiative in one of these bodies, and what the effect would be, and why ARIN is either supporting it or attempting to change it, or resist whatever is going on. Just an example from one of the bodies and what the policy areas are now.

MR. PLZAK: I think the most evident example is the multiple-year effort by the ITU to nationalize and nationally distribute IPv6 space, to either completely remove it from the regional registries or to create along side the regional registries a distribution of IPv6 to each country. In other words, take the pie and divide it up, and everybody gets a chunk, and off to the races.

Through primarily using the NRO, we generated multiple papers over time because every time you turned around someone new was generating this idea again, although in reality it was the same person just finding new surrogates to put the idea forward. The net result is that – and it’s really just it back, beating it back, keeping on saying it, keeping on message – is that that particular effort has gone away.

Now, I will not say that the effort to supplant the way that we do business has gone away.

In fact, it is probably increasing. And it’s becoming much more subtle, and it’s also becoming much more persistent. But it’s showing up in different ways, and it shows up in papers being presented. For example, to Study Group Two of the ITU and so forth. And the way some of the discussions are phrased inside the civil society bodies, in particular.

One good example is the discussion about RESCERT in that now RESCERT will give the regional registries uncontrolled, unsupervised control of the routing table. And, therefore, if a registry doesn’t like you, your packets will not be routed. And so that’s another thing that has to be dealt with. And, of course, some of these things perceptions.

Now, you can say, and people have said from time to time, well, you don’t have to really answer these kinds of things because what they’re saying is stupid. Well, excuse me. The problem is that there are people that are not informed. And if the only source of information they have is a bad piece of information, it’s not any good.

Consequently, as a result of our concerted efforts in many areas, the NRO and the individual registries are now looked to first for a real answer. In other words, other people may chime up and give an answer, but at some point in time someone is going to say well, what about this, ARIN?

What do you think about this? What about this NRO? What do you think about this? And so that we have established ourselves as a credible entity, it’s probably one of the most important things we have done over the last three to five years in the area. Does that help, Suzanne?

MS. WOOLF: Yes, it does. And thanks. Since the Treasurer’s report is coming up a little bit later, I just wanted to make sure it was really called out what you guys are doing for that particular set of items in the budget. The other thing is that after the first 100,000 miles a year, nothing is a boondoggle. Thank you guys for your time on airplanes and in meetings.

MR. PLZAK: Thank you. Thank you, Cathy. Just a minute, we have one more question, Nigel?

MR. CASSIMIRE: Nigel Cassimire. Just to support what you said about some of the outreaching things, I mean, also on the development side, I mean, for developing countries – like, for example in the Caribbean – Internet developments are taking place and, you know, in many cases small countries are being left back. The are issues related to country code TLD Management within the Caribbean, redelegations and stuff like that. What – in fact, ARIN’s outreach has helped us in the CTU to be able to do as involved more of the Internet community in the Caribbean with some of these issues that are important to the development of the region.

I think we very much appreciate the outreach that ARIN has done – not just ARIN. In the Caribbean we are dealing with both ARIN and LACNIC, and we very much appreciate the outreach activities that have been undertaken by both ARIN and LACNIC in the Caribbean region. And it’s very important to us, as well, because there is the implementation of what we call the Caribbean single market and economy, which means that we have to bring together and harmonize a lot of the policies and regulations around the Caribbean through not just the Internet, but other parts of the telecommunications and information technology world.

So I just want to express the gratitude for the efforts that have been made and hope that they would continue. Thanks.

MR. PLZAK: Thank you for those kind words, Nigel. And I can assure you that we will continue to be an avid supporter of development of the Internet in the region. I remember several years ago Carlton Samuels saying we need an evangelist in the Caribbean, and I stood up and said well, we are here to be that evangelist. And we will continue to do so.

Okay. Any other questions or comments?

ARIN Advisory Council Report

MR. PLZAK: Moving on now, the chair of the Advisory Council, Leo Bicknell, will give the Advisory Council report. And I have to warn you it is a Leo animated Mac presentation.

MR. BICKNELL: Yes, my name is Leo Bicknell, and I’m here to give you the ARIN Advisory Council report. Here’s the wonderful picture we have of this year’s Advisory Council. I know many of them don’t like it because of the hour it was taken back in January, but it is the only picture we have of everyone, so we have to use it. If you haven’t gone up and said hi to all of your Advisory Council members, most of them are still here. You should at least go up and say hi to them.

I’d also like to take this opportunity as kind of my only public opportunity to thank them for electing me chair this year. The chair terms run from January 1st to January 1st, so there won’t be another public opportunity for me to do that before my term is up. You know, I may be re-elected; I may not. You never know. So I’d like to thank the Council for electing me chair, and I’d like to thank Marla for serving as vice-chair as well this year and giving me support there.

We talk a lot about travel. I make it clear where the AC members are going. AC members attend the spring and fall ARIN meetings. We had a workshop in January this year because of the transfer policy proposal. It’s likely for a number of different reasons that that will continue to be an AC event going forward. Currently four AC members are attending each Caribbean sector meeting and we send one AC member to pretty much every RIR meeting. And we do this so that the AC as a whole has a perspective on all of the policy work that is going on in the Internet space around the world as we deliberate the policies.

So who traveled this year? For the Caribbean sector meetings, you can see we went to Kingston and Nassau. I would like to point out that the chair is not interested in being the only person who goes to every Caribbean meeting, although my name is up there twice. The criteria here is that we’ve been sending the chair or the vice-chair, plus three additional AC members to these meetings. And this year, due to circumstances, I ended up going twice because Marla couldn’t go to the second meeting. So we’ll make sure that another chair or a vice-chair gets to the next Caribbean meeting.

The RIR meetings – the ones in green on this slide – are meetings that already occurred. AC members have attended and reported on. There are two more upcoming meetings this year that AC members will be attending.

I spoke at the last ARIN meeting about a change that we made. Previously, for a meeting like this our schedule would have more or less looked like this. It’s not exact. But the AC would have met on Thursday night right after the Policy meeting, unless I would have been able to give you a full report on policy. At Denver meeting and also at this meeting, we’re trying something new. What we’ve done is we’ve actually moved the AC business meeting to after this, so I cannot report in this meeting on the events that have taken place in the last two days.

And the reason we’ve done that is it gives he time for the AC to discuss and consider policies.

And more importantly, to consider what we need to do going forward. One of the biggest problems with the previous schedule is we would get to the meeting and more or less have to make up on the fly what would need to happen with proposals that we’re going to continue to work with the author on. And this gives us a little more time to discuss with each other, and come up with a plan, and be able to get that right.

I also want to give kind of an estimate here on the time that the AC puts in. This is time, butt in chair, in a meeting. This doesn’t count travel time, time as shepherds, preparation time. So your AC members are spending around 695 hours sitting in meetings on your behalf and in an effort to help the policy development process. And I’m sure if we counted all of the travel time, particularly looking at the foreign meetings and things of that nature, that there are thousands of hours put in by AC members.

So let’s get to the heart of it. The AC is about the policy development process. The policies at the previous meeting – this would have been the Denver meeting – are listed here. We had four of those policies that have been adopted and implemented. And I want to give you just a little bit of detail on those. 2007-17 was kind of the most interesting. The AC went back and didn’t come to initial agreement right after the meeting. It actually went through another AC meeting cycle where we decided to send it on to the Board. The Board, however, was not completely happy with what we had done and had returned it to us. And we made some corrections and returned it to the Board yet again.

So, if you are interested in the history of the policy proposal, checking out the minutes may provide some interesting feedback there on both the AC and Board side.

But the net result is the policy was accepted, and according to the ARIN website has been implemented as of September 24, 2008. 2007-21 took a more straightforward path. It has been implemented as of August 5, 2008. 2007-23 was approved by the ARIN Board of Directors but would not be implemented until it is approved by the ICANN Board of Directors because it is a global policy. And 2008-1 was implemented on August 5, 2008, as well. So those all came out of the last meeting.

We also have one policy, 2007-27 that the ARIN AC chose to abandon after the last meeting. And at a real high level the reason why is that, you know, basically 2007-23 looked like the better path forward.

So that left three policy proposals that we’ve seen in the past two days. These were the carryover proposals from the previous meeting. So we take those three carryover proposals and add that to the new proposals that we received since the Denver meeting. And here is the slate that we have discussed over the last few days, and these are the proposals the AC will be discussing this afternoon in our business meeting and seeing how we move them forward. You’ll seep the rules of that on PPML sometime next week most likely, and of course, come and get meeting minutes if you want to find out about what happened prior to the next ARIN meeting where we’ll give a summary on it.

Lastly, we have elections. We have three- year terms in the AC, five people per three-year term. That’s how we get the 15 AC members. There are five members with terms ending December 31st of this year – Dan, Bill, Alec, Matt, and Suzanne. And I’ve highlighted Alec and Suzanne. I’d like to go ahead and thank them now because they have chosen not to run for re-election. So I would like to go ahead and thank them for their service to the AC. We have 11 nominated individuals for five positions, which I think is absolutely excellent. We’ve got a nice, strong slate of candidates. And of course, the election information is where it is always at. But I do have one small request. And that is all you have right now, you’re sitting there in front of your laptops. Send an e-mail to somebody who is not here at this meeting. Just send them the ARIN election URL and tell them that they need to vote and participate in the ARIN process. If everybody can send one e-mail to one person, we’ll be able to probably double the number of people who vote. So I’d ask you all to take a minute, you know, look up from your IM session, or stop reading CNN for a second, and go ahead and send that e-mail.

And with that, in honor of Owen, we have the flaming question mark. Would anyone like to ask any questions?

MR. PLZAK: Any questions? Thank you, Leo.

ARIN Financial Report

MR. PLZAK: Normally the financial report would be given by the treasurer, but for personal reasons Lee was not able to attend the meeting this week. Therefore, the FINCOM has asked Bob Stratton, the director of Financial Services, to provide the treasurer’s report. Bob?

MR. STRATTON: First of all I want to say what a pleasure it has been to work with Lee over the years. And we do miss him here at this meeting.

FINCOM activities. They’ve been discussing the treasurer position in light of the Sarbanes-Oxley situation. The bottom line is Sarbanes-Oxley calls for a treasurer on the Board who has financial acumen, which means either a CPA or was a CFO in a similar-type organization. We’ve been looking at what other organizations in our situation do. Most of them do exactly what we do – is try to muddle through. But the Board is going to discuss this further on.

This year we’ve also been reviewing the investment results in light of the financial situation out there. They also accepted the audited financial statements of last year which I’m going to show you. And basically they are monitoring ARIN’s financial condition.

Statement of financial position. This is basically a balance sheet for a non-profit. A couple of line items I’d point out to you – investments increased by about $4 million. That’s a combination of both we increased our net reserves over the year, and we also moved money out of cash and cash equivalents.

Another line item is property and equipment net, which is about right in the middle. As Mark outlined, we’re buying more equipment. We’re replacing our obsolete equipment with the co-locations in place. Our equipment is and going to continue to increase throughout the year or reach a steady state. From a financial standpoint this means depreciation – the expense for depreciation is going to reach a steady state from the equipment that we’re buying over the year.

One other item on this page is that the ICANN contribution – our support to ICANN we actually have released, so we know longer need – and we’re going to release it going forward on a yearly basis. So we’re no longer going to have to keep an escrow account, and we’ll just have a fund in our reserves money market and release it on a yearly basis.

On this line item, the accounts payable went up but that’s more of a timing issue. At our members meeting last year in October, we still had accounts payable due to them. If the hotel doesn’t want to get paid on time, that’s fine with us. We had some capital equipment that was also in that, so it was just really of a timing issue.

In reality, ARIN has no debt per se. The only thing we’re on the hook for into the future is our lease. Just so everybody is aware.

One item I want to kind of explain is deferred revenue. ARIN recognizes revenue on a yearly basis. So if you owe us $18,000 on January 1st and pay us, we recognize $1,500 of that or 1/12 in that month. The remaining $10,500 goes to this line item. That’s why it is called a liability. We owe you the services for the remaining 11 months of the year, and each month thereafter we recognize another 1/12 until it’s fully depleted in December of that year. The second to the last line, the $23 million, that represents the net reserve position of unrestricted net assets for ARIN as of December 31, 2007.

Statement of activities. This is in essence an income statement for a non-profit. The net registrations rose about 6 percent. The lion share of that line, from the $8.9 million to the $9.5 million – the lion share, $7.9 million – is IPv4 renewal registrations. Even with the exhaustion of v4 space, unless people turn their v4 space back in to us, we don’t foresee that changing any time necessarily in the future. So the lion share of ARIN’s revenues is v4 renewals.

End-users are a steady state. This is the assignments. Maintenance fees are increasing. About 10 percent there. This represents AS holders, transfers, assignments. And in the future it would also represent legacy holders.

The rest of this is pretty self evident. Contributions. If we get support at a member’s meeting – somebody sets up the network and the cost to us would have been X – well, that’s a contribution. Also last year we started charging for network transfers again. That’s why that $85,000 line shows up there. The net revenue, $11,068,000, an increase of about 10 percent from the year before.

We break down our expenses by department. As a non-profit, what our program departments do is what we do for you, which is what we are in existence for. As you can see, Engineering is increasing substantially because of the demands on the engineering resources at ARIN. Registration Services, Member Services. Member Services might increase going forward due to the outreach programs.

General administrative. That represents Mary K’’s department and mine. That’s the line item that you want to keep to a minimum in essence for a non-profit because you don’t want all of your money chewed up in the administrative costs.

The bottom line is it’s about a 14 percent increase in actual expenses year on year. And Scott, who is not here, suggested I mention something about where we are year to date right now.

So I’m going to use this slide as an example. This is also the last piece of the page on the income statement or statement of activities.

Gross revenue $11 million. If projected for the end of this year, we’d have about $11.6 million registrations. So if you add a 2008 line item or a column to the left of the 2007, it would be $11.6. Total operating expenses. This is, you know, you just never know about this. But let’s say it’s going to be somewhere around 10.8. So the net change would be $800,000 rather than $1.2 million from 2007.

Interest in dividends and realized and unrealized gain on investments. So it was about 1.4 in 2007. Currently, we’re down somewhere in the range of 2.4, which as a total portfolio value it’s down about 11 percent but on any given day it could change. We keep the majority of our investments in bond funds, CDs, and money market. The CDs, we keep about $95K per bank, because the FDIC insures up to $100K, and I think they’re talking about increasing that to 250. But, if they do we will do such rational allocation as it is.

So the bottom-line for 2007, we increased our net reserves by 2.6 million. And that’s where that $23 million number comes in. So, if this year ended today, we would decrease back down to $21 million. But hopefully the year may get better before all is said and done.

I think that should do.

MR. PLZAK: Thank you. Questions? Front and center.

MR. HANNIGAN: Martin Hannigan, Verne Global Iceland. How come so much cash?

MR. STRATTON: Cash in terms of money market? Or cash in terms of –

MR. HANNIGAN: Well, you said you had a cash reserve of $21 million.

MR. STRATTON: Twenty-three.

MR. HANNIGAN: Okay. I’m off $6 million. I’m sorry. Twenty-three million.

MR. STRATTON: The Board designated that we wanted to keep two years worth of operating expenses in reserve. And under our current budget that would be about $24 million.

MR. HANNIGAN: And second question. Can you just give a little detail on what exactly it is we get from ICANN? I know at the last meeting last year I asked about why we were holding those funds.

So this year since you’re releasing the funds, I’d just like to – if you can explain what we are actually getting, and why we’re paying them, and if there’s any SLAs attached to any of the services. Just very brief. Just want to hear about that. Thanks.

MR. STRATTON: We make a voluntary – each RIR together makes a combined voluntary contribution to ICANN. ICANN provides no support for the operation of the address supporting organization. The regional registries do it on their own through the auspices of the NRO. So the travel of the Advisory Council members to meetings, to various ICANN activities, is paid for by the registries. The cost of operating the mail servers for the Council, for operating the website, for their monthly teleconference, this is all borne by the registries. We are not paying any kind of fee for any kind of service. This is a voluntary contribution given for the operation of the Internet.

Now, we have been in various stages of negotiation of a contract with ICANN to establish service levels agreement. And that primarily is a deal with the two major activities that we have with ICANN, one of which is to receive Internet number resources from them and the guise of v4, or v6, or AS blocks, and the other is to make changes to the DNS zones for which we are responsible.

We, amongst the registries, have had some difficulties, if you will, in terms of putting together a contract that we could all agree to and that we could get ICANN to agree to. I can tell you from personal experience, this is a very, very painful process. It took us many years just to get an Address Supporting Organization MOU put together.

We anticipate going forward that our voluntary contribution will remain about the same. There have been an attempts by ICANN in the past to put a percentage of their budget as what our contribution should be. Seven or eight years ago when their budget was maybe $20,000, that was a reasonable expectation. Now, given the cash cow that they have and what they’re doing, that is another reason why we kept it like that.

So, in the end, the expectation that we have of the service levels agreements will be spelled out in the contract. The joint – the five registries, Boards met together here this week, and we discussed many things, one of which was the matters around what we would have to do to go forward to try and negotiate another contract with them.

Does that help? Okay. Bill?

MR. DARTE: Yeah, hi, Bill Darte, ARIN AC. In the discussion of the transfer policy yesterday, I was reminded of the Ryan children’s fund. And I was looking for line items in the budget that relate to legal funds that are held in reserve, or expenditures, or expenses associated. Where do those show up?

MR. STRATTON: In – these are financial statements, Bill, but on the budget in the website there is a line item for legal funds. And that’s $500K. And there’s also a legal defense fund if we ever get into litigation, and that is $225,000 in it. The way that the financial statements allocate those expenses, we have to allocate them over the departments. And usually it’s either on a head count or some kind of overhead basis.

MR. PLZAK: Any other questions? All right, thank you, Bob.

ARIN Board of Trustees Report

MR. PLZAK: Now we have the Board of Trustees report from the Chair. John?

MR. CURRAN: Good morning, everyone. I’m John Curran, and I’m the Chair of the Board of Trustees of ARIN. I give this report each meeting and let you know what we have been doing since the last meeting.

So, as already covered very well by Leo, the Board approved four policy proposals and had them added to the NRPM. That was covered in his report, 2007-17, legacy outreach and partial reclamation; 2007-21, PIV – provider independent v6 for legacy holders; 2007-23, end policy for IANA IPv4; 2008-1, slip support for smaller than /29.

As Leo noted, sometimes these don’t go straight through the Board. The Board has a responsibility to look and make sure that the policy is supported by the community, is clear, doesn’t pose a risk to the organization. Occasionally we just – in the process of dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s, we’ll ask the AC to either clarify something or revisit something. So it is ultimately – we do, in the vast majority of cases, follow the direction of the AC. But we have a responsibility.

It’s an important one for the Board to ratify the policy decisions.

We also spend a bit of time cleaning up the Bylaws. We have a high level of symmetry in the Bylaws between the election of the board and the election of the AC. This level of symmetry is so high that typos in one sometimes appear in the other. We decided instead to have one section that covers how we elect people and just reference it. So that was something we spent a bit of time working on.

We also made it perfectly clear how we’ve been electing people for the last eight, nine years.

Actually, eight years. For the Board of Trustee and the AC elections, we didn’t change it, but we spelled it out in case someone has trouble reading.

So we’ve been very happy with those processes we’ve (off mike) this year. With respect to financial responsibilities, the Board is responsible, of course, for working with the FINCOM and the full Board, reviewing the audit report to make sure that we’re performing according to our budget and spending things as we said we would. We performed that for the 2007 budget at the end of the year, and that goes into the annual report that’s published. And we set, of course, the 2008 budget that we’ve been operating under.

I guess the only other two things – we have some initiatives that we embarked on. I guess the most important aspect of that is we did have the community ask very clearly if they thought that there was some sort of fraud going on with respect to a particular address blog or a particular application, that there be a way to report that. You’ll see we actually announced that a little while back. The Board adopted a fraud reporting process.

And that’s on the website. And you can – if you think you have a situation where someone may be not being truthful with ARIN, you can report that. And we have a process for investigating and getting back to the extent that’s possible to do.

And then the last one, and probably one of the largest activities, is the Internet Resource Policy Evaluation Process. We briefed at the last meeting the changes that we’re in the process of making. This is the policy process that brings policies before the PPML mailing list and then before this body. And it’s essential for the smooth working of ARIN.

One of the things we noted is that we have now the possibility of – more than ever we have the possibility of multiple proposals with interactions with each other. As we get closer to the IPv4 depletion, it’s quite possible that almost every proposal has some interaction with another one. We thought it was best that the Advisory Council have the ability to make good policy. And so, the revived IRPEP is very clear about handing ownership of the policy proposals off to the Advisory Council. And it also has a number of administrative clean-ups, making sure that staff and legal review are done in enough time before the meeting; making sure the text gets frozen in ice 10 days before it ever shows up here so we’re all talking about the same thing.

That policy proposal is actually ready to go. We didn’t pull the trigger on it before this meeting because we were already in the wrap-up to this meeting, but we will do so immediately after this so that the AC can have a better set of tools to get their job done and helping make the policy that you folks want.

That concludes what we have done since the last meeting. And I’ll take any questions. No? Okay, thank you.

One more thing. We talked about elections a couple of times because we are in the middle of that period. The Board of Trustees has two board seats opening up. We have four candidates. I’d like everyone to take the opportunity to make sure we vote. This is a very important process.

I’d also like to recognize Lee Howard, who is not re-upping he’s indicated. Lee has served the organization exceptionally well over the years, and I’d like a round of applause for his service to the organization.

MR. PLZAK: Actually, Lee had two distinct terms on the Board. So he went out and he joined the Board and did some good work. Then he went away and we drug him back. I don’t know, maybe we can get him to come back for a third time.

Open Microphone

MR. PLZAK: So now we are on to the open microphone. Now remember, meeting courtesies. This open microphone is not for any policy-related discussion.

So if you attempt to bring one, the chair will tell you to go sit down. However, it is an open microphone that pertains to the operation of the organization, and also such things as fee structures and so on. So with that I would invite the chair.

MR. CURRAN: Open microphone. I know I’m between you and sunny L.A. I’m told it’s sunny out there somewhere. But if there’s are any questions or comments, now would be the time to bring them to the attention.

Last shot? I recognize Mr. Darte.

MR. DARTE: Bill Darte, ARIN AC. I’d just like to thank all of ARIN staff again for one of the really better meetings.

MR. CURRAN: Thank you, Bill.

SPEAKER: John?

MR. CURRAN: Mr. Vixie.

MR. VIXIE: I was the NONCOM chair this year, so I did a tiny bit of work trying to get more candidates for the two elections that are now open.

I want to echo what Leo said. Please, send out mail to people that you know are members or you think might be members. Ask them to unearth their DMR and make voting happen.

I also want to thank all of the candidates, and I agree with what Leo said. It’s great to have 11 candidates for five slots. Obviously, with 11 candidates for five slots there will be some people who are not winners. I will encourage everyone who does not win to continue participating. Come back, run again. There will be another election. More open seats.

And finally, I want to say that this meeting has been distinct to me in recent meetings because we’ve had so many new voices at the microphones. You know, even though the old-timers here are largely friends of mine, and I guess I’m counting on your vote when my board seat comes up, I want to say I get a little tired of hearing the same people all the time. So I love it when people who are maybe at their first meeting, or maybe they’ve been lurking or standing at the microphone asking important questions, making important observations.

And I want to encourage that to continue.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Last chance. This concludes the open microphone session. Thank you very much.

MR. PLZAK: Thanks, John.

Closing Announcements and Adjournment

MR. PLZAK: Okay, first of all, let’s thank our sponsors, Los Nettos and CGR. Reminder, if you hasn’t won anything, you still have a chance to win the biggie. Some other reminders, the wireless network will shut down after this meeting. So, you have a few minutes left to get in your last flurry of e-mail activity on this network.

Lastly, the word transition has been used add lot this week. In fact, I mentioned it at the beginning of the week. And as you saw from the reports from the various department directors, we’re doing a lot of things as we’re moving and changing directions. Not necessarily directions as a way to get to the goal, which is to provide the best service possible.

And so consequently we’re looking at changing the meeting structure so we do three a year so we can get to all of the regions and not just follow the process and path that we had in the past.

We tried an innovative mode of extending and enhancing our remote participation. We had questions that came into the virtual microphone. We had people vote in the hands up room, and we even had a person that won a prize for completing the survey and did it remotely. So, as Susan mentioned, we’re going to continue to enhance that feature.

One of the other things that I need to talk about is the fact that I have been at the helm of this organization now for eight years. And that’s a long time, believe me. And so last month I, after some serious discussions with my wife and daughter, have decided that I’m going to step aside as being your CEO. And John and I exchanged letters, and unfortunately for me, from one perspective three days later John McCain said the economy is fundamentally sound.

So I will be around, and my services will be available to ARIN. And I want to say that I hope that I have provided you with a good, sound organization that will move forward in the future. And I want to thank you all very much. John?

MR. CURRAN: Thank you, Ray. I’d like to give – a round of applause for Ray for his service to the organization.

As Ray noted, he has put in a wonderful effort over the years, and quite frankly has carried the organization as long as we can expect him and more. We are in fact going to do a few things. I, as required by the bylaws, I will be facilitating in the interim CEO role during transition time. The Board of Trustees has spun up a search committee. Paul Vixie will be leading that. If you know qualified candidates, point them in Paul Vixie’s direction.

And Ray – most importantly, Ray will be available to us. Quite frankly, we’re going to have use of his services and his expertise. He’ll be helping us with outreach. He’ll be doing a number of things. So we still have the valued talents of him, but he doesn’t need to shoulder the load for another year or so because he’s been doing it so long we figured it’s time to bring in an opportunity for him to enjoy a better life and not quite as much pressure cooker of running the organization day by day.

So, quite frankly, it’s good news throughout. And I’m very happy to keep ARIN moving full speed ahead. Feel free at any point to approach myself or Ray if you have any questions.

So, thank you very much. At this point, I think – are we done with the meeting?

SPEAKER: Second. I’m sorry. Go ahead, Ray.

MR. PLZAK: That concludes the meeting. For those of you that can make it, Barbados is in February. That’s the next policy meeting. The next policy meeting after that will be in April in San Antonio. And the one in the fall we haven’t nailed it down yet, but it’ll probably be some place on the East Coast of the U.S., although there has been some suggestions maybe in the Midwest. We’ll see.

So please, please vote. It’s very, very important. You know, you’ve been bombarded by candidates to vote in the presidential election. Well, this election is probably more important to you, and to your business, and to our future in the growth and development of the Internet.

So with that, thank you very much. See you.

(Applause)

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