ARIN 53 Public Policy and Members Meeting, Day 1 Transcript - Monday, 15 April 2024

Opening and Announcements

Hollis Kara: I think we’re going to get started. Welcome everyone to ARIN 53 in Barbados. I’m Hollis Kara, ARIN’s Director of Communications and human glow stick.

(Applause.)

To start off, I’d like to thank some very important community volunteers who make ARIN possible and ARIN meetings possible. I’d like to start with the Board of Trustees. If I could get my trustees to stand up. They didn’t know – or put a hand in the air. It’s okay if you don’t want to stand.

Dan, Nancy, John Curran, Peter Harrison, Hank Kilmer – I don’t know why I just switched to full names, but I did – Tina Morris, Bill Sandiford, Robert Seastrom and Chris Tacit are our elected members of the Board. We thank them for all their hard work.

(Applause.)

They’ve been here yesterday in meetings. They’re ready to get the meetings started. And they’re here for you if you have questions of them.

(Video and audio unavailable for virtual participants)

So thank you very much, Board, we appreciate your support.

Also, absolutely critical to the success of ARIN and to the success of meetings, our Advisory Council. If you guys want to stand up, you can stand up. You can raise a hand in the air. It’s 15 names, so I’m not going to read them all. These great folks are responsible for – uh-oh.

(Applause.)

– are responsible for shepherding policy.

(Video and audio resumes for virtual participants)

You’ll meet a lot of them throughout the meeting when they come up to present on the proposals that are on docket, and we are very thankful for all of their hard work.

And last but not least we have our esteemed representatives of the Number Resource Organization Number Council. Kevin, Nick, and Chris all have other obligations that keep them from being on site, but my understanding is that they will be joining us online, and we will have a video update on their work a little bit later today.

Let’s talk about numbers. You’ll notice we have slightly interesting stats for attendance. We have a smaller –

Beverly Hicks: Hollis, I’m so sorry to interrupt. We just lost power on half of the room. I want to make sure that the Zoom was aware that we’re trying to get the Zoom back online. That’s why you have a screen on one side and not the other.

Hollis Kara: I understand, I didn’t notice that. Question, can Zoom hear me, or are they off entirely?

Beverly Hicks: Zoom is frozen. Chat works. I am confirming whether or not they can hear you.

Hollis Kara: Please pause. As you’ll notice, we have a lot of virtual attendees at this meeting, so we’re going to be doing everything we can so they can engage fully, and that may require some flexibility for folks here in the room. So let’s confirm before I natter on–

(Meeting paused.)

Hollis Kara: I appreciate everyone’s patience. All right. So as I said, we’ve got 267 registered virtual presenters and 104 folks who made the trip down to Barbados. We appreciate people making the trip. I know travel is a little complicated to get here. Really appreciate the virtual attendees for tuning in.

I know that participating in a virtual meeting can be a bit of a challenge. So to help those virtual folks navigate, I want to go over just a couple of quick pointers, highlight a few things, if you will.

Okay. So chat is for informal conversation. Please use that. If you have questions that you would like read into the room for policy discussion or after any other presentation, you are going to need to type that in Q&A.

Unfortunately, we’re not going to be able to bring you in live by audio. There’s a little bit more of a lag because the bits have to swim back to the mainland.

We’re going to be taking all of our virtual comments through – read them in versus having anybody turned on live. So apologies for that inconvenience.

You can raise your hand and let us know that you’re typing. We’re going to try to make sure that we pace those Q&As to allow plenty of time for folks to type. But I strongly recommend, if a question occurs to you early in the presentation, go ahead and submit that and get it in the queue.

Our Virtual Help Desk is open until 9:30. So you’ve got 20 more minutes. They’ll be back at lunch and back tomorrow and Wednesday as well.

They’re there if you’re having any issues navigating – finding anything on the meeting site or otherwise running into problems.

What to do if the Zoom disconnects. We already had this fire drill. Here in the room apparently we get to do knock-knock jokes, so that’s cool. But what we ask is you just keep an eye, if something goes down, is going to be down for an extended period of time, you will receive an email requesting you to switch over to the livestream. And we will keep you apprised as soon as that is – as soon as Zoom is available again, because I’m in communication with the desk, and we can do that.

If Zoom and the livestream both go down, like they did just a few minutes ago, hang tight, and pray for me because it’s a little scary up here.

In-person attendees, you are welcome to join the Zoom so you can chat with our virtual attendees. I do ask that you disconnect yourself from audio – I think it says “leave audio” now in the Zoom settings and that you’re muted – so that we don’t end up with any weird feedback. But you are welcome to do that if you like.

Reminders for approaching the microphone. When we enter into any kind of Q&A session, please queue up at the mic. We’ll be alternating in virtual comments and questions.

Wait for myself or the other moderator who is up on stage at that time to address you before you start your statement. And also lead off with your name and affiliation.

Same for virtual presenters, please do type in your name and affiliation. It helps when we’re reading that into the room for the transcriptionist.

Wi-Fi is available for in-person participants. If you aren’t on the ARIN meeting network, the information for login is on the registration desk out front.

We do have a social event tonight from 7:00 to 11:00 PM at The Boatyard. There will be shuttle service. If you come back down out in front of the ballroom and head that way toward the little parking lot. That’s where shuttles will pick up. And return service will start at 8:30. We do hope we’ll see you there tonight for LED volleyball and other fun stuff on the beach.

This afternoon, at lunchtime, the AC will be hosting three table topics. If you’re interested in discussing any of these topics with them, please do feel free to grab a plate, sit down and have a chat. They’re here to get your feedback.

And, again, for everyone, we are recording and livestreaming. And the presentations are all uploaded and already available on the Meeting Materials page. If you find that the screens are hard to read, you always can pull those down and follow along independently on your own device, and the live transcript is also available.

Now, just to help you understand, because we did rearrange the navigation on the meeting website, you’ll see this fun little menu with drop-downs. If you go to ARIN.net/ARIN53, under the Program Information, that’s where you’re going to find the details about the agenda and things that are of general concern to all participants.

Under the In-Person Participants drop-down, you’re going to find the things you need to know if you’re here with us in Barbados, so information about the hotel, social events, other things like that.

And under the Virtual Participation drop-down, you’re going to find our Event Hub and the Virtual Help Desk. The Event Hub is very helpful. If for some reason you don’t receive your notification email before the start of the meeting with a link the day’s session, you can always go there to access it.

I’d like to thank our network sponsor, C&W Business. If I could get a round of applause for them.

(Applause.)

Our bronze sponsor, IPv4.Global by Hilco Streambank.

(Applause.)

And our webcast sponsor, Google. (Applause.)

And I’d like to thank and welcome all of our Fellows for participating in the meeting, whether they’re here with us in person or participating virtually. You’ll be able to identify them by the ribbon on their badge. Please do try to introduce yourself. They’re here to learn, and we’re very glad to have you here.

And for those who participated in Meeting Orientation and to whom all of this information sounds overwhelmingly familiar, we do have a survey winner from those who completed the survey for that event.

Beverly Hicks: The survey winner is Mark Hunt. I’m sorry, Mark Hart.

Hollis Kara: Mark Hart, congratulations. We will be in touch, and you will be receiving a $100 Visa gift card. And we thank you for playing.

All right. Emergency evacuation. It’s pretty straightforward. There will be an audio alert, and assembly point is directly adjacent to the security checkpoint, which raises a good question. Where is the security checkpoint? Do we know? I don’t know, just head to the beach. It’ll be fine.

Okay. Now, in all seriousness, one of the things that is a critical concern for ARIN is making sure that meetings are a safe space for everyone to participate, and we wanted to highlight where you can find more information about that.

So we have a Participants Standards of Behavior. That information was something that you acknowledged upon registration. So you hopefully had a chance to review it previously. If you need to find it, it is under the Program Information drop-down on the website. You can read it in total.

It’s very straightforward. Treat everybody with courtesy and respect. Keep the discussions on topic. Understand that other people may have a different opinion from you. We’re all here to learn from each other, and we’re all acting in good faith. So let’s try to treat each other as such.

And we do have – if you read the policy, there is a response mechanism for dealing with violations to the Standards of Behavior. Those will be appropriately escalated and investigated. So I do encourage everybody, if you haven’t had a chance to read through the Standards of Behavior.

I will note that we have signs posted in the room. We were kind enough not to post this on YouTube for perpetuity. And there are five very important people who will be very happy to talk to you if you have an issue with what you believe to be a standards violation. Their contact information and details are on those signs.

And as part of our whole approach to trying to make our meetings more inclusive and welcoming for these – we started at ARIN 52, we brought on board an ombudsperson. And he’s on his way up here, he’s going to beat me to the stage before I finish talking. I’d like to welcome Wade Hinton up to explain a little bit about his role. And I hope that you get a chance to talk to him because he’s pretty cool.

Wade Hinton: Thanks, Hollis. Good morning, everybody. (Applause.)

My name is Mark Hart, and I’ll be picking up that gift card in just a second. (Laughter.)

It’s great to be here. The first observation, Hollis, I’ll tell you, we’re going to prescreen jokes, just in case. Chris and I were both nervous over there.

It is certainly a privilege and honor to be with you today and to partner with ARIN again on creating these spaces that – or a space that is inclusive of everyone and making sure that everyone feels safe.

My name is Wade Hinton. I’m CEO of Hinton & Company. We’re a leadership and culture firm that focuses on creating opportunities and unlocking potential for leaders.

So as Hollis mentioned, ARIN is committed to creating a safe space, not just for the organization but for each and every one of you. And that includes these Standards of Behavior. She referenced those on the screen. You have them in your packet. You have them online.

So please look at those. I’m not going to read them. I trust that you have a sense of why we’re doing this. If indeed you feel like you have been – you’ve observed or witnessed anyone that might be in violation of these standards, you have those contact persons that are listed in the online, but you can also reach us via email.

So I’ll just read it out to you. My email is arin@hintonandco.com. You can also contact me via phone. That phone number is 423-481-9400. So whether you’re in person or online, if there are any challenges, please feel free to reach out to us.

Again, thank you so much for taking this bold step to make sure that participants are taken care of and, again, creating a safe space for everyone. And thank all of you for your partnership in making sure this is a space belonging for all.

Thanks.

(Applause.)

Hollis Kara: Thanks, Wade. We’re glad to have you.

Let’s talk a little bit about what we’re going to cover today. I promise we’re getting to the end of listening to me for a little bit and getting more information from our presenters. We’re almost done with the welcome.

We’re going to kick it off with everybody’s favorite presentation, the Financial Report from our treasurer, followed up by the Board of Trustees report, Advisory Council On-Docket.

And then our keynote, don’t want to skip that. Very excited to have Brent Mc Intosh here. He’s going to give a talk on building and sustaining Caribbean digital infrastructure with IXPs and IPv6 technologies. We’re very excited for that talk a little bit later this morning.

And then we’re going to take a break. When we come back from break, we’ll have our Policy Implementation and Experience Report, Regional Policy Update, Government Affairs Update and Membership and Elections Update.

Break for lunch. Do some table topics, get a little fresh air, come back in and we’re going to hit the policy.

We’re going to have four policy discussions today. You’ll notice two are listed as RDP. That’s Recommended Draft Policy. So we’ll be polling the room for consensus on those. We’ve got two Draft Policies also in the block.

We’ll have another break after that to reset and then come back and finish up the day with some reports from the NRO, the Number Resource Organization, and the Address Supporting Organization, which are the same mostly but not entirely – more on that later – and the Global Stats Report, which is that Internet Number Status Report. Then we’ll have an Open Microphone. So save your thoughts.

I’m done for the moment. I’m going to invite John Curran, our President and CEO, up and let him say a few words of welcome.

Welcome from ARIN’s President and CEO

John Curran: Thank you, Hollis. Good morning. Welcome to ARIN 53 in lovely Barbados. Glad to have everyone here who’s on site. Welcome remote participants. Glad to have you participating as well.

As people are aware, ARIN tries to move its meeting throughout the region over the course of several years. So we do meetings in the U.S. We do a meeting in Canada.

We try to do our spring meeting at least every other year in the Caribbean. Happy to be here, and it’s a venue we’ve been at before. So we’re familiar with it. Though apparently not the power. That was a little surprise this morning.

And it’s a great place. It really is. It’s a wonderful meeting and a great little location for everyone to get together and hopefully get some good work done.

We have a very busy week ahead of us. It’s got, as Hollis noted, a lot of policy presentations. This is where the discussions happen. And we have some on the Mailing List, but there’s a lot more discussions that happen within the ARIN meeting both online, structured through the Q&A that happens, and also in the hallways.

And we ask that people try to be respectful and think about each other. Try to listen to what people are saying. Everyone brings a different view to the table, and so what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to hear all those views and then come up with something that works for everyone, come up with consensus policy.

That consensus policy is what’s used by ARIN to do the administration of the registry. We don’t own the policy. You do. So truly this is your opportunity to make the policy that’s right for the region, that makes sense. I ask that everyone really engage in that. That’s the most important part of being here.

We do give our updates. We give the organizational updates. And as we’re going to see, the treasurer will give the finance update, a product of the “funance” committee because we’re the fun part. And we do a lot of updates as well to keep you informed about what ARIN’s doing.

But the most important part is you. The most important part is listening to your fellow people, try to understand their perspectives, try to come up with common solutions that work for everyone.

Because once you’re done, we have to administer the registry according to that policy. So it really is important to try to come up with something that works for everyone.

I’d like to just thank – I’ll do this again when we close, but I just want to say there’s a whole hoard of people behind the scenes who make ARIN meetings work. I’d like to thank the staff. This is a particularly exciting meeting because we’re trying to do it with a different mix of staff than usual. And everyone’s covering roles.

So it’s exciting times. I just want to say, everyone, enjoy your week. I am looking forward to great conversations with you all. And hopefully we’ll get some good policy done. Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

Hollis Kara: Thank you, John. Next up, he’s up and moving. Bill Sandiford, our Chair of the Board of Trustees, I’d like to invite you up to give a few words of welcome as well.

Welcome from the ARIN Board of Trustees Chair

Bill Sandiford: Good morning, everyone.

Not a lot left to be said that John hasn’t already covered or that Hollis has covered. But would like to welcome everyone here, both in person and those who are with us remotely.

You look around the room, it feels like there’s more than 100 people in the room. We have a good-sized room, and we’ll see if it’s full tomorrow morning after the social tonight.

Once again, welcome. Look forward to a few days of productive work. And I’ll pass it back to you, Hollis.

(Applause.)

Hollis Kara: Thank you, Bill. For our final welcome of the morning, I’d like to invite up Mr. Desron Bynoe, the Country Manager for Flow Barbados.

Welcome from Sponsor

Desron Bynoe: Good morning. Seem to be getting the prefix menu today. President Curran, Chairman Sandiford, colleagues, industry partners, ladies and gentlemen, good morning and welcome to beautiful Barbados.

On behalf of C&W Communications, the operators of Flow, Flow Business and C&W Business, it is my distinct pleasure to welcome you to the 53rd Public Policy Meeting of the American Registry for Internet Numbers, ARIN, here in beautiful Barbados.

I’m honored to stand before such a distinguished gathering of industry experts, policy makers and stakeholders drawn from across the region.

As the digital landscape continues to evolve and expand, the efficient management of Internet number resources plays a critical role in ensuring fair and equitable access to all organizations.

These resources include IP addresses and Autonomous System Numbers, are essential components of the Internet infrastructure serving as a foundation upon which online connectivity and communications are built.

Effective management of Internet number resources involves allocating these resources in a manner that promotes accessibility, sustainability, and innovation.

By ensuring fair distributions, organizations can harness the power of the Internet to drive economic growth, fostering innovation and improve societal well-being. Moreover, equitable access to Internet number resources is essential for fostering a level playing field in the digital realm.

It empowers businesses, governments, educational institutions, and individuals to participate fully in the digital economy regardless of their size, locations, or resources.

At the heart of this endeavor is ARIN, a trusted steward tasked with managing the distribution of Internet number resources across the Americas and the Caribbean. Through its transparent and accountability governance – processes, sorry – ARIN strives to uphold the principles of fairness, transparency and inclusivity, ensuring that all organizations can obtain the resources they need to thrive in a digital age.

As we continue to navigate the complexities of an increasing interconnected world, the importance of managing Internet number resources cannot be overstated.

It is through thoughtful stewardship and collaborative efforts that we can continue to uphold the principles of open and accessible Internet, empowering organizations of all sizes and sectors to harness the full potential of digital technology for the benefit of the wider society and the communities we serve.

C&W Communications is proud to be the presenting sponsor at this important forum, and we are committed to fostering collaboration and innovation in the field of Internet governance.

We recognize the critical importance of this gathering in shaping our digital landscape, and we are proud to support ARIN’s mission.

Over the next few days, I encourage each of you to actively engage in the discussions; share your insights; build connection, first and foremost, that will drive positive change in our industry. Together we can chart a course towards a more connected, inclusive, and resilient digital future.

On behalf of my team at C&W Communications, we extend sincere gratitude to ARIN for organizing this event and to all of you for your participation and commitment to advancing the collective goal of our community.

I wish you all a productive and rewarding experience at this forum. And I hope your time here in Barbados will be both enjoyable and very much warm and welcome. Thank you.

(Applause.)

Hollis Kara: Alrighty. Time to get the show rolling. I’d like to welcome our first presenter to the stage, Nancy Carter, the Treasurer of the Board of Trustees.

Financial Report

Nancy Carter: Good morning. I have a joke. Wade, don’t listen. It’s a tax joke.

(Laughter.)

So it’s probably fine. So what’s the difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion?

Jail. Exactly.

(Laughter.)

So this is the moment you did not have to wait for this year. The exciting part about ARIN 53 is that the Financial Report is up first. You don’t have to wait ‘til day two or day three.

(Applause.)

So as I share with you at every Member’s Meeting, I could not serve as treasurer – wait, sorry – without the help and support of the ARIN staff and my colleagues on the Board of Trustees.

I would like to thank especially the Financial Services department for their continued commitment to supporting the creation and development of really meaningful reports.

Thank you to Brian and the entire FSD team. They, along with Alyssa, are some of the folks that make my job as treasurer super easy.

Today I will update you on the activities of the Finance Committee since last October. I will then review the 2023 results, including the financial position, highlights of the investment portfolio, operating results, and then finally we’ll look at the net assets and liquidity.

As you can see, the CFO and I continue to keep the Finance Committee super busy. We’ve met five times since I reported to you in October in San Diego.

We’ve continued to provide oversight of the financial results of the organization. We’ve monitored our investment results with our investment advisors. We’ve made approved changes to the investment allocations in the portfolio.

We’ve discussed RFPs for audit and investment advisory services. We kicked off a project for 2024 to review the operating reserve policy.

We’ve had fulsome discussions about the endowment contribution to the IETF. We’ve met with the auditors and reviewed the results of the 2023 financial audit.

And yesterday, the Board met and accepted the 2023 auditors report and the 2023 audited financial statements. So you will see those published soon.

We rely on the work and the professionalism of our investment advisors and our audit firm. Their dedication to our results and compliance requirements and their transparency and commitment to engaging with the Finance Committee has been very much appreciated by the members of the FinCom, especially as we have onboarded new committee members this year.

So I’ll now move to ARIN’s financial position. This eye chart shows you ARIN’s financial position at the end of December 2023 compared to 2022.

We ended the year with a 2.3 million dollar increase in total assets. So if we look at the assets, the biggest changes you’ll see are a decrease to cash and an increase in investments. So there’s a correlation between these two changes.

During 2023, cash was moved from our bank account into the investment account, and we’ll look at that more when I go through the investment-related slides.

Looking at liabilities, we see a big increase in accounts payable and accrued expenses. The main driver of that increase is the accrual for the Board-approved 1 million dollar contribution to the IETF Endowment. This contribution is the second of two 1 million dollar contributions that were originally approved back in 2016.

In addition to the IETF contribution, accounts payable and accrued expenses also increased due to several large recurring expenses that were not paid until after the 2023 year-end.

And finally, overall, the statement shows a 1.26 million dollar increase in net assets. And this reflects the combination of an operating loss and positive investment returns incurred during the year.

We’ll now look at the ARIN investments. This chart shows the end-of-quarter investment values going back to the end of 2019. Investment assets grew from $31.4 million in 2022 to more than 36 million dollars at the end of 2023. And so we’ll look at those changes in each of the long-term reserve fund and the operating reserve fund.

During 2023, the long-term investment fund earned 10.5 percent. The 2023 earnings increased the fund’s value by 2.9 million dollars, helping it recover from the 12.4 percent loss that we realized in 2022. The chart on the right compares our 10.5 percent return to several of the market’s major indices.

One final slide on the long-term investment fund, during the first quarter of 2021, the then-new investment advisor led an exercise with the Finance Committee to determine the desired investment asset allocation for the fund. The result of that exercise was a shift to a much more conservative portfolio.

And this chart shows how the asset allocation exercise reduced the fund’s position in equities and grew the allocation of fixed income investments. The resulting shift in the asset allocation has been reviewed several times since then and has stayed relatively constant since 2021.

After several years of money market interest rates that ran very close to 0 percent, the operating reserve fund is now earning interest of more than 4 percent. Because of that, ARIN undertook an active treasury management position in 2023 to take advantage of the higher interest rates in the reserve fund. So you can see that that approach increased the interest earned significantly.

So we’ll move on to ARIN’s operating results. Here we see that total revenues and expenses to the end of December 2023 compared to 2022 and to the budget for 2023. And as I’ve shared with you in previous meetings, the operating deficit was expected.

There are non-cash expenses included in the operating deficit that were not expected to be covered by revenues.

So I have a few notes on revenues. The majority of ARIN’s revenues are realized through the Registration Services Plan’s annual billings. And these billings provided just over 25 million dollars in 2023, a 12 percent increase over 2022 and very close to the 2023 budgeted amount. Initial registration fees are billed to customers when an organization is receiving resources for the first time.

We expected a slight drop in these revenues in 2023, and that drop did occur and was a little more than we expected. So those revenues are 10 percent below budget.

Finally, we can look at the network transfer revenues. 2023 revenues grew significantly over 2022. This was expected due to the new fee for customers on the recipient side of the transfer transactions. And the new recipient transfer fee helped revenues grow by 125 percent over 2022. However, that revenue fell 7 percent short of budget.

IPv4 and IPv6 number resources account for the majority of ARIN’s annual revenues. This slide is presented to show the year-over-year change in these customer counts and associated revenue run rate.

2024 customer growth over 2023 is 507, or 3.3 percent, most of which is seen in the 3X small category. And the revenue run rate has grown $338,000, or 1.4 percent for that same period.

ARIN’s operating expenses were budgeted to grow in 2023, and that’s exactly what happened. Overall, the growth mapped close to budget, with two exceptions.

The first notable exception is in the 2023 outreach and industry meetings expense category. This expense category is over budget because it includes the second of the two 1 million dollar contributions to the IETF Endowment that ARIN committed to in 2016, as I mentioned earlier.

The second exception is related to the budget variance in treasury and corporate insurance. This variance is driven by the cancellation of a plan that we had to charge customers for credit card fees.

Salaries and benefits represent a very large percentage of ARIN’s spending, and our employee count is clearly the driver for that. This chart documents the pay-period-by-pay-period change in the number of employees. From 2021 to 2023, we’ve seen an increase of 12 employees.

And finally we’ll take a quick look at ARIN’s net assets and liquidity. From a liquidity perspective, ARIN continues to be in a very good position. Net assets are more than 25 million dollars. And even better, cash and investments totaled almost 37 million dollars at the end of 2023.

Although the number of months of expenses covered by net assets has decreased over the past couple of years, ARIN’s financial position is still extremely solid.

You should have told me, I would have smiled. Try it again. (referring to the photographer)

(Laughter.)

Thank you so much for your attention. I’m more than happy to answer any questions or hear any comments or feedback.

Hollis Kara: All right, folks, this is the time to approach the microphones if you have any questions for Nancy or, if you’re joining us online, to start typing if you haven’t already.

Adair Thaxton: Adair Thaxton, Internet2.

If the contribution to the IETF was planned, why wasn’t it listed in the 2023 budget?

Nancy Carter: Great question. (Laughter.)

I mean, I know the answer, but John will give you a more succinct answer than I will.

John Curran: So when we made the pledge to the IETF, we did $1 million up front and we did another million with the phrase that said, “when there was a matching program and other organizations contributing.”

We expected to be able to do that in 2023 because there’s a matching program that ISOC has provided, but we weren’t able to find other organizations that were going to do a contribution with the IETF in 2023.

So even though we wanted to do it on a stage with more people to build more momentum, it would have been us making the contribution alone.

I find myself in 2024 in the same circumstance. We still have a million-dollar contribution we’d like to make. Anybody who happens to work for a firm that’s made successful by the Internet protocols who would like to actually stand on stage with me at the IETF and make a contribution along with ARIN, the second half we pledged, I would welcome and would come stand with you on stage at IETF.

But we’re finding it very difficult. A lot of the organizations – it’s not a lack of support by IETF – a lot of the organizations that support IETF support them contributing to each and every meeting as meeting sponsors and various event sponsors.

And so an additional contribution to strengthen the endowment is just something many of them haven’t planned for.

We will almost certainly make the contribution this year, even if I have to stand on stage alone and do it, but we’re, again, actively looking. If any of you have organizations that want to help strengthen the IETF and contribute to the endowment, please find me at this meeting. Thanks.

Nancy Carter: Thank you, John. And just to add to that a little bit, it’s a conversation that the Finance Committee had many times over the last year. We had people come in from the IETF to talk to us about what they were going to do with the money. So this decision wasn’t made lightly.

And as John says, anybody wants to stand on stage with him, please feel free to go and talk to him.

Hollis Kara: Andrew.

Andrew Dul: Andrew Dul, 8 Continents Networks. Now, if I read your slide right, even with taking out the 1 million dollar accrual, we still ended up with a 400 thousand dollar operating loss for the organization for the year. Was that how I read the slide?

Nancy Carter: I think it’s a bit more than that. Brian?

Brian Kirk: Brian Kirk, CFO. The operating loss was closer to 2 million dollars. And, again, that reflects mostly the non-cash expenses for depreciation and amortization that we don’t look to recover revenues for.

Andrew Dul: So on a cash basis, we’re close to even?

Brian Kirk: Pretty close to even.

Hollis Kara: Thank you. I see we have one virtual question.

Beverly Hicks: Yes, I’m also going to ask for those that are virtual that if you are coming up to the mic that you get a little bit closer.

From Andrew Gallo from George Washington University: Are there any projects for increases related to the change in the LRSA fee structure – projected?

Hollis Kara: So the question is are there any projected –

Beverly Hicks: Projected – any projects for increases related to the change in the LRSA fee structure, and then it just says “projected” after. I’m not sure where it fits in.

Nancy Carter: I’m running out of friends to call.

John Curran: I’ll take this one just for – we’ve done two very significant restructuring of the fee schedule since 2022. That includes moving end users and ISPs to the same schedule, and then now moving ASN holders.

So everyone is paying on the Registration Services Fee Schedule in a very equitable manner based on the high watermark of the number of ASNs, the amount of v4, the amount of v6 you have. Based on the resources you hold, you’re put in a fee category.

The revenue produced by that covers our operating expenses very closely. Not quite aligned, but fairly closely. And we don’t envision significant changes.

Operating-wise, we have added to the organization. There’s areas where we have made our operations more robust. So, for example, the security operations are, our certification is an area that didn’t exist before. The efforts we have going on in making the place more inclusive, things like having an ombudsman hired and the programs that are related to that, all have been costs to the organization.

Our volunteer support has been staffed up over the last three years to make sure that both the AC and the Board have very solid support for the volunteers because you’re the folks that actually make the organization work.

So we’re done strengthening the organization. We’re done with the fee restructures. We’ve achieved the approximate parity of revenues and operating expenses.

So the real question is – and we have an open consultation on this – how do we address the fact that because our costs will go up inevitably, would you like to see us increment those per Consumer Price Index or inflation, or do you want to see us come to you every three, four years with a more significant one-time increase.

That’s the topic of the consultation that’s presently open on ARIN Consult.

But aside from those related changes that will be necessary for inflation, there are no projects or programs that will be incurring costs that we intend to drive fee changes as a result of.

So long answer, but hopefully that gives context.

Nancy Carter: Thank you, John.

Hollis Kara: Thank you, John and Nancy. Not seeing any further questions. I think we’re all done. Thank you so much.

Nancy Carter: Thank you. (Applause.)

Hollis Kara: On to our next presentation, I’d like to invite Bill Sandiford up to give the Board of Trustees Report.

Board of Trustees Report

Bill Sandiford: Hello again. A very brief Board of Trustees Report today. Just more or less a very brief summary of some of our activities so far this year. Of course, the year is young, so there’s not a lot of them, but we’ll go through them.

We’ve handled the normal fiduciary things that the Board of Trustees tackles every year, things like approving the ARIN budget. Nancy has her committee; her Finance Committee and the entire Board has that under control.

Also as was just mentioned, we approved the distribution to the IETF Endowment Fund for the remainder of ARIN’s commitment. And then the usual one, we’ve authorized the Treasurer to approve future commitments.

This is done because we often have to sign contracts for things that are outside of the budget year, and as a matter of good governance we have to empower her to do that.

Continuing along usual stuff, adopting Board minutes, confirming the election results, reconstituting and forming the Board and its committees, and as well as updating any committee charters that need to be addressed.

And, of course, this year was not a Number Resource Organization Council Member election year; it was an appointment year. So we appointed that person again for a three-year term.

We spent some time and we adopted a revised ARIN Strategic Direction Statement. We looked, based on community feedback and request, at developing Board Trustees and officer job descriptions. So those who are considering running for the Board might have a better idea of what’s expected.

We approved and updated the Standards of Behavior for participation in the ARIN community, whether it be in person here at meetings or whether it be online or on the Mailing List, all that sort of stuff.

Finally we updated the Board’s standing rules and approved the AC’s requests for changes to their standing rules.

That’s all we have so far this year. Happy to take any questions from anybody.

Hollis Kara: If anyone has questions for Bill, please feel free to approach the microphone or start typing, or raise your hand. Give just a moment for our virtual attendees.

Okay. I don’t think we’re seeing any questions, Bill. If something comes in later, we will take that on at the Open Mic. Sound good?

Bill Sandiford: Sounds good. Thank you.

Hollis Kara: Great. Thank you.

(Applause.)

And before she beats me to the podium, I’d like to introduce Kat Hunter, who is going to give the AC On-Docket Report – and as her first meeting as Chair.

(Applause.)

Advisory Council Update and On-Docket Report

Kat Hunter: Hello, and welcome to the ARIN Advisory Council Report and Policy Docket Report. My name is Kat Hunter and I’m the current Chair of the Advisory Council.

So the Advisory Council serves in an advisory capacity to the Board of Trustees on Internet number resource policy and related matters. Adhering to the procedures in the Policy Development Process, which you’ll hear referred to as the PDP quite frequently, the AC forwards consensus-based policy proposals to the Board for ratification, and there are currently 15 members.

So I’m not going to make you all stand up again because you already did it this morning. But these smiling faces are the 15 members of the Advisory Council.

Our Vice Chair is Matthew Wilder, and he is right over there. And our Chair for the Policy Experience Working Group is Alison Wood. And every couple of years – she’s right over there – every couple of years we go through a little bit of turnover.

This year was a little bit more than normal.

We lost a few people to the Board and other activities. However, that gave us room to fit in some new smiling faces. Matthew Gamble, Liz Goodson, Kaitlyn Pellak, and Daniel Schatte are our four newest members of the Advisory Council.

(Applause.)

So you’re going to hear about the AC elections later. But just the short and sweet for the Advisory report, the AC members generally serve three-year terms, unless they’re filling a position for somebody that had to leave early.

Five members are up for re-election each year. So this year, end of terms, would be myself, Chris Woodfield, Matthew Gamble, Daniel Schatte, and Alicia Trotman. And nominations for the AC election are self-nominations.

So on top of all of the policy work we do, we do a lot of outreach. You will find two AC people at all of the RIR meetings. You’ll see a few of us at CaribNOG. And you’ll also see us at all of the NANOG meetings this year. You usually see one of us at the NANOG 90, 91, and most of us at 92 in the fall because the meetings are back-to-back with one another. It’s very easy for us to get to that.

And on top of volunteering, and more volunteering, we do more volunteering. There’s a number of additional volunteering roles that are open to the AC – the Grant Selection Committee, Nomination Committee.

There’s Fellowship mentors for the fall and spring meetings. You’ll see us at ARIN on the Road. And we’re also part of the Acceptable Use Committee for PPML.

So what is on the docket, why is everyone here? Other than to see Nancy’s super awesome report. I can’t tell you how upset I was when I heard I had to go after you today.

So we’ve had five proposals received since the last ARIN meeting. Three are in Draft Policy state. One was rejected for out of scope. It’s actually the first policy that’s listed on there for Replace Specified Transfers with Monthly Single-price Auction. That was deemed out of scope.

And the last draft to come in is actually an editorial policy update. That is actually still in process. It was turned into – it was moved from a proposal to an editorial update at our last meeting. We’re still in the discussion period for that. We don’t actually discuss editorial updates during the meeting. PPML is open for discussion on that.

This one was found by a member of the community and asked for some Advisory Council people to write up an editorial change. So the Policy Experience Report – not report – the Policy Experience Working Group took that policy, wrote up a policy that was very simple. We’re changing “it” to “in.” I don’t know how it got put in there. Our best guess is policy comes in and out of the NRPM all the time. It was a typo. Thank you, autocorrect.

There are currently four draft policies that will be discussed. There won’t be any raising of hands to see whether people are for or against these policies, but we strongly encourage people to come up to the microphones.

I can tell you from experience, there’s nothing worse than talking about a policy and having no one come up to the microphones because then you have no idea how the community feels about the policy.

And we highly encourage virtual attendees to participate, Fellows participate. We love PPML, but we would really love everyone to come up to the microphones.

These are the four Draft Policies that they have a clear problem statement and they have been deemed in scope.

There are also five Recommended Draft Policies. You’ve seen all of these before: Retire Slow Start; Modernization of Registration Requirements. The third one is almost editorial but not quite. These all have a Staff and Legal that have been done on them.

They also followed the – and I’m going to read this because I always forget one of these – they are considered fair and impartial, technically sound, and they have a decent amount of community support.

There will be a question asked: Do you support this policy as written? And I want to stress, “as written.” If you think that there are changes or modifications that need to be done to the policy, please come up to the microphone. Even “I agree with this policy as written” is very helpful for the community to make decisions.

So I also wanted to be cool like Nancy and have a fancy, fancy graph. I like that ours kind of matched. The colors weren’t there, but we were close.

There’s been some discussion about how much policy the AC is actually working on. Are we working on more or less? So, I worked with staff to come up with the number of proposals that have come in over the last 10 years, which policies have been adopted and abandoned. Adopted you can see in the blue and abandoned is in orange. The ones that are in gray are still policies that are being discussed today.

That 2022 one, we’ll get there, Doug, at some point. But you will see an uptick in 2019. 2019 was when the working groups first were introduced.

There was a backlog of policy that the Policy Experience Reports had identified as issues that needed to be worked on. So there was the backlog from that. There was a backlog of things that have basically been taped together from the policy manual.

So that was kind of a catch-up year.

Understandably, the rest of the years it kind of seemed like we were working on more policy, but policy rolls forward. It takes a little bit of time to get through all of them.

So, working groups. For 2024, the Number Resource Policy Manual Working Group has been suspended. Frankly, the team from the different working groups over the years has done a fantastic job of going over the policies. They’ve pretty much gone over everything once at this point.

The only thing that’s left is Section 6, which is the v6 policy. It is a little overly complicated. So we would rather speak to that in person in the policy meetings and get a very broad view of what everyone thinks we should look at.

But that section does need help. The first sentence in it does not say “This section,” it says “This document.” So please, please, please, there are table topics that will discuss Section 4 and Section 6. Please come talk to us.

So the Policy Experience Report Working Group is an ongoing group, probably always will be. There’s always an update to the Policy Experience Report in the fall and the spring.

So that team, led by Alison Wood, takes the policy that comes in and evaluates it, updates PPML to see how they feel about potential options for policy, and then will write policy if necessary.

So I also thought it would be interesting to see what kind of policy came out from the working groups over the last couple of years and what state are those today. So the ones that are bolded are proposals that came from the working group that were adopted.

The ones that are still in a regular fontare policies that are still being worked on. And the ones that are crossed out were ultimately abandoned. You’ll see the only one from this year is the edit that’s currently in process.

So we have table topics. I know we mentioned it today. But please, please, please don’t be afraid of the sign that says “Please come talk to us.” We really do want to hear from you.

There is a topic for Section 4, simplification; Section 6, which is the v6 evolution topics; and the last one, there is a new policy that came in about a month ago on the registration information for Whois and systems like it to get more detailed POC information inside of what everybody can look up.

It’s very detailed, the amount of information that is required for a POC. It’s a little bit more than what is standard. I know we’ve had this discussion before, just about trying to get email updated.

So we’re all very interested to see where this one ends up. It could generate a lot of discussion. It could be very interesting. So Leif and Daniel Schatte will be taking on that table. So, that is it, if anyone has any questions or comments.

Hollis Kara: If you have questions orcomments for Kat, please approach the microphones. We’ll give our virtual attendees just a moment to chime in.

Not seeing anything. As I said earlier, if we do end up with any late-breaking questions we’ll come back to them at Open Microphone at the end of the day. Thank you, Kat.

Kat Hunter: Thanks.

(Applause.)

Hollis Kara: All right. Brought my handy-dandy Cliff Notes to introduce our next speaker.

I’d like to invite our keynote speaker to the stage. Brent Mc Intosh is an Internet service provider and network infrastructure professional with a specific expertise in IPv6 deployment.

He considers himself an IPv6 and Internet exchange point evangelist. And he’s here to talk to us a little bit today about his work in the Caribbean to promote the deployment of IPv6 across IXPs.

Keynote: Building and Sustaining Caribbean Digital Infrastructure with IXPs and IPv6 Technologies

Brent Mc Intosh: Pleasant good morning to all. Let me say a very special welcome to the Fellows. The reason I’m telling you that is I was a past Fellow, ARIN 39, 2017, in New Orleans. It’s amazing the amount of stuff you can learn in those sessions. So a special welcome to you.

It’s indeed an honor to be here this morning delivering this keynote. And I get the feeling that – I wasn’t looking out for this, but I get a feeling ARIN was preparing me for this since 2023.

I was invited to be a virtual speaker at an IPv6 deployment scenarios around the Caribbean and around the world. And I got into the virtual waiting room, Zoom, I think, pretty early. So I was waiting to be let into the meeting. And then shortly after, guess who joined? Vint Cerf, the father of the Internet. Talk about pressure.

(Laughter.)

One minute later, guess who joined? Geoff Huston. Wow, more pressure.

Started to break into a little sweat. And Vint started talking: “Hey, Geoff, I have a question for you. I’m having some issues with TCP offloading on a specific chip set.” I’m hoping that Vint doesn’t ask me what’s my take on that because I had no idea what he was speaking about.

Anyway, the time passed, and we were let into the room. And all went well. Today I’m speaking to upcoming Vint Cerf and Geoff Hustons, so I feel pretty comfortable.

So let’s get into the meat of the matter today. I’m going to be giving you a perspective of Internet exchange points, IPv6 position and deployments in the Caribbean, and where we’re at today, where we can be, and what we should be doing better.

So if we can have the slides. So as we know, the Caribbean has immense potential to boost its digital economy through technical innovation such as using next-generation Internet protocols and, of course, using connectivity based on critical infrastructure.

Now, the question is how can we get to that position? And who can help us get there? Well, we have to look at our Caribbean stakeholders. And, of course, ARIN being one of our trusted supporting stakeholders in getting us through that position, these are all realities.

The whole idea is to ensure that we can bring economic success to the Caribbean. Now, keep in mind, I’ll constantly be speaking about the Caribbean perspective. Because sometimes I get the feeling I’m actually preaching to the choir.

You may see similarities with some of the global situations in terms of Internet exchange points, and IPv6 deployments, but a lot of the focus would be on maybe what the Caribbean can do different, how we can improve. But chances are you may also learn something from how the Caribbean is progressing.

It’s important that we formulate strategies to continue to build local infrastructure, local critical infrastructure and fostering this related supporting technology such as IP version 6.

For the most part, ordinary end users don’t care about how they’re connected, what protocols we’re using. We just want a perfect end user experience.

How many persons this morning, when you got into the into the room, connected to the SSID ARIN meeting, did an IP config or an IF config on IPADDR to see that you had an address that was delivered to your laptop by stateless DHCPv6? Nobody, by the show of hands. No one. Anybody did it?

Oh, okay, that’s Yves and myself. That’s the point, right? We don’t care how we connect to the Internet. We just want to know it’s a reliable awesome working connection so that we can do our daily dos.

But you must have some underlying protocol that is making this user experience the one that you want it to be.

Enabling local networks to efficiently exchange data, that’s the whole point. That’s the original expectation of Internet exchange points. We just want to exchange data locally, not crossing international borders to get back into our local networks.

And that’s one of the main objectives of Internet exchange points. But we’ll see today that that is really changing. Yes, it’s important, and it’s the important point of Internet exchange points, but it’s changing a lot. And we see how it’s changing.

Increasing affordability and quality connectivity in local communities, that’s a major objective for a lot of the Caribbean governments these days. We’re talking about now community networks, accessible public Internet services at low cost, how all these critical infrastructures are going to be supported.

You know, I want to mention as well that we, in the Caribbean, as part of the CaribNOG group, have been fostering building critical infrastructure like Internet exchange points, fully dual stack, supporting all the latest technologies, just waiting to have all the pairs connected and start exchanging their traffic.

So the idea is to always ensure that we can increase and build new connectivity options.

Okay. So the protocols we’re speaking about and the infrastructure we’re speaking about, it’s pretty much IXPs as your infrastructure and Internet Protocol version 6 as your underlying end-to-end communication protocol.

Now, as I mentioned, stakeholderism and finding your partners, there are tons of them. But, of course, there’s some crucial ones that you have no choice to work with, and they’re really awesome to work with – your ARINs, your CaribNOGs. And I just want to say most of the deployments we do would not be possible without these stakeholders.

Today we have, I think, north of 16 deployed Internet exchange points in the Caribbean. Some of the later ones – I named a few here, St. Kitts IX, Smart-IX Saint Martin, Suriname IX, St. Barths-IX. They’re really deploying critical infrastructure to ensure that they can increase their economic value by providing seamless resident Internet connectivity locally.

So are Internet exchange points making a difference in the Caribbean? Is it worth the money? Is it worth the time? Absolutely. Will it work for every Caribbean island? Absolutely.

Well, why isn’t every Caribbean island where they should be? Well, we’ll look into that. But rest assured, that’s being worked on. Again, through the support of your CaribNOG, your ARINs, your ISOCs, your PCHs, that’s going to be a reality hopefully in the next five years.

If you look at this slide, we have a couple samples of some average peak bandwidth utilization of some of the Caribbean Internet exchange points. You would see those values in green where we have the Trinidad Internet Exchange point No. 2, I believe.

Trinidad TTIX has two IXPs. They peak at around 10 gigs. The Grenada Internet Exchange point peaks at around 9.6 gigs. We have AMS-IX Caribbean at 17 gigs, and Haiti IX at around 12 gigs.

Now, these numbers change, of course. And I tend to look at trends when there are national events in those countries. And I can speak to, case in point, Grenada, where the last regional Caribbean track and field meet, that’s where all the elite athletes in the Caribbean meet to have their competitive sporting events, like Caribbean Olympics.

You would notice the jump in local traffic just because you have tons of people there accessing content and sharing content. And that’s all been exchanged over that critical infrastructure.

What will it take for the other Caribbean islands to get to fully operational efficient Internet exchange point? Well, the thing is they already have what it takes.

It’s now a social challenge of having stakeholders, parent parties actually connect and pair at those exchanges, exchange local traffic, and thereafter attract global and other content delivery networks.

But that’s our job. Our job as Internet stakeholders – CaribNOG, ARIN, ISOC, yourselves – that’s where we make the difference. And I’ll give some more insights onto that later.

So let’s just take a quick look at, just a quick snapshot of the IPv6 adoption. We know that has been a challenge over the years. We expect it to be at a much better position in 2024 than we were in 2020, because we thought, well hey, look, it’s an excellent protocol. It’s working. More applications are being built to support Internet Protocol version 6. So we should be all moving towards deployment.

No one can tell when IPv4 will be phased out, or will it be? But what we do know is we can start working to deploy IP version 6.

I took a few snapshots. In 2020, and that’s based on Google stats and Google adoption stats, in 2020, Grenada was around 0.14 percent adopted. Today it’s grown to 4.49 percent. Actually that figure this morning was around 5.53 percent.

We see, I believe, St. Lucia, St. Vincent pretty steady with 12.59 percent. Trinidad and Tobago lead in the Caribbean – Dominica actually, the last meeting we had, I believe that meeting was at CaribNOG 26, I remember Nate Davis asking the question, Can anybody tell me why Dominica seems to be so high?

We’re still investigating.

We suspect that a lot of providers there are deploying IPv6 because of their IPv4 shortage challenges. But we still haven’t put a handle on it as yet. But it’s good to see that some of the Caribbean countries are moving to deploy IP version 6.

Now, why is critical infrastructure important? And I would tell you this. As recent as last week, you know, one of the financial institutions that I actually invest with got a cyber attack. And to date I still can’t access my funds or I can’t access what’s in my savings.

And you know sometimes you say, well, we’re in the Caribbean, we’re small. And cyber issues wouldn’t really be a challenge for us. But it’s a reality.

And critical infrastructure is important because that particular entity said, no problem, we will recover from our backups. But our backups are actually stored in the public cloud. And our Internet connection is not that large. So it’s going to take much longer than expected.

What would have fixed that issue? Well, had your backups been in a local data center, which you could have had a very high-capacity link to at a lower cost, then your recovery time objective would have been much better.

But anyway, the top 20 global economies has what we call a Cyber Defense Index. I think the top 20 markets around the world would have a national Cyber Defense Index measurement. And it measures four pillars.

The Cyber Defense Index is mainly four pillars, one being your organizational capacity; your policy commitment; your cybersecurity resources; and the fourth pillar, not the least important, but the fourth pillar being critical infrastructure.

In the Caribbean we don’t have a cyber defense rating index. We don’t have that. We’re small economies. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t follow these strategies for having those pillars.

Where we can start, we can start with our critical infrastructure. So let’s look at building national data centers. And while I consider myself an evangelist for Internet exchange point deployments, Internet Protocol version 6 deployments, recently I’ve moved into the area of data center deployments because we’re seeing how all three, together, can make a huge difference to critical infrastructure.

Hosting of global connected – CDNs, that’s crucial. If you look at the daily statistics for the Caribbean for the top most-accessed domains, it continues to be – and it’s probably the same trend for the global market – it continues to be – anybody want to take a guess? Your Google, right? And then your Facebook.

But when you look at those stats, you say, well, okay, in the Caribbean we’re considered to be consumers. But that’s changing. We’re starting to see producers.

But the important thing is having the ability to have reliable access to specific content. Specific services that would help us produce is very important. And that’s why critical infrastructure is a differentiator in the Caribbean.

As I mentioned, we really should look to addressing our cybersecurity challenges, again, by ensuring we have one of those four pillars in place, which is, again, critical infrastructure, which in turn gives us the ability to deploy our own DNS Anycast services.

I promised I wouldn’t get technical on any of these, but we have already seen some islands building out their own DNS Anycast services, which is in no way an intention to replace other DNS services. But we’re hoping that local ISPs can join these projects and start using these DNS Anycast caching services.

The reason being, we have seen challenges in the past where we expect that particular global resolvers, in the case of Cloudflare, which is a very popular 1.1.1, doesn’t go down. For the most part it doesn’t because it’s an Anycast network distributed all over the world.

But we have seen an issue whereby we had resolution challenges for particular customers. And to fix that issue we asked the providers, “can you use this local DNS Anycast service?” And that solved the issue until Cloudflare was able to resolve.

That’s important first. And our Anycast critical infrastructure can be distributed anywhere in the Caribbean in Internet exchange points.

For example, we’re going to most likely start a pilot project on that, have Anycast service placed in Internet exchange points in Grenada, in St. Vincent, in St. Lucia, in St. Kitts, all over the Caribbean, and vice versa. The host of these other markets can host in our exchanges as well. And that’s the sort of collaboration that we intend to drive over the next few years.

The strategy that would push these results, what should be our main game plan to push these results? Well, again, multistakeholder engagements. Right?

Meeting and speaking with the good folks at ARIN, CaribNOG, CarPIF, ISOC, and the list goes on. Governments are becoming a key stakeholder if not becoming the most important stakeholder.

And today I will tell you this: Every election campaign that I listen to and I follow over the Caribbean, you would always hear the term “DTA,” digital transformation agenda. And I love to hear that. The reason being, you cannot have a digital transformation agenda without having – it goes back to the same term – critical infrastructure.

And an economy growth in the digital sector would depend on a lot of things, right? How tech savvy your workforce is becoming, how efficient your workforce is becoming by use of digital tools, digital applications.

So we’re seeing that public and private stakeholders need to ensure that they can have some agreed agenda for getting to that point.

Local content hosting, we’re hoping this is going to be on the rise because building your own local content is important for your local economy.

I can’t give you statistics today. I’m really sorry for the other Caribbean regions, but we’re seeing that is increasing in Grenada. We’re hoping that it’s going to increase in the other Caribbean islands as well. And forgive me if I tend to draw a reference to Grenada a lot. That’s because of where I’m from. So I have day-to-day experience with the figures there.

So building the pillars that I spoke about before, those four pillars for your Cyber Defense Index, most importantly your critical infrastructure is going to be important. Again, we spoke about challenges with cybersecurity in the Caribbean. And one of the ways of sort of not, you know, preventing totally, but of course giving you a better experience in terms of returning to a normal operations in case you were attacked or affected negatively.

To make all this happen, you need a champion. A champion doesn’t mean one person doing it all. A champion means one person leading other champions, creating other champions, building a group of champions to take care of all the sectors that are required.

This is very important. I’m hoping at CaribNOG I can see some of the other champions. I’m not sure if all are here at the ARIN meeting. But we can see in some of the other Caribbean islands that there are persons moving fast ahead to try to foster building their critical infrastructure.

Yves, I see you across there. That’s good, looking out for Antigua. There’s Suriname, Jai Udit in Suriname, and BVI there is Elford Parsons, and many names. That is going to be an important step towards deploying critical infrastructure in the Caribbean region.

So other considerations. We want to say, well, Internet exchange points are not expensive to start. And take that with a grain of salt because it can be, but it all depends on what you want to achieve.

And I’m proud to say that the Caribbean islands have taken the expensive route of building Internet exchange points with the best current operational standards and practices of global Internet exchanges. It’s just that it’s at a smaller scale.

Our latest deployment at St. Kitts, I can tell you, it would match any IXP in the world in terms of the deployment standards, but we’re just waiting to get pairs connected and get it moving.

We encourage development of local and regional communications infrastructure. Regionally, the plans to look at how we can start off, share, as I mentioned before, critical DNS services into other IXPs. So we’re not connecting IXPs. We’re extending services.

We want to continue to attract a variety of global and local services. And that’s important. That’s important. We need to create this platform whereby local developers of applications, websites, whatever, feel comfortable that we can have these services at a local data center. And of course facilitating value-added services, I can give one example of that value-added service.

In the case of the Suriname Internet Exchange, there’s a need to get more Dutch content into Suriname more efficiently, which means at a lower cost and at a better user experience, lower latency.

Suriname exchange is actually looking at an option of interconnecting into AMS-IX to pair with specific pairs because of the requirement of specific content.

And that’s why I say Internet exchange points are no longer what they used to be. The sky’s the limit in terms of your connectivity options and who you can connect to now.

These days you can actually pick, I can maybe connect to this exchange to get these particular services. So the innovations are there but the platform and the foundational platform must be created.

So why most – what most Caribbean IXPs offer today. Today you get your local traffic exchange. You get your normal, bilateral, non-mandatory peering model. Keep in mind, Caribbean exchange points are not-for-profit. Well, with the exception of AMS-IX Caribbean, they’re all not-for-profit.

And some of them you have government stakeholders involvement. And I’m not sure if Bill Woodcock is online, but I remember my first IXP lesson came from Bill. And he gave some feedback on government’s involvement in Internet exchange points. I always say in the Caribbean it’s a little bit different, because governments are pretty much one of our biggest supporters as well. While that may not be the case for other countries, you have to find what works for you. And that’s important.

All right. But of course this is going to be driven by strong background policies on governing the exchange point set-up.

So you would find pretty much PCH DNS Anycast services in these exchanges. You’ll find support for IP version 4. But what Caribbean exchange points should offer in the future and will offer in the future is a full suite of connectivity services, local cloud services, CDN pairing, regional data center interconnects, connectivity options from 1 gig up to 100 gig or more. 10 gig is the new one gig.

Global CDN hosting, true regional partnerships. Of course there is strength in numbers. Some of the islands in this region are sort of small to justify having particular global CDNs. But true collaboration and partnerships, that can be a possibility. And of course your local DNS Anycast services through IP version 4, IPv6 connectivity.

Let’s look at the challenge, and let’s look at the enterprise versus the ISP. Now, it’s really interesting that when you look at the ARIN blogs and you look at some of those case studies, and Matt had reached out said, “Brent, make sure and read the IPv6 Business Case again.” I read it. Actually, I read it before. And most of the things we’re going to talk about today is IPv6 for Internet because there’s a business case for IPv6 for Internet.

And it’s very interesting, and I never looked at it that way before. I always looked at it as a straight case deployment. But you have to have that delineation there. Today we’ll be talking about IPv6 deployment for Internet.

I did a quick comparison. I always tend to do that when I do different technical discussions. I tend to compare a small island to the island that I’m actually doing the discussion in. And we happen to be here in Barbados.

Now, Barbados is special because they have, it’s a very competitive telecom market. Two strong telecom providers, both offering a wide range of, I think, quadpay services. And they both support the IPv6 protocol, more so on a transit level.

I know the main sponsor left the room already. I don’t want to put any pressure on him, but I think he has a representative here. Barbados has quite a bit of IPv6 prefixes. Compared to Grenada, same number of ASNs. Population, Grenada might be 112 thousand; Barbados maybe close to 300 thousand, maybe more at this point. Of course, different adoption rate. Grenada being maybe 5 percent higher than Barbados.

What’s the challenge? The main challenge is that while those providers can transit IPv6 through the networks and offer you maybe direct fiber connectivity, the broadband access networks have not been set up for Internet access deployment.

Why is that? I can’t be quoted on that, but I can tell you there’s lots of great mechanisms out there that we know about, and it’s called Carrier-Grade NAT. Carrier-Grade NAT is still being used around the Caribbean, all over the Caribbean.

And when Carrier-Grade NAT implementation started somewhere maybe five years ago, 2019, 2018, the expectation was that maybe in five years we should be phasing our networks away from that and moving into full IPv6.

And I can tell you to date, Carrier-Grade NAT is still being used, and Carrier-Grade NAT hardware is being refreshed. Pretty expensive stuff, both from a cap ex and op ex perspective. But the whole objective is still to ensure that at some point Caribbean operators can get IPv6.

So that’s part of the challenge, which is the lag in moving away or at least starting a deployment in your broadband access networks. It may be a similar challenge maybe in other countries, but when I followed the adoption statistics, a lot of the global – a lot of countries are moving to that native IPv6 dual stack configuration.

Why in Grenada, again, I’ll use Grenada as a reference, why are we seeing an increase in IPv6 traffic? Well, enterprise customers have decided that they are going to start doing some adoptions because, for specific reasons.

Their motivation, maybe it’s not, is because it’s an efficient protocol, but maybe it’s just more effective for us from a business-case perspective because we have a lot of cloud services that are now offering things like BYOIP, like AWS. And, okay, we have our IPv6 address space, then maybe we can do more because we intend to move away from a lot of on-prem services into cloud.

You find – so let me give you an idea of a ratio. So Grenada has maybe five ISPs, four ISPs, and you have maybe the same number of enterprise companies. While still small, it’s a big start moving towards IPv6 deployments.

And I would just want to add as well, of all the enterprise institutions that are moving to v6, they fall into the financial sector, the finance companies. So that means they’re thinking a little different. They’re seeing something that maybe the ISPs are not seeing. But whatever they’re seeing, it’s important to them.

So I got permission to speak on a few of those deployments which I want to share with you. I’m going to start with an ISP first.

So all is not lost. You can take some examples from this particular ISP. So this one happens to be Cable Bahamas. I know there was maybe a CaribNOG or a CarPIF meeting held there not too long ago. And they listened. Cable Bahamas decided that they’re going to stay ahead of the game.

Now, from my latest feedback I can say they’re the first Caribbean ISP to deploy what we call a “core to door” deployment for Internet, that’s the Internet business case. They have deployed IPv6 in their core, and they’re delivering this to their fiber to the home customers. And they followed a model that made sense.

They first invested in training and, through that, trained their staff. Then they moved towards deployment planning. And then from that stage they decided, hey, we’re going to go into implementation, and, of course, there’s no deployment without issues. So we’re going to have our optimization phase after.

So what was the game changer for them? Well, they picked a greenfield deployment. Well, we’re going to be moving from HFC into fiber to the home. So let’s deploy v6 on our fiber-to-the-home service.

And that worked out. To date I think they have over 7,000 customers using dual stack. And I asked a question. Did anyone call your help desk to ask, what is the strange number I’m seeing when I do an IP config? No one did. No one did. That’s just to give you an idea how seamless that can be.

So they also benefit from local hosted and global CDNs. Of course, these days the CDNs would ask you, can you give me transit connectivity on IPv6? Sure we can. Okay, great. We’ll send you some notes.

Just serve your customers locally, right? And they are also benefitting from providing secure e-services at low-latency speed over IPv6.

So another snapshot, and this is interesting because I did the same thing at home and got almost the same value.

So to date, 45 percent of their FTTx subscriber traffic goes over IPv6. I did a snapshot at home as well because at home I decided to carry out a little experiment. That’s after listening to Owen DeLong’s – one of his presentations some years ago.

I decided to put a segment in every room in my house and deploy IPv6 in every room of my house. And the traffic ratio is pretty much the same. 45 to 50 percent of my content sometimes is accessed over IPv6. So that’s a really – this is a really good picture of why moving to this protocol makes sense.

I’m going to give you another use case. This use case is a company in the financial sector. It’s one of the largest local banks in Grenada now. Mind you, this is not the only example. There are other examples that have excellent deployments using IPv6, but unfortunately I was not allowed to give you details on their deployments.

This bank is the first financial entity in Grenada to pair on the Internet exchange. So we do have a financial entity on the Internet exchange. They’re the first financial entity to deploy IPv6.

Why did they do that? Because their e-services or their secure e-services is hosted with a very popular CDN. And that very popular CDN happens to be hosted in the local Internet exchange.

So for them, if my end users can grab my e-services really, really quickly and efficiently, then that makes sense for me. So that was a no-brainer, and the rest is history.

All right. So they’re enjoying the benefits of being on that exchange, all right, and, as a matter of fact, even decided that, hey, what are the other services that ARIN would offer: Hosted RPKI; yeah, we want that too; DDoS protection, yeah, we’re doing BGP – let’s pair with the DDoS protection provider. We want that as well.

They spared no expense in ensuring they had a resilient infrastructure for a – resilient secure infrastructure for all their edge services.

Dual-parent points, dual-parent routers, multiple ISPs, both dual-stack. The only thing to test now is literally shutting down one side and make sure the failover is seamless.

But the point is, because their customers mean so much to them, they ensured that they put an infrastructure in place, supported by local Internet exchanges and local content service, local DNS to ensure that end users can have services that would literally be always available.

Okay. So here I just have a snapshot that shows you the latency that their e-services are accessed with. It shows you that the e-services supports IPv6, and they have digitally signed their prefixes, created routes with RPKI, which the ARIN team will speak about later on as well.

Okay. Here’s the economic benefit for them. It’s that a lot of the e-commerce traffic, 33 percent of it to date, goes local. The expectation is that’s going to grow over the next few years.

Moving on, the government, you ever hear of governments really wanting to be on an Internet exchange point? What is their use case? Well, governments are special. They’re special in the case that they have a lot of staff. And usually government staff is busy doing all sorts of things, right? How can we offload some of their traffic locally, right?

Let’s be on Internet exchange. The government of Grenada decided we’re going to get our own ASN and then we’re going to get our own IPv4 and IPv6 block from ARIN and connect to the local exchange because we want to ensure that our staff get low-latency services. They access popular social media content locally and also deliver e-gov services. And, again, important to note, it all depends who you’re housing at your exchange or your data center that attracts these entities.

Do you have a Cloudflare there? Yes, you do. Okay, well, we are going to pair that exchange.

So to date, their social media and streaming content is offloaded at the Internet exchange point at around 67 percent. The rest of it, that 33 percent, goes over the transit links to the Internet.

Now that’s a financial benefit, right? They save on their transit services, which they pay for. Again, another benefit – that might be just one of a few, but there are quite a few on the list.

So what does that mean for Caribbean businesses and support businesses? Well, we have now a rise of local supporting companies. I’m just going to name a few. We have Calatech. Calatech is now doing DNS, IPv4, IPv6 deployments, infrastructure design. We have Kapasiti that’s doing Internet exchange points, design and deployments, and of course Internet solutions, which is pretty much my passion. I live for that stuff. And we’re here to help support Caribbean organizations move forward because we see it as absolutely important as your next step in building your critical infrastructure.

And with that, I want to say look at the right partners. Ensure you go to the ARIN website, which has everything, everything on all IPv6 and how to get started getting your resources. As a matter of fact, I was able to go there and find out when was my last ARIN meeting as a Fellow. ARIN really keeps track of their data.

You have your CaribNOG, your CarPIF, all these organizations that will really help you move forward. It’s important to try to follow the industry standards and trends. And that is where these meetings make the difference, the people you need to speak to are right in this room. Trust me.

I’m here. You know. (Laughter.)

All right. So with that, I want to say a very, very, very big thank you to you and ARIN, allowing me to give you this keynote. As some of you know, I can stay here the rest of the day, speaking about IPv6 and Internet exchanges.

But it’s a long week, and feel free to reach out and let’s have some discussions, especially our Caribbean stakeholders. I was hoping to see more of you in the room. I hope you’re there virtually. And to the virtual participants as well, I’ll leave my email address so you can reach out should you have any questions.

Hollis Kara: Thank you so much, Brent.

Do we have any quick questions in the room? (Applause.)

Brent Mc Intosh: I strongly discourage questions. I’m just joking.

Hollis Kara: We have time for one or two, and then we’ll collect others and we’ll follow up with Brent afterward and make sure to get that out to everyone. But if we could start over here, Chris made it to the mic first, I think.

Chris Woodfield: Chris Woodfield, I3D.net, ARIN AC. I’m curious, Caribbean exchanges, have any of them grown beyond the need for a single /24 of critical infrastructure? And are they using critical infrastructure allocations or other IPv4 allocations?

Brent Mc Intosh: That’s an excellent question, Chris.

I get the feeling that you looked at my last ticket, right? I opened up a ticket on something very similar.

Right now, in terms of the critical parent infrastructure, which is the IX LAN allocation from the micro-allocation, no one is busting that /24. I can tell you that in the Caribbean.

Of course, what’s missing is, in the past, the only block that was applied for was an IPv4/IPv6 block for the IX LAN. Never a block for things like management transit services.

All Caribbean IXPs are doing that right now. We’re ensuring that they do that. Use case, again, I would draw a reference to Grenada, as we just moved Internet exchange into the data center. And the data center has become its own sort of entity, we applied to ARIN to get infrastructure blocks for this as well, noting that we have some changes to make which ARIN highlighted, and which we will do over the next few years.

But to answer your question, no, no one is busting that block at this point.

Chris Woodfield: Thanks.

Adair Thaxton: Adair Thaxton, Internet2. I ask lots of questions. I was wondering, following major storms like hurricanes, is there any correlation in increases in the amount of deployment of IPv6 or likelihood to create an IXP on that particular island investing in critical infrastructure?

Brent Mc Intosh: That’s a good question. I would tell you, I think Caribbean businesses and stakeholders, they’re used to hurricanes. They don’t worry about it too much because a lot of services are still in the public cloud. And they continue to deploy services in the public cloud, and we do encourage that.

The challenge is that sometimes, when you’re sizing your workloads that sit in the cloud and you’re not looking at your connectivity, then you can run into some problems.

So Internet exchange point deployments is more so coming now from the justification of having critical infrastructure that’s pushed by CaribNOG, that’s pushed by ISOC.

So that’s the whole driving force behind the Internet exchange points. You need to have that critical infrastructure because it makes a difference with connectivity. So not so much from natural disasters and all that.

Adair Thaxton: Okay, I was just wondering, since after hurricanes they have to rebuild a lot of stuff, if they took that opportunity to say, while we’re rebuilding, we can really rebuild correctly –

Brent Mc Intosh: I am absolutely going to add this to my list of reasons. I’m telling you, because I was mentioning last night to one of the guys that data centers are now critical to the Caribbean. No longer just an IXP. You need data centers as well.

Hollis Kara: We have one last question from our virtual attendee.

Beverly Hicks: Yes, Matthew Cowen, DgtlFuture, ARIN 52 Fellow. Hi, Brent, great keynote. Thank you. Where are we with deployment of IXPs in the French West Indies? Specifically what can be done to increase participation? P.S.: I know it’s complicated. I’d like to help if I can.

He’s based in Martinique.

Brent Mc Intosh: Yes, please give him my address. French islands, I love it. We spent some time in the French islands working on the deployments. Saint Barts. No problem. One of the best IXs out in the French Caribbean. Lots of passionate resources.

St. Martin, the French side, they have wonderful deployment as well. The challenge is, again, convincing parties to connect and exchange prefixes with each other. I think that more so needs a sort of social encouragement and further discussions.

Guadeloupe, Guadeloupe have not moved. And they have a perfect use case for an IX. The right number of ISPs, tons of ISPs; a large population as compared to the Caribbean; and tons of traffic to exchange. Tons of critical infrastructure to build up.

But it never materialized because, again, I would go so far as to say, you need a champion. And the potential champion and his associate, actually they died in an aircraft crash not long ago. So we sort of have to start from scratch again.

We would love to have that discussion. There is a team from French I – from France-IX, sorry, that’s working on seeing how they can rebuild the relationships in those islands. We can discuss that. Please give him my email address.

Hollis Kara: Awesome. We’ll connect you with Matthew offline. Thank you, Brent, very much for your talk.

Brent Mc Intosh: Thank you. (Applause.)

Hollis Kara: All right, our little glitch earlier put us a little bit behind. So let’s talk about how we’re going to adjust going into the break. First of all, let’s see, where are we at?

It is 10:50. Let’s give it until 11:10. We’ll take a 20-minute break, and we’ll adjust our schedule a little bit following that.

We will stick to the policy schedule as advertised for the benefit of our virtual participants. That will start at 1:30 after lunch. We may jiggle things around a little bit between here and there. We’ll figure it out, and I’ll fill you in after the break.

I would ask if the AC and Fellows and Mr. Curran could stay in the room for just a moment so we can get some obligatory photos.

Otherwise, I invite everyone to step out, get a bit of fresh air, a snack and for folks who are online to refresh their coffees, or whatever other beverage they may be partaking in, and we’ll see you back at 11:20.

(Break from 10:50 AM to 11:14 AM.)

Hollis Kara: Welcome back from break, everyone. We’re going to start off this session with our Policy Implementation and Experience Report, given by our Chief Customer Officer, Mr. John Sweeting. Come on up, John.

(Applause.)

Policy Implementation and Experience Report

John Sweeting: Thank you, Hollis. Hello, everyone. Good morning. I’m going to run through Policy Implementation and Experience Report. The first section of it’s going to be just a little bit of allocation and assignment terminology and how we got to where we are today.

I’m going to run through that pretty quick because we’re going to cover 25 years of those terms and what changed along the way. Then I’ll hit the 4.4 IPv4 Micro-allocation policy for IXs and 6.5.2.1 IPv6 Allocation Size. Let’s get right into it.

It’s kind of like a stroll down memory lane, but it’s going to be a race down memory lane. Part of the reason is I was on the AC for almost this whole entire time that all these changes happened. So, it’s nice memories.

All right, we started out in 1997-2004, and of course at that time we were using RFC 2050, and you had to be an ISP, or if you were an end user you could only get space directly from ARIN if you could qualify for a /19.

As you can see, the policies were a little bit different for each of the ones for the ISPs, of course they used their customers for end users.

You had to base it on your hardware numbering requirements, with a utilization rate of 50 percent one-year, internal use only.

That’s pretty much the highlights of it. It required the utilization that we still required in 2004 to 2012. But we made a change in the AC, started doing their thing, and we got the policies changed. We got it down to a /20 minimum allocation.

And the reason for the minimum allocation size was strictly related to routers and what they could handle as far as the routing tables. And then there was also a /22 minimum allocation to multi-homed ISPs. So, there was a little bit of flavor in there.

End users went to the same – /20 and a /22 if they were multi-homed. That’s where a lot of end users got their own AS numbers and stuff so they could pretend to be a multi-home or be multi-homed and get their own space.

Again, it was still 80 percent usage of each previous assignment, same 25 percent immediate and 50 percent in one year.

Whois is still the same. The ISPs had to SWIP all their reallocations and reassignments. And the end users were not supposed to – actually couldn’t – and that’s why they had the term “assignment”; that was the difference between an allocation and assignment. Allocation, you could actually make reassignments and reallocations. Assignments you could not do that.

That was all built into ARIN Online when ARIN Online was built during this time. There was no automatic membership for end users. As a matter of fact, end users had to pay – for a while I think there was a $500 fee they had to pay. And then they were able to select and be part of a Registration Services Plan, which meant they had to become an ISP and they had to follow all the rules for an ISP, but they were still an end user.

But they were able to have membership and they were able to vote, and they were able to actually do reassignments and reallocations.

So, 2012 to 2015, we got down to the /24 minimum allocation for both end users and Internet services providers. There was a time in there when the /24 for end users, they had to be multi-homed. That was another drive on all the AS numbers that were given out during that time.

Again, still the same 80 percent utilization. Block size was based on a three-month need. And that kind of played into the way the fees were handled because ISPs came in really a lot of times over a short period of time.

It was too much to have them keep paying every time they got the space. So, it just got added up and they paid at the end of the year, whereas end users paid every time they got their assignment at that time.

2015 to 2018, not a whole lot of changes there. It just kind of shaped up and kind of became the automatic. People got used to it. I don’t really see - there’s nothing bold in here, so I don’t think there was any changes.

And then 2018 to 2021, the big change here was membership became unavailable to end users. They couldn’t even pay that $500 a year to become a member. I believe they could still do the RSP. They could volunteer to be part of a Registration Services Plan and be evaluated under ISP criteria in the NRPM, in the Number Resource Policy Manual, but once they made that conversion, they could not convert back. I’m looking at Eddie. He’s kind of blank, but okay.

(Laughter.)

And then IPv4 assignments and allocations 2022 to present. This is when we went through the fee harmonization. We did a whole lot of stuff here.

ISPs became Service Members; end users became Service Members. Everybody was able to take advantage of all the services to include reassignments and reallocations, which a lot of your bigger enterprise end users really needed to because they had offices in other states and stuff, and they wanted to do geolocation for them. So, they really needed to do reassignments and reallocations to their offices.

Or they had to get an Org ID for every office they had in every state where they wanted the IPs to show up. Still the 80 percent utilization, the /24 was still the minimum and it still is today the minimum. And end users became Service Members, and the thing about the membership was they all, everybody became Service Members with the option to become a General Member and vote in the elections.

The other thing along with that was that when you opted for General Membership you agreed to participate in ARIN elections. And there’s a policy that if you don’t participate in the elections in three consecutive years, we turn you back to a Service Member.

However, you can become a General Member the next day if you so choose. We’ve had that. We had people who got notified, “hey, you’re no longer a General Member; you can’t participate in the elections.” And they said, “whoa, we never knew we could participate in the elections,” because people had moved on and these people were new. They came back in and got their General Membership right away.

It’s working really well. We went through some iterations with that. At first it was going to be if they lost it, they lost it for the year. And then our president and CEO and the Board looked at it and said, we can’t really do that. We need to be able to let them – what if somebody left and didn’t take care of it, but the new person came in and wanted to vote. So, we put that in there and it has actually had a lot of value to the members.

And also, at that time a lot of the stuff was all because of the fee harmonization that we did in 2022. The distinction for fees between end users and ISP was eliminated. Everybody was charged now by the aggregate amount of either IPv4 addresses or IPv6 addresses that they held in their account, depending on which one ended up in the higher cost tier of the registration of the fee table.

Everybody has access to the same tools, the same services. Everybody is a Service Member unless they volunteer or request to become a General Member and participate in the governance of ARIN. And everybody received allocations.

So, ARIN no longer made assignments. This is important for – especially for our ARIN Online and our system, because it was distinctive in the system, if you had an assignment, you could not do a reassignment or a reallocation.

So, we had to change everything over to allocations so that everybody was able to have that feature and that service. So that’s why, when you see – well, a reassignment – an assignment is an allocation, it’s just a different word for it. In ARIN-speak it really isn’t when we’re talking about the systems and everything.

When it was an assignment, you could not do anything more with that. It was there in your Org and that’s where it stayed until it either got transferred or given back to ARIN. To date, anybody and everybody can do reassignments or reallocations depending on their need and what they want to do it for.

And so, we had in the system it was a DS for assignments and DA for direct allocation. So, everybody gets direct allocations today.

So where are we today? That’s where we’re at. We only allocate IP addresses. There’s been a lot of struggling by the NRPM Working Group. So, I figured we’d do this Policy Experience Report so it jumps over to Alison to struggle with for a while now. No.

Anyway, that’s what they’re trying to do. That’s what the Advisory Council is trying to do right now. They’re trying to get the assignment language out of the NRPM and just talk about allocations because that’s really all that ARIN does and that’s really all we talk about.

If you talk to RSD, they’re going to talk about allocations or reassignments and reallocations because there’s still – we still left the option for our direct customers to do reassignments if they don’t want their customers to be able to assign it any further, or do reallocations in case it’s to an ISP that needs to reallocate it to their customers or reassign it to their customers.

Let’s see. ISPs may use external customers. Right now, today the difference is ISPs, they’re still an end user, and an ISP evaluation and qualifications for getting IP addresses. The main difference is ISPs can use external customers to justify their needs where an end user can’t.

But you can choose which you want to qualify under. So basically, you don’t have to make that decision on whether you want an RSP or not. You’ve got an RSP; now you say I want to be judged as an ISP or an end user.

At this point, it’s not clear if there’s any need to have two distinct – oh, yeah, do we need to have two different policies for end users and ISPs?

Is there a way to harmonize that as well and just say, “hey, based on your requirements, you get the block that’s the right size for what you’re saying your needs are and what you’re going to be using it for?” I don’t know. That’s another one we’ll hand off to the Policy Experience Working Group.

Okay. This is just some stuff added in because we had some comments on the Mailing List when we were doing this. LIRs and ISPs are not the same.

In the NRPM, it defines an LIR, a Local Internet Registry, as an Internet registry that primarily assigns IP addresses to the users of the network services that it provides, noting that LIRs are generally Internet service providers whose customers are primarily end users and possibly other ISPs.

That’s where you get the difference. In ARIN-land, LIRs are really ISPs, and they’re really providing connectivity services to their customers.

Those terms aren’t 100 percent interchangeable because you can actually have an LIR that does nothing more than gets IP address space and leases it out to other people and manages it for them, which in ARIN we say you can’t get IP space from ARIN for leasing.

We’re not sure that you really want us calling out that LIRs and ISPs – anyway, we’ve got to get that straight. We’ve got to figure that one out because an LIR can be somebody that doesn’t provide connectivity services.

But the ARIN community has been loud and proud on, “hey, we don’t give out address space for leasing. We don’t even allow people to do transfers to get space for leasing.”

That’s something that has to be worked out. The AC is all over it. And you’ll probably be hearing more about that from them.

That was the example. If you only provide address management services, i.e., IPv4 leasing – a lot of these leasing companies, they do a lot more than that. They do the RPKI for them. They do their reverse DNS. They do all kinds of stuff for them.

Anyway, we’ve got to figure that out.

Additional considerations for policy. So NRPM 6.5.1a says ISPs and LIRs are equivalent terms. But NRPM Section 4 has been interpreted to use the community’s present ISP definition. That’s where we are today. That’s what RSD, Registration Services Department, uses as the term. They’re using ISP, somebody that provides network services to their customers, not just IP management services.

Changing that definition would impact policy implementation beyond what we addressed today. And it’s basically what I just said.

If you really say that it’s an LIR and they can actually just get space to manage it for other people, then we’re really saying that they can go on the transfer market and get space to lease.

While that should not inhibit policy changes, if sought by the community – in other words, if the community says, “you know what, we’d like that to be that way; we would like LIRs to be able to get space to manage for other people,” then that’s fine.

Work with your local – your local – your global Advisory Council member and try to get something into policy for that.

Okay. So, these are just some of the things we heard on the list, which you can see really different people have different ideas of what an ISP versus an LIR is. So, the question to the ARIN community is should we prefer the term LIR over ISP with the understanding of what that would mean to policy interpretation by the ARIN staff.

Okay. So, the next thing I’m going to talk about is IPv4 micro-allocations, NRPM 4.4. This is a special pool of space that’s reserved for IXs. Within the pool, there’s micro-allocations for critical infrastructure, including public exchange points. And the public exchange point must be allocated from specific blocks reserved for this purpose.

And knowing the history of that, that was done that way because it wasn’t supposed to be routed space. So, people could actually go and say, “oh, this whole block is space – I don’t want to see any traffic from this block, so I’m going to filter these out.”

The problem is that a lot of IXs are wanting to use some of that space for routing.

And when they challenge us and we go back and we look at the policy, there’s nothing in the policy that says that space cannot be routed. All that’s in there is that it has to be from a specific block, suggesting that it might not supposed to be routed. But it does not explicitly say that.

So, we’ve been challenged quite a bit lately. And we need some clarification in how the community – because they have reasons to – and I don’t know, an Internet exchange, can they manage with just a block for internally and not use any of it? Do they need to connect to the Internet with it?

So, we really need some clarification on that. I’m sure Alison and her working group will get right on that. But they’re going to need to get some of the information from you, the community.

So, there you go. Current staff understanding is that it must be used for the switch fabric only and not routed. But should this be specified in policy? I would say “yes, it should.” If that’s what you want, it should say very clearly in policy that’s the intent.

The last thing I’m going to cover real quick is IPv6 Allocation Size. And part of this is, okay, we had a very large allocation of IPv6 space. And because we have these current practices of allocations being made on nibble boundaries and current practice is if a request shows justification for a larger block – say, they qualify for a /24 and a /32 and one more /32 over that – should we take it all the way out to a /20? Should we take a 20 that they’ve qualified for a /20 plus a /32 over the next five years or so? Should we go all the way to a /16 and give them the full /16?

And the other thing that we didn’t do for this last particular one was the other practice we have is that we actually reserve out to the next. So if they got a /16, we would have reserved out to a /12, which we did not do. And I wouldn’t do that unless the community specifically said you should do that.

So, we need some guidance. Maybe if an ISP demonstrates they need slightly more than the /20, should we go all the way to a /16, or a /20 from a /16 reserve, which could have been done actually in this case, or a /20 and a /32? How does the community want us to start doing this as we get into these larger and larger numbers?

I suspect there will be more customers that are requiring bigger blocks, /24s, /20s, and so on.

Should the ISP be required to show more utilization? I’m not sure how they show if it’s their first block and they’re going to do the whole project, and they’re doing it for five to ten years out, how they would show utilization. I think maybe that meant should they show more justification.

I’ll tell you, for the one that we got, the large one, there was plenty of justification. It was very well documented.

Should larger allocations be exempt from nibble boundary requirements? We’re asking you that. And if so, then where is the correct size to impose that? Would it be at the /28, the /24, the /20, whatever. That’s what we’re asking of the community.

And that’s it.

Hollis Kara: All right. It is time to approach the microphones if you have any questions for Mr. Sweeting about this presentation. And I do see that we have one that came in online during the presentation.

Beverly Hicks: Yes, Kevin Blumberg, the Wire. In different regions, the term “LIR” is utilized. It should not be used if it’s a synonym for ISP in our region, absent specific policy.

John Sweeting: Thank you, Kevin. That is more an opinion than a question, right?

Hollis Kara: True. It was a comment. It was a comment. Mr. Woodfield.

Chris Woodfield: Chris Woodfield, I3D.net, ARIN AC. The question about IXP allocations being routable, you may be aware of this, but I believe that a good number of the conversations around that have been revolving around policy, which I think in RIPE was adopted, ARIN, we had a proposal to reduce the IXP allocation size to below a /24, which inherently would make it non-globally routable.

So, I think that conversation is probably a justification for some of these questions as well, because if you’re an IXP, if I need my IXP space to be routed, then it’s got to be a /24. I can’t do anything smaller and expect to be routed. So that might be driving some of those questions and concerns.

John Sweeting: Very true, thank you. Are you on the Policy Experience Working Group?

Chris Woodfield: I am.

John Sweeting: Okay, awesome. All right, Doug?

Doug Camin: Doug Camin, Coordinated Care Services. Just a question. When you mentioned the policy changes that occurred that reroute – end users can now gain the ability to reallocate, did the team go back through so every prior allocation that was made before was –

John Sweeting: Everything in our database shows as an allocation today. And every allocation – so every assignment that was ever made has been changed to allocation and can do the reallocations’ reassignments, yes.

Doug Camin: Okay, thank you.

Hollis Kara: All right. I don’t see any more questions in the queue. I think we are done. Thank you, John.

(Applause.)

John Sweeting: Thank you, everyone.

Hollis Kara: All right. Next up, we have Eddie Diego, our Policy Analyst, to give us a Regional Policy Update.

(Applause.)

Regional Policy Update

Eddie Diego: Hello, everyone. I’ll be going over the Regional Policy Update, which includes policies across all the four other RIRs, Regional Internet Registries, which include AFRINIC, APNIC, LACNIC, and RIPE NCC.

Starting in AFRINIC, their docket has remained unchanged since the last time we gave this presentation.

Their RPKI ROA policy remains ratified by the Board, is awaiting implementation and the remaining three policies reached consensus and are awaiting ratification by the Board.

Moving on to APNIC, they just had their Members Meeting last month, APNIC 57. At that meeting, two policies reached consensus. Prop-154, Resizing of IPv4 Assignment for the IXPs.

This would reduce the assignments- the initial assignment size - for IXPs from a /23 to /26. And like Chris just mentioned, ARIN had a similar policy proposed last year. That was abandoned due to lack of community support.

Also reaching consensus, APNIC 56, was Prop-156, Assignment of Temporary IP Resources. This reserved a /21, a /29 and eight ASNs for temporary assignments for special purposes such as conferences, workshops, special interest group meetings, et cetera.

APNIC 57, there were two proposals that did not reach consensus. Prop-157, Temporary IPv4 Transfers. Pretty straightforward. It would allow temporary IPv4 transfers, as well as IPv6 auto-allocation for each IPv4 request. This automatically delegates IPv6 addresses to initial IPv4 requests, with the intention of accelerating IPv6 adoption.

Moving on to LACNIC. Currently under discussion is 2023-3, Considerations for Declaring a Proposal Abandoned. This adds some clarity to when proposals will be considered abandoned.

2023-7, Temporary Transfers. Again, pretty straightforward from the title. It would allow temporary transfers within the APNIC region. And not on this slide are two proposals that were just added to the docket just in the last two weeks.

2024-1 adds some clarity to their PDP on how to introduce proposals. And 2024-2 adds some clarity to their appeals process. It updates their appeals process.

Not ratified in LACNIC was 2023-5, DeleteROAs for Recovered Resources. And not reaching consensus was 2022-2, Clarification of the Lease of Resources not Allowed Under the Policies in Force, which, as John mentioned, ARIN has had a lot of discussion about leasing in our region.

Also not reaching consensus is 2023-6, Special Exception for Global Critical Infrastructure Providers.

Moving on to RIPE NCC. Last Call just closed on April 9th for Add AGGREGATED-BY-LIR status for IPv4 PA assignments. This basically adds the AGGREGATED-BY-LIR status to INETNUM objects that are applicable.

Accepted and implemented in RIPE are two policies I mentioned the last time I gave this presentation. 2023-1, Reducing IXP IPv4 Assignment Default Size to /26. Again, this is similar to the one Chris mentioned in the ARIN region that was abandoned.

Also being accepted and implemented was Voluntary Transfer Lock. This allows the holder to voluntarily lock resources from being transferred for a period of 6 months, 12 months, and/or 24 months.

And lastly, here are some links to all five of the RIRs’ policy dockets, and you can look up previous policies as well.

And the NRO Comparative Policy Overview is a single document we maintain that gives a nice overview where you can compare policies across all five Regional Internet Registries.

All right. That’s all I had. That was quick.

Hollis Kara: That was fast. Thanks, Eddie.

If anyone has questions for Eddie, feel free to approach the microphone or start typing. We’ll go over to Adair.

Adair Thaxton: Adair, again. Internet2, again. Was the temporary transfer block in RIPE a reaction to any one specific incident? Or was it just considered to be a good thing to do?

Eddie Diego: To be honest, I don’t know. I’m not that familiar. Is there anyone in the room?

John Curran: It was the blocking?

Hollis Kara: The temporary lock on IPv4 transfers. The question was, was there an event that preceded that policy?

Chris Woodfield: I3D.net, ARIN AC. My understanding is the impetus for that policy was due to potential involuntary transfers due to geopolitical concerns in eastern Europe.

Hollis Kara: We’re going to defer to the gentleman from the NCC.

Hans Petter Holen: Thank you. Hans Petter Holen, COO of RIPE NCC. My first ARIN meeting after I took this job – I have been to a couple before but thank you for having me.

The transfer lock came after the invasion of Ukraine. We did some administrative decisions at the first RIPE meeting. Basically, it happened adding, first, an extraordinary approval from the managing director for all transfers in Ukraine until we understood the situation. Then that allowed the community to discuss and develop policy, and we created a mechanism for locking transfers.

Basically, it’s a legal mechanism. You actually have to sign a document and prove that you are legally entitled to block transfer for a certain point of time.

Now, taking that administrative path was easy but we did, strictly speaking, not have any grounds in policy to do that. So, for the sort of part of the greater good, I stepped up knowing that I would lose a case in arbitration, but the whole idea here was to chill down any attempt to transfer address space out of Ukraine to Russia. That was the underlying problem.

Now the policy is hopefully in place and there is then a policy basis for that transfer lock.

Looking at statistics, it’s not been very popular. There’s been very few uses of them. And one of the reasons for this is that we do have additional scrutiny on transfers. Basically, you have to provide legal documents, signed and notarized and so on, in order to do a transfer. So, it’s very difficult to provide a transfer under distress.

But this area with transfers in areas that are de facto under one administration – now I need to be really careful with the use of words – but are still under international law, part of a country that does not recognize that administration is a political challenge of dimensions. So that’s the reality in Europe and the RIPE region these days.

Hollis Kara: Thank you so much for that clarification. That was great.

Not seeing any questions further, I think we’re all done. Thank you, Eddie.

(Applause.)

Speaking of political issues, I’d like to invite up Einar Bohlin, ARIN’s Vice President of Government Affairs, to give the Government Affairs Update.

Government Affairs Update

Einar Bohlin: Yes. Probably not political to say, but governments do have issues.

Einar Bohlin, VP Government Affairs at ARIN. Thank you for allowing me to present this update.

The topics I’m going to cover is the composition of the department, our areas of focus, a look at last year and a look at this year.

The team is myself; Nate Davis, Senior Government Affairs Analyst; Leslie, Senior Director, Trust and Public Safety; and Bevil Wooding, Director of Caribbean Affairs.

Bevil is here with us in the back over here. I’ll be here all week. Nate and Leslie could not make it this week.

These are our areas of focus. We take this – this comes from the Board’s strategic direction that they update every year. And it’s got more than what you see on the screen here, but these parts of the strategic direction really speak to us in the GAD department, in the Government Affairs Department.

This is in addition, of course, to our mission statement. Protect the multistakeholder approach to Internet technical coordination and the Internet number registry system, and increase our outreach and support to our members in the Caribbean.

We do this by engaging with members, with governments, with international regional organizations in our service region and beyond.

A look at 2023: There was a lot of proposed legislation and regulation being worked on last year. In the U.S., in Canada, at the U.N., at the ITU, in the EU. And we followed and track those with the goal of thinking in our minds, is this regulation going to impact the registry system? And we’re still monitoring these things.

And a big thing that happened last year was the IGF in November, in Kyoto. The Internet Governance Forum is a U.N.-hosted non-decisional forum for discussion of topics determined by a program committee.

The recognized stakeholders are governments, private sector, civil society, and the technical community. It’s been going for 19 or 20 years.

One of the sessions, early in the meeting, a long, multihour session hosted by the U.S. and some other countries from Europe and other places, was dedicated to discussing the Declaration for the Future of the Internet.

This was signed two years ago by about 60 countries. And its purpose is to establish and commit to principles of an open, free, global, interoperable, reliable, and secure Internet. And what this multihour session at IGF was about was the governments asking the stakeholders groups to keep governments accountable to these principles.

We broke out into four breakout sessions. We had discussions about how to do this, and we came back to the DFI plenary and had some discussions and then that plenary reported to the overall IGF.

And it’s in the report. But as an IGF is, it’s about discussing things and informing future discussions, other discussions in other places.

And then perhaps coincidentally, later in this IGF meeting, the U.N. body on education, science and culture presented an interesting tool where a country can assess itself on Internet principles of rights, openness, accessibility, and multistakeholder participation.

So if you’re a country and you want to assess yourself according to some 300 different indicators, you can create an assessment team, use the UNESCO tool, and publish a report on their site how well you’re doing at upholding these principles.

And on top of that, interesting sessions that – well, there were a lot of sessions on AI, as you might expect. That’s the topic du jour. RIPE NCC hosted a nice session on RPKI. There was a great session on small islands, developing states, many other things, and then everywhere, in every meeting, every hallway there were discussions about the future of IGF itself, and I’ll get back to that.

2024: So the top item here, we’re going to continue to monitor everything that you saw on that 2023 slide and more. Last week, the federal government of the U.S. came out, word is coming out that there might be a federal regulation on data privacy. So we’ll be looking at that in ‘24.

Touching on the Caribbean: Just want to point out, last year we’re super proud to have helped with the launch of an IXP in St. Kitts and Nevis, as one of the IXPs that was recently launched earlier in Brent’s discussion. Largely driven by CaribNOG. But this was an activity helped by the ARIN Grant Program. And then don’t want to steal the limelight from Bevil, but we had a wonderful summit of the Connected Caribbean Summit last year in December in Miami. It’s a typo here. It wasn’t the sixth one, it was the second one. It was a really good event back in the late 20-teens – 2018 – but then COVID – it seemed like it was going to really get a lot of momentum and then COVID happened, unfortunately.

But Bevil was able to kickstart this last year with the support of all the organizations here, and I think, I know we have Ms. Petipha Lewis from CARICHAM here today, and I think we have Rodney Taylor. It’s hard to see up here, but I know we have friends from probably all of the organizations here.

And I’m happy to say that, for 2024, we’re already committing to hosting or participating in a Connected Caribbean Summit in December. So it’s good to get that out and be able to more advertise that.

And of course, CaribNOG 27 is happening starting Wednesday after this meeting. We’ll also be supporting the CaribNOG that happens later this year.

Alright, turning back to the topic of IGF, the Internet Governance Forum. So there’s two concerns. There’s one concern that IGF will go away. And there’s a larger concern that something else will be created.

In September of this year, the U.N. is going to have a meeting. It’s called the Summit of the Future. This is a government activity. The U.N. has – of course, they do – significant goals: peace, human rights, sustainable development goals. The summit is about how to achieve those higher-level goals, how to attain them, maintain them, keep them going forward.

And there’s a document that’s going to come out of this summit. As part of that document, there could be an annex called the Global Digital Compact. The U.N. recognizes to achieve any of their goals, the Internet is probably an enabler. You’re not going to get the sustainable development goals if somehow you’re not using ICTs and Internet technology.

So with that in their minds, they’re developing this completely different document in an annex focused on Internet regulation. And a zero draft of this compact came out on the first of April. It’s nice to read but it’s not out for comments; it’s just published. The comment period by us is done.

This is a government activity now. But it was nice to see recognition of IGF, it was nice to see recognition of the technical community. It was not, maybe, nice to see that they are considering creating a new forum for governments only to do Internet regulation, the Digital Cooperation Forum.

IGF is still scheduled to happen in Saudi Arabia later this year. And then, finally, there’s a thing called the WSIS Review, the World Summit on the Information Society.

The U.N. created IGF, and they occasionally review it. Next year they’ll be reviewing it to see whether they keep it or not. They might keep it.

They might look at that forum to replace it. They’re going to have to figure out how these things are funded.

A lot of work for them to figure out how to do. I’d like to give a shout-out to ICANN, at the bottom here, the footnote. During the last ICANN meeting, they had some very nice government affairs discussions, and one of the things they actually set up was an email list for people that are interested in following this activity. I subscribed to it. There’s been a couple of posts to it, couple suggestions for some Zoom discussions.

It’s to share information over the course of this year and next year as these things develop.

Switching gears completely now to the ITU. The ITU has a large meeting, one of their four large meetings later this year. A thing called a resolution at the ITU gives members of the ITU endorsement to work on certain activities.

If there’s a resolution on AI, there’s going to be standardization on AI. These are the topics that are being discussed right now as possible new resolutions for work on standardization at the ITU in the standardization sector. AI, digital rights, metaverse, digital transformation, quantum, OTTs.

So in my participation at the ITU, I happen to know that they’re already working on standardization of all of these except the digital rights/human rights one.

But like I said, if a resolution happens, it just gives them endorsement for broadening the scope of the work in all the study groups. So some countries support increasing scope of standardization, some don’t.

And also a thing that we always have to keep track of is the resolution, existing Resolution 64, on the transition and deployment of IPv6, among others.

The ITU is a really big organization, lot of things going on there. We’re tracking the part that concerns us, things that might impact the registry system.

Thanks to Leslie and her work at M3AAWG and participation in a DNS Research Federation event – these people were a grant recipient and spoke in Tampa, if I’m not mistaken – I learned about this tracker of Internet standards. It’s called the Internet Standards Observatory Tracker. They’re tracking Internet standardization projects. And I got this link from Leslie. I open it, and I have to admit I did a double-take.

Maybe it’s a web design, but there’s two boxes here of organizations doing Internet standards, the ITU-T and the IETF. And it just sort of struck me that they were right next to each other, grouped together. Here’s the first two bodies that these guys are going to start studying Internet standards on.

But they’re not wrong. They’re not wrong. The ITU-T is doing Internet standards. I won’t say that at the ITU, and I hope they don’t quote me from here, but it’s true, they are doing standards.

Switching gears a little here. Within the ITU, it’s got three sectors. The standardization sector, the development sector, and the radio sector. The radio sector has areal important role regarding spectrum and satellite orbital spectrum.

When countries launch satellites, they do filings at the ITU-R so the ITU-R can keep track where they are. We all know there’s been more satellites being launched low Earth orbit providing – those are providing Internet services.

So we’re going to have to pay more attention to those. But I heard at a recent meeting, ITU-R staff saying filings are up. We need to hire people. We need to update our systems. So I did a quick search. I found this slide or this chart that shows satellite launches.

And it’s remarkable. For the last four, five decades there were an average of 200 satellites launched per year, with a hundred by the U.S.

Last year, over 2,600 satellites – or spaceships – it’s all together, but mostly satellites – launched in one year with 2,200, approximately, by the U.S., and it’s just astonishing.

This is my final slide before thank you.

Change is happening. These satellites are going to be providing Internet services everywhere. It’s for IoT devices. For your cellphones. It’s not just going to be Wi-Fi and cell tower delivery. It’s going to be, we’re going to be getting connectivity where we need it from these devices.

Thank you, and I have additional slides that have links.

Hollis Kara: Yes, for those who want to reference this online, there are additional slides at the end of the deck that have links to all of the information that Einar cited in his presentation.

And right now I’d like to invite anyone with questions to approach the microphones or start typing.

Alison Wood: Thank you, Einar. That was awesome My name’s Alison Wood. I work for the state of Oregon. So I’m with the government and I’m here to help.

So I have a question about the IGF and community outreach. We know that in times of civil unrest, sometimes just in regular society, governments do censor access to the Internet for their citizens.

And so in those meetings, is there any talk of outreach to those countries to help stabilize Internet access or sanctions if during an election they cut access to their citizens?

I mean, how are we progressing in this field, because we’ve known for a long time there are certain players and certain countries that do go against exactly what you were talking about, an open and free Internet.

Einar Bohlin: Sure, great question. You’re talking about shutdowns, I think.

And for sure, the document, the Declaration for the Future of the Internet from two years ago, and even the compact that came out just a couple weeks ago, mentioned shutdowns, and how they’re not a good thing.

But it’s very difficult for countries to hold other countries accountable. Shutdowns is a topic at IGF and other fora. Even countries that do shutdowns have laws against shutdowns, but they still do them.

Alison Wood: Right, right. And we know even in the state of Oregon, we’ve had, during serious civil unrest, in the city of Portland, we’ve had shutdowns to Internet access there, so. Thank you.

Einar Bohlin: Difficult issue. Thank you.

Hollis Kara: Thank you, Einar. We’re not seeing any questions from online, so we appreciate your presentation.

Einar Bohlin: Thank you.

(Applause.)

We seem to have gotten ourselves pretty well back on schedule. We’re going to hold the Membership and Elections presentation for after the afternoon break so that we can let you guys get to lunch and then come back at 1:30 for our policy block today.

Just a reminder, for in-person attendees, lunch will be just outside the room. There are table topics. They’re at slight risk of flying away. So you may see the AC members who are hosting those tables carrying them around until they get their food and get seated.

But if you are interested in participating in those, please do keep an eye out. We hope you will take part.

For our virtual attendees, we will be back at 1:30 PM AT, which is also Eastern Daylight. So you can just leave the Zoom open and silence it if you want and you’ll see us when we come back online.

And a final reminder that the room is not secured during lunch. So please keep that in mind when deciding whether you want to take your valuables with you.

Alright. Enjoy lunch, everybody, and we’ll see you back at 1:30.

(Applause.)

(Lunch break from 12:04 PM to 1:30 PM.)

Hollis Kara: We’re ready to get started at 1:30 as promised. Thank you, everybody. Hope folks enjoyed their break.

Alright, so before we get started, I’d like to take just a moment to once again say big thank you to our sponsors – C&W Business, IPv4.Global by Hilco Streambank, and Google. If I could get a round of applause.

(Applause.)

A little audience participation to warm up the room. Alright. We’re heading into Policy Discussion, and I feel it incumbent upon me to raise the point that, yes, standards do apply. Please treat your fellow participants with kindness and courtesy as we go through the policy discussions, and the rest of the time, too. It’s kind of a good thing to do.

And along that same line of courtesy, if folks could just take a quick check and make sure that the volume is down on your notifications on your phones and that you’re on vibrate. I understand that people need to stay connected for reasons, but it can be distracting to other attendees if you’re chirping and chiming. So thank you for that.

And with that, we’ll start our policy block. I’d like to invite up Kaitlyn Pellak from the Advisory Council to talk about Recommended Draft Policy 2023-1: Retire 4.2.1.4. Slow Start. Really guys, why is that last period on there? It drives us buggy. If you could do something about that, would be cool.

Policy Block 1

Recommended Draft Policy ARIN-2023-1: Retire 4.2.1.4 Slow Start

Kaitlyn Pellak: Hi everybody. Good afternoon. Hopefully we all had some coffee. We’re all nice and awake now.

This is Recommended Draft Policy 2023-1, like we said, Retire Slow Start. I will not read those numbers out to you again. And this is something myself and Brian Jones worked on. Brian has been super, super supportive and helpful with this, so I just want to say a quick thank you to him.

The problem statement, essentially Slow Start was very successful in constraining the rate that ARIN issued IPv4 addresses for many years.

However, with the exhaustion of the free pool and the implementation of transfer policies, Slow Start has really not been used since 2018. This is something that we have confirmed with the ARIN staff.

So our policy statement is very simple. Retire 4.2.1.4 Slow Start. And, again, proposed policy changes. So we have the original policy text. The proposed new text to the policy would just read 4.2.1.4 retired.

A little bit of history. This one, you know, seemed to go through fairly straightforwardly. We made the proposal in April. The Draft Policy was ready by May of last year, and it became a Recommended Draft Policy last November.

There was a Staff and Legal Review conducted last November when it became a Recommended Draft Policy.

So the staff recommends the policy is implementable as written because it retires policy that is no longer applicable to the Number Resource manual. And legal confirms that this policy doesn’t present any material legal issue. The timeframe for implementation is fairly short with three months.

The Advisory Council also made an assessment of the conformance of this policy with the principles of just Internet Number Resource policy. And they’ve decided, based on discussion and community feedback, that this Recommended Draft Policy does conform with the principles of the Internet Number Resource policy. They do see this as fair, impartial, and technically sound.

So, again, policy impact. We see no material impact from retiring this policy. Slow Start, it’s no longer in use. The Wait List or the transfer market are the only places that the community can receive IPv4 space at this time.

Finally, we have some community feedback. Community feedback has been mostly positive for this policy. My favorite: Slow Start is not possible. It is an impossibility when it comes to IPv4. It can’t be used. It should be removed, and I do support this as written. So I think that’s about as definitive a show of support as you can have.

So, my question, do you as the community support this policy as written?

Hollis Kara: All right. I think that brings us to the discussion portion. So we’ll wait for our chair to join us to moderate any discussion. If folks have comments or questions before we go to the polls on this one, please feel free to approach the microphone or start typing.

And remember what Kat said earlier, that it really feels terrible to come up here and present a policy and not have any feedback. So come on, guys.

Bill Sandiford: All right. Reminder to those online, please get your questions in.

Hollis Kara: We do have one online.

Bill Sandiford: Let’s start with the online one, then.

Hollis Kara: Wait. Maybe we don’t. I looked at the wrong window. My bad.

Bill Sandiford: False alarm. Right microphone.

Doug Camin: Doug Camin, Coordinated Care Services Inc., and ARIN AC member. Great to see this policy moving forward. And I support it as written. Thank you.

Bill Sandiford: Thank you.

Hollis Kara: Not seeing anything come in from online.

Bill Sandiford: We’ve got one?

Beverly Hicks: They just came in. Matthew Cowen, dgtlfutures, I support this as written.

I also have Jonathan Stewart, removing old policy is healthy. Support this as written.

Bill Sandiford: Not seeing much movement in the room. We’ll go to the front, left microphone.

And last call for the microphones. Get your questions in online.

Adair Thaxton: This is Adair again. As a newbie it would be helpful in the future for policies such as this to include direct link or direct language to the NRPM sections that it’s referencing, just because my first read of this was that we were going to retire TCP Slow Start.

Bill Sandiford: Great. Anything else online? Go ahead.

Beverly Hicks: Mohibul Mahmud. How effective was the Slow Start policy in managing IPv4 allocations before it became obsolete due to the exhaustion of the free pool? Is there any impact over the years?

Bill Sandiford: I’m not sure if we have that. Is John Sweeting here, or John Curran? Do we have any info on what the impact was of Slow Start?

Hollis Kara: Waiting for Mr. Sweeting to Pac-Man his way to the microphone.

John Sweeting: John Sweeting, Chief Customer Officer with ARIN. It was well used early on. It has not been used since we’re out of IPv4. So, it’s really, it’s a no op to have it in the NRPM, but it was – absolutely did provide some positive support for people that could use it early on.

Bill Sandiford: Alright. Thank you. Online?

Beverly Hicks: One more, David Farmer, University of Minnesota. Support as written.

Bill Sandiford: Thank you. Alright. Microphones in the room are now closed. I see the talliers seem to be ready. So, we’ll ask the question: If you’re in favor of this policy as written, please raise your hand highly. Those of you online please indicate as such with the method provided. Nice and high, folks.

Those opposed, please raise your hand or indicate online.

Alright. We’ll wait for the tallying.

Michael Abejuela: Michael Abejuela, General Counsel, ARIN. We had 70 in the room, 74 remote for Recommended Draft Policy ARIN 2023-1: Retire 4.2.1.4 Slow Start, 68 for, zero against.

Bill Sandiford: Thank you. That will be passed to the AC for their consideration. Thanks.

Hollis Kara: Thank you, Bill and Kaitlyn.(Applause.)

All right. Jumped ahead, next we’ll have Daniel Schatte, of the Advisory Council, coming up to present on Recommended Draft Policy 2023-4: Modernization of Registration Requirements.

Recommended Draft Policy ARIN-2023-4: Modernization of Registration Requirements

Daniel Schatte: Good afternoon. I’m here to talk about Recommended Draft Policy ARIN 2023-4. I am Daniel Schatte. Co-shepherd, Alicia Trotman on this one. It’s about the Modernization of Registration Requirements.

Problem statement is really depending on ISPs do SWIP. And it really is timely in the fact that we do that, and really, it’s an adjustment to the policy to update the timeline in which you have to do the registration.

And it really operationally or tries to modify Section 4, but also modifies Section 6 of this, which you’ll see. So, in 4.2.3.7.1, we are basically adding in “to be registered within SWIP within 14 days.” And then we’re going to retire Section 4.2.3.7.2, which is the Reassignment and Reallocations Visible Within Seven Days.

Then we’re going to rename Section 6.5.5.1 to include Reassignment and Reallocation Information.

And then we will be adding within Section 6.5.5.1 the 14-day requirement, and then also retiring the 6.5.5.2 of the reassignment and reallocation within seven days.

History on this one, proposal came in June 5th, 2023, through Draft Policy July 25th of 2023. Revisions in September. Recommended draft in December with one more revision in January.

Staff and Legal did review this one. Staff understanding is it changes the requirement from seven days to 14 days. The policy text is clear and understandable.

Legal reviewed this one as well. There was a section for the revision that came up in January to the extent permitted in manner provided by applicable law. That was striked from the policy. So it really is a seven- to 14-day change.

Implementation timeline, three months. Requirements are training, public documentation and the text was reviewed September 21st, ‘23.

Assessment of Conformance. Conforms with the principle of PDP. Found to be fair and impartial and technically sound. Motion to move to that, to recommended draft and really just modernizes the two sections.

Policy impact: Really, the policy extends the requirement to create reassignment and reallocation records from seven to 14 days.

A little bit of community feedback. In the past revision of Whois and SWIP that are part of the current section in both of Section 4 and Section 6, of really wanting to pull those parts out and just call it Directory Services. And then the second one is can we genericize as much of the policy as possible, same kind of thing, Whois and SWIP with directory services. But that would also require updates to definition section.

Questions for the community: Do you support this policy as written? And if you don’t, what would you change?

Hollis Kara: We’ve come to the question-and-answer portion of the program. Bill, come up to join us to moderate.

While he’s coming up here, I want to point out something really quick for folks who are maybe newer to this process and are maybe trying to find the information.

If you go to the ARIN meeting website, you’re going to have two options under the event, under the main drop-down at the top. One is the agenda. If you click on the agenda item for the policy block, there are direct links to each of the policies that could be found there.

Or if you want to just shortcut it, you can go to the meeting materials page, and there’s a link to the Discussion Guide. And that will give you all of the policy text for all of the policies that are being discussed.

So you need to pull that up, that’s where you can find that information. Thank you for this service announcement.

Bill Sandiford: Microphones are now open. We’ll start off with online.

Beverly Hicks: I have quite a few online, but we’ll start with one for you. I have David Farmer, University of Minnesota. 14 days is a good change. Support as written.

Bill Sandiford: Keep going if you have another one.

Beverly Hicks: You got it. Adam Thompson. This still does not appear to address the local privacy laws. I don’t see any point in approving a policy that will be broadly ignored.

Bill Sandiford: Front microphone.

Andrew Dul: Andrew Dul, 8 Continents Networks. I do not support the policy as written. As I posted on the Mailing List, this includes terms that are now outdated, and we need to update the language to include things like RDAP and removing Whois and the term “SWIP” is actually not really relevant anymore. It’s not really a SWIP. It’s called a reassignment.

Bill Sandiford: Are you saying you could be supportive with some language change?

Andrew Dul: I would support it with language changes, but I do not support it as written.

Bill Sandiford: Thank you. Right microphone.

Adair Thaxton: I’m back. So, you’ve got rename 6.5.5.1 from reassignment information to reassignment and reallocation information. In Draft Policy ARIN 2022-12, you’ve got a lot of language that is removing, I guess, assignment as a term that’s used by ARIN. So why are we keeping reassignment in this section header? And would that get updated after the fact by editing ARIN 2022-12?

Bill Sandiford: Good feedback. Thank you. Yea, go for it John.

John Sweeting: John Sweeting, CCO with ARIN. So, reassignments are still a thing. And that’s actually what the SWIPing is – it’s reassignments and reallocations. Assignments are what have gone away. And assignments are direct assignments from ARIN. That’s why they added the reallocation because it used to say reassignment. So, they made it correct by putting both of them in that title.

Bill Sandiford: Thank you. Online?

Beverly Hicks: Atefeh Mohseni from Harness Inc., also an ARIN 53 Fellow. The language could benefit from some clarity on, one, when the 14 days starts; and, two, what happens if ISPs couldn’t meet that timeline or need an extension?

Bill Sandiford: Thank you. Continue if you have more.

Beverly Hicks: I have quite a few. Sorry. Tom Bonar, TDS Telecom. Can customers opt out of SWIPing? We have several customers that don’t want to be SWIPed as they’re US military bases – they’re on US military bases. Apologies.

Bill Sandiford: John Sweeting. Might just want to grab a seat close to the microphone there.

Hollis Kara: We’ve got a chair right over here for you, John. He’s getting his steps in.

John Sweeting: John Sweeting, ARIN CCO. There is a thing called private information label that can be put in for circumstances such as that. But they still have to SWIP it to show that it is in use.

That’s the basic reason for showing the SWIP is that they actually have that space in use. But there are provisions that cover for military, government, things like that, that they don’t want their information published – or private citizens.

Bill Sandiford: Thank you. Moving to the left microphone.

Lee Howard: Lee Howard, IPv4.Global by Hilco Streambank. As I was reading through it again and I saw that the red line and the dif, it looks like the only material change is changing from seven days to 14 days. I think that’s pretty much the only change that’s happening.

I don’t understand how that addresses the problem statement of responding to privacy laws. That was the problem statement.

It’s probably like slide 3. It’s always way back in the beginning.

(Pause to review slides.)

“Reminding ISPs that reassignments are important.” Okay, maybe it does that because there’s a policy change, so you have to tell people there’s a policy change. But I don’t understand how this addresses this.

Bill Sandiford: Are you for or against the policy as written?

Lee Howard: I therefore think it’s harmless but useless.

Bill Sandiford: Fair enough. We’ll go to online and just keep running through them until there are no more.

Beverly Hicks: Okay. Mohibul Mahmud, question, given the changes to the registration timeline from seven days to 14 days in sections pertaining to IPv4 and IPv6 reassignments, what are the anticipated challenges for the ISPs in adhering to these new requirements?

John Sweeting: John Sweeting, ARIN CCO. I think it makes it easier for them because it gives them seven more days to get their reassignments and reallocations done. The impact is it gives them more time to do something that’s required of them to do before they can come back and ask for more space or transfers or anything else.

Bill Sandiford: Next? No more.

Hollis Kara: That’s it. We’re clear.

Bill Sandiford: Last call at the microphones and online. We’ll give it a few minutes – few seconds. Go ahead.

Beverly Hicks: I have a hand raised which means somebody is typing.

Bill Sandiford: Gotcha.

Hollis Kara: While we’re waiting, quick reminder to the room that when you approach the microphones, please make sure to speak up. Make your statements clearly, and to lead with your name and affiliation, for the benefit of those who are listening in online.

Beverly Hicks: They changed their mind. So we’re clear.

Bill Sandiford: All right. With that, we’ll consider the microphones closed. And are my vote talliers ready? Yep.

All those in favor of the policy as written, please raise your hand or indicate online.

And all those opposed, please raise your hand or indicate.

All right. We’ll wait for the vote talliers.

Michael Abejuela: Michael Abejuela, ARIN

General Counsel. We had 72 in the room, 74 remote. For Recommended Draft Policy ARIN-2023-4, Modernization of Registration Requirements, we had 20for and 23 against.

Bill Sandiford: Thank you. The counts will be provided to the Advisory Council for their consideration.

Thank you.

Hollis Kara: Thank you. (Applause.)

All right. Next up I’d like to welcome Doug Camin. He’s going to present on Draft Policy 2022-12, Direct Assignment Language Update.

Draft Policy ARIN-2022-12: Direct Assignment Language Update

Doug Camin: Thank you, Hollis. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Doug Camin, and along with Leif Sawyer, we are the shepherds for 2022-12, Direct Assignment Language Update.

The Problem Statement for this is, as a result of the fee harmonization that was undertaken a few years ago, direct assignments are no longer being utilized; therefore, the language should be updated. The language around that has been deprecated and it should be modernized and aligned with current ARIN practices.

We’ll walk through – this has a handful of different things. It’s gone through several revisions over the last year or so from being presented at various ARIN policy meetings and feedback from PPML.

I’ll walk through each one here with red text that identifies the places that have been changed. So here we have updated the definitions of “allocation” and “assignment.”

I’ll just pause for a second on each one.

And next, changing Section 2.6, “receiving assignments of” to “issued.”

And then next, Section 2.8, changing “allocated or assigned” to “issued.” And in this case we included the following language for the paragraph so that it is clear how it flows into the rest of the text.

Then in Section 3.6.3, changing paragraph 1.

And then this is the result of that, in line with the text for clarity.

Next is Section 4.2.2. This is a reorganization of this text for clarity. It does say the same thing.

And then 4.3.2, changing paragraph 1’s text.

And Section 6.5.8, changing the section title, to remove “direct assignments.”

And 8.5.4, changing this section text to remove “direct assignments and allocations” again.

Louder? (adjusts microphone.) That might be better.

And with that, the history of this policy has been that it has moved along for several revisions from PPML and from feedback here at the Public Policy meetings going back to ARIN 51, I believe, in Tampa.

This has undergone a recent Staff and Legal Review as of a couple of weeks ago. In that, the Staff and Legal did find that they made some recommendations for specific definitions of “allocation” and “assignment.” Those were incorporated into the policy, the current revision that you see and as well as a review to ensure we use the term “allocation” consistently.

And the legal review, with the noting the term “issued” rather than “allocated” or “assigned” was also incorporated into the text. And the policy impact of this is this Draft Policy could potentially harmonize the Number Resource Policy Manual and the Registration Services Plan fee schedule. The term “issued” currently used in the Registration Services Agreement would match the proposed changes in this Draft Policy.

This policy has been around a while. It has received a lot of feedback over the last year. The most recent feedback, at the last Public Policy Meeting, found that the definitions as presented at that time for “allocation” and “assignment” were not supported. There were revisions made from that.

There was some concern about the changes and the impact from “no allocation” to “no IP addresses” in certain sections of the text. That was reviewed and updated as appropriate.

And PPML feedback was actively solicited as of February with some of the most recent revisions.

There were supportive comments received, and there were some additional comments regarding discussion around the definitions.

So, the question for the community today is, do you support the clearer, revised definitions of “allocation” and “assignment” as provided in this policy – this draft?

Hollis Kara: All right. Folks, microphones are open. Please queue up, and if you are online with us, please start typing if you have a question or a comment on this policy.

Bill Sandiford: All right. We’ll move to online first.

Beverly Hicks: Mohibul Mahmud, while this does replace with broader terms “as issued,” written variations of “allocation,” it, however, may be beneficial to retain a more specific term like “assignment” to describe IP addresses used exclusively by the recipient organization for their internal needs, which does not involve reassigning or reallocating to third parties. This distinction can help maintain clarity in situations where an organization holds IP addresses strictly for internal use as opposed to those who might manage IP addresses on behalf of others.

Bill Sandiford: Okay. Any others online or in the room?

Hollis Kara: Looks like a few more coming in online.

Bill Sandiford: Go to online first.

Beverly Hicks: David Farmer, University of Minnesota, I support the new definitions and support the policy as written.

Bill Sandiford: Left microphone.

Lee Howard: Lee Howard, IPv4.Global by Hilco Streambank. Generally support. This is work we ought be doing to harmonize, to have everything be consistent.

I’m confused about – you mentioned that the title of Section 6.5.8 changes from Direct Assignments from ARIN to End-user Organizations, to End-user Allocations, which makes sense. Except within 6.5.8, there are other subheaders that still say “Assignments” and the rest of the text talks about assignments. I didn’t see that at least in the slides.

I think there’s stuff inside that section

that may need edits. I’m kind of okay if you want to move forward and come back, readdress the rest of that. But again, support.

Doug Camin: Thank you.

Bill Sandiford: Online.

Beverly Hicks: Dale Carter from Energy Science Network. “In the proposed update to Section 2.5, the term “ARIN customer” is used instead of “member” or “organization.” Is that intentional?

Doug Camin: I don’t know that it was specifically intentional. Sorry, John, do you want to stand up?

John Curran: That was intentional because ARIN membership, while we do have the idea of members, and we’ve expanded the Service Member definition, there’s always the possibility that we’ll end up with someone who is a customer who is not a member and we want the policy to always apply.

So, in practice, we’ve used “customer” in NRPM and not “member.” I don’t want to change that without a conscious decision.

If we do that, we will need to make sure we never have anyone who can be categorized as a customer, who isn’t automatically also a member, and that’s such a recent change; it wasn’t true until last year.

So, the distinction of customer versus member in NRPM and bylaws is actually an intentional thing.

Bill Sandiford: Thank you. Last call for microphones and online.

None? All right. This was a Draft Policy, correct?

Hollis Kara: This is a Draft Policy.

Bill Sandiford: No show of hands is required. The AC will take your consideration, your feedback into consideration. Thank you.

Hollis Kara: Thank you, Bill. Thank you, Doug.

(Applause.)

(To John Sweeting) you need to check your phone because I need you to get ready to present because we’re running a little bit ahead. Don’t walk away and leave all your stuff, sir.

Next up, Gus Reese from the Advisory Council, ARIN 2024-1, Definition of Organization ID.

Draft Policy ARIN-2024-1: Definition of Organization ID/Org ID

Gus Reese: All right. Thanks, everyone. I hope everybody had a great lunch. Welcome back.

So today just talking about a – my watch is going off – just regular old Draft Policy. Let’s go to the next slide, ARIN 2024-1.

This is the policy to define what an Organization ID is in the Number Resource Policy Manual.

Problem Statement: So during work on a related Policy Proposal, the NRPM Working Group determined that the definition of Org ID, Organization Identifier, should be included in the NRPM to add clarity to the term and unify NRPM references to match the use of the term in other ARIN publications such as ARIN Online.

So there is no current Policy Statement.

This is the Proposed Policy Statement. Organization Identifier, Org ID: An Organization Identifier is an identifier assigned to resource holders in the ARIN region.

So this definition had been previously – Okay, sorry. I thought the slides were out of order. Nope. This definition had previously been included in an earlier Policy Proposal, ARIN 2023-7, but the community feedback recommendations on that proposal showed a preference for adding the definition separately from that proposal there.

As such, the definition is now being proposed as a stand-alone proposal, and the language will be removed from the current ARIN-2023-7 proposal, allowing for the two sections of that proposal to be evaluated separately between the two.

So the original text was “An Organization ID is an identifier” – I’m sorry, “An Organization Identifier (Org ID) is an identifier assigned to resource holders in the ARIN registry.”

That was sent to PPML. We did have considerable feedback on that, which led to the proposed text changes here, and the proposed changes are, “An Organization Identifier (Org ID) is a unique text label assigned to entities that intend to participate in the Internet Numbers Registry System via ARIN Registry Services.”

And the history of this one, it came through as a proposal on December 18th of last year. It was accepted as a Draft Policy on January 31st, and then the revision was sent out to the community on the 7th of February of this year.

So how does this policy impact you, the community, here? So, defining the term Organization Identifier in the Number Resource Policy Manual will help newcomers understand the NRPM references there.

So, the feedback that we received on this proposal. Most of it was – well, all of it – was on the PPML. We had very robust discussion on this topic including what type of entities can obtain Internet number resources.

This led to further refinement of the proposal and changes to be more inclusive. The revised language was also sent to the PPML and received a little bit more feedback there, with consensus on the language listed on the previous changes – or, I’m sorry, on the previous slide.

Okay. So questions for you, the community, here: Do the proposed changes bring enough clarity to the definition of Organization Identifier to be included in the NRPM?

Hollis Kara: All right. Rolling into discussion on Proposal 2024-1.

Online participants please be typing if you have questions or comments. Same in the room, approach the mics if you would like to share your thoughts on this proposal.

Bill Sandiford: All right. Online, we’ll start there.

Beverly Hicks: Atefeh Mohseni from Harness, Inc., also an ARIN 53 Fellow. I’d argue this should come under Section 2.12, Organizational Information, as 2.12.1 Org ID instead of a new subsection as 2.18, to conform to the rest of the definition scope. Thank you.

Bill Sandiford: Okay. Thank you. And online again.

Beverly Hicks: Matthew Cowen, dgtlfutures, ARIN 52 Fellow. I’m not sure I understand the use of the word “text” as “unique text label.” Does “unique label” not suffice?

Bill Sandiford: Thank you. Over to the right side.

Doug Camin: Doug Camin, Coordinated Care Services, Inc., ARIN AC member. I know a lot of work has been put into and a lot of feedback and discussion about defining this term. I think what’s been landed on is a very good term for that, and I would support the text as written, notwithstanding any sectional changes might be suggested. The actual text Org ID, great work.

Bill Sandiford: Left side.

Brian Jones: Brian Jones, Virginia Tech, ARIN AC. Kind of a question. I support the policy as written. Would ARIN also change the online – the other online presences of Org ID definitions if this moves forward and it’s accepted?

Bill Sandiford: John.

Brian Jones: If this is accepted and moves forward, there’s definitions on the ARIN website that’s different than this. That’s where this came from.

John Sweeting: So I can answer. Anytime, if a policy changes something in NRPM, Hollis has the responsibility to make sure all our website is coordinated with that policy change.

Hollis Kara: So, yes, Brian, we’ll make sure. If you find what we miss, please tell us and we’ll fix it.

John Sweeting: When you see in the Staff and Legal Review it says “documentation needs to be updated,” that’s from Hollis and she’s the one that tells them that.

Bill Sandiford: Great.

Last call in the room. We’ll go to online.

Beverly Hicks: David Farmer, University of Minnesota. I support the proposed text and not the original text. I think it adds clarity to the NRPM.

Bill Sandiford: Okay. Thank you.

Beverly Hicks: Just a wish from those online, that those who are coming to the microphones, please get a little closer to the mic and use your big voice.

Bill Sandiford: Last call in the room, last call online.

All right. Thank you, everybody, for your feedback. The AC will take it under advisement.

Hollis Kara: Thank you, Bill. Thank you, Gus.

We said we would let you take a break after policy but you went too fast. So we’re going to get one more presentation in and that will be an update on membership and ARIN elections from John Sweeting.

Membership and ARIN Elections

John Sweeting: Thank you, Hollis. This is the one that got bumped from this morning. So, we’ll put ourselves right back on schedule most likely. This presentation is to kind of set the table where we are with membership and ARIN Elections today.

Excuse me. There’s been numerous changes to membership and ARIN Elections over the last four or five years, and we want to level set with everybody on exactly where we are today.

Okay. So, participation in ARIN governance is easier than ever. We did it through autonomous system number fee harmonization, service versus General Membership, elections 2024 and steps to candidacy.

So, the ASN Fee Harmonization, which was initiated on 1 January 2022, is now complete. Effective 1 January 2024, ARIN has transitioned all of our ASN holders to the Registration Services Plan fee schedule. We’ve converted all ASN-only holders to Service Member organizations making them eligible for General Membership.

And aside to that, we’ve removed the $550 ASN issuance fee because now, if your very first initial Internet Number Resource from ARIN is an AS number, you pay the category of the fee schedule that it’s in, which, for one ASN is $250. So you don’t pay that $550 anymore. It is now down to $250, only if it’s the first resource you get from ARIN.

Service versus General Membership. Service Members are organizations that have signed an ARIN agreement for IPv4, IPv6 address space and/or ASN.

If you have just an ASN in your organization, you are a 3X small category, your annual fee is $250 a year, and you have all the rights and privileges of any other member.

If ARIN’s governance is important to your organization, Service Members can elect to become General Members. We talked about it earlier. General Members express their commitment to participate in our elections and if they don’t participate in three consecutive years, they will get removed, but they can reapply anytime they wish to reapply with that commitment to participate.

And one additional note we want to make sure you see is that you can choose to cast a blank ballot. If you don’t want to vote for anybody on the ballot that year, in order to not have that three consecutive years, you can cast a blank ballot, and that counts as you participated.

So, our current ARIN membership numbers: As of 10 April 2024, right up to date, we have 23,478 Service Members and 1,988 General Members. Combine that together, you get our total membership number.

And we also provide services to approximately 14,000 customers who hold Internet Number Resources that are not currently covered under any type of ARIN agreement. That’s where you get the customers versus the members.

So, the steps to become a General Member, nice little screen capture here from the team that felt this would be much easier for everybody to see and understand. If you log into your account, you click on your records, and then under the Org Info, you look to see what your membership status is as of that day.

And if it says Service Member, you move over to Actions, and a drop-down menu will show Request General Membership. You click on that, and you will request General Membership, and it will get acted on and you’ll be – next time you log on, your membership status will say General Member.

And then General Members are eligible to subscribe to and participate in the General Members Mailing List, which we would really like to get more use out of this year and going forward since we’re now down to the people that – the organizations that have committed to participate in the elections.

One use that we started last year was that once you see the candidates, that they’ll be added to the General Members list, and they can be asked questions there. They can put information there that they want the General Members to see. And we really would like to get more use out of that list as far as that goes. It would help everybody stay up to date on the candidates.

ARIN Elections: Why participate? Why indeed. Because then you can shape the future.

Your vote will determine who volunteers, which volunteers will guide ARIN’s strategic direction. Our Board does a heck of a job keeping us all under control, making sure we keep focused, and we do the right things for our community.

So, getting the right people on the Board of Trustees is very, very important. It also ensures diverse perspectives are represented in the governance and policy development within ARIN because the more people, the more diverse people you get voting, the more diverse people you get on the Board and the more diverse ideas we get fed and looked at and can implement.

And also, you’re helping protect a global resource, contributing to the secure, stable, accessible Internet for all.

So, there’s one thing you have to do every year. You have to make sure that your Voting Contact is verified. So, here’s the steps to verifying a voting contact.

You log in, you select your records, Organization Identifiers, then select the Org Handle associated with your account.

If you have a designated Voting Contact, it will be displayed in the Voting Contact section. If there’s no voting contact listed, then you have to select Manage Voting Contact from the action menu to assign.

Let me go back. That also allows you to update it, change it, whatever. And something new, I think last year was the first year we did it, you are able to change your Voting Contact up until seven days prior to the opening of the election.

It used to be 60 days. Whoever was in as a Voting Contact, 60 days prior to election was locked in, and you couldn’t change it.

We had a lot of organizations say, “oh, we just realized our Voting Contact left and we don’t have a good Voting Contact.” Well, now you can change it all the way up to seven days prior to the election.

Okay. Want to learn more about the role of the ARIN Board of Trustees and Advisory Council? By the way, this meeting is a great place to learn more because you can talk to any one of them and they will be more than happy to tell you.

But you can also watch the Leadership Development videos that we have online that goes in and describes ARIN governance, ARIN policy and there’s some other subjects on there that aren’t listed here.

Like I said, the best way to do it is to go straight to the people that are serving in those positions today. You’ve got like 23 of them here this week.

If you’re interested in what the AC does, talk to an AC member. They are more than happy to share that information, as well as the Board of Trustees.

Okay. So, the Nomination Committee’s responsible for recruiting candidates. That’s pretty much finely melted down to that’s what the purpose of the Nomination Committee is. It’s to recruit candidates to make sure that we’re getting really good candidates and that they have the skills that we need on the Board.

Candidates must self-nominate. That’s also a change three years ago that we went to the self-nomination, and you have to complete the nominee questionnaire by the deadline.

One of the problems we had when it wasn’t self-nomination is that the questionnaire wouldn’t get completed by the person that got nominated until after the fact and then it was too late.

We have a third-party vendor that’s solely responsible for assessing all the nominees. And we also have – then we come up with the initial slate of candidates that will be published. And any nominee that’s not placed on the initial slate may petition.

Get to know the candidates. You can review the candidates’ biographies and statements of support. Directly ask questions to the candidates on the General Member Mailing List, but you have to be subscribed to the General Member Mailing List in order to do that; attend or view the Candidate Forum. Watch for more information as the election gets closer to see what that’s going to look like.

Then there’s always the prerecorded candidate speeches that get presented at the fall Public Policy and Members Meeting in October.

This is a lot of slides. Sorry. So, this is the calendar for this year, the important election dates. 10 June, opening of call to nominations for the Board of Trustees, Advisory Council, and NRO NC.

As John mentioned earlier today, or maybe Bill, last year was an appointment year. This year is an actual election year, and you’ll notice a change to the NRO NC elections. It’s going to be run in conjunction with the Board of Trustees and the ARIN Advisory Council. It will be only open to General Members of ARIN, and you will vote for each three of those bodies when you log in to vote. There’s no longer any voting outside of ARIN General Membership. It’s all within the General Membership of ARIN.

June 24 is closing call for nominations. September 9th is the deadline to establish voting eligibility. One of the other things under voting eligibility is you have a Voting Contact, and you have – you don’t have any outstanding annual invoices. In other words, you’re paid up to date on all of your annual invoices.

If you have an invoice for a transfer or some other action, that does not get held against you for being in voting eligibility good standing for the elections.

The initial slate of candidates will be announced, call for petitions on 10 September. 17 October is the deadline for changes to Voting Contacts for General Members. And 24 October, the elections will open, and they’ll close on 1 November. And no later than 8 November the results of the elections will be announced.

It usually happens quicker than that, but that’s the date that it has to be announced by. All right. Thank you.

Any questions, comments?

Hollis Kara: Microphones are open, so please approach the mic if you have a comment or a question or start typing if you are submitting a virtual statement.

John Sweeting: Andrew.

Andrew Dul: Andrew Dul. I know that the General Members list last year was approximately in the low hundreds, like 150. Have you seen it increase significantly?

John Sweeting: I think we just went over 200.

Andrew Dul: I would still say that’s way less than the number of General Members we have. Has there been any discussion about creating, perhaps, an announce type General Members list that would go to all of the members as a non-opt in as part of your membership requirements is that you have a duty to read and kind of absorb information from ARIN with regard to membership activities?

John Sweeting: I think John wants to answer that.

John Curran: That sounds like an excellent suggestion, and ARIN has a process that you submit that.

The reason because – I actually think it’s a very wise thing, but if we’re going to spam the community, even just the General Member community, we’re going to discuss it first. Put it on the suggestions Mailing List. If it passes, we’re happy to create an ARIN General Member Announce equivalent.

But seeing as we’re coming from an era where people were rather annoyed at getting announcements, we need to be very careful if we reinstitute something as a requirement of General Membership.

Andrew Dul: I’ll be happy to submit a suggestion.

John Curran: Okay. Thank you.

John Sweeting: On top of that, Joe Westover is our Director of Customer Experience and Strategy. And along with Hollis, they do plan to have a short and focused campaign on General Members to push the General Member list enrollment a little more this year. We were just waiting until after this meeting to do that.

Kaitlyn Pellak: Kaitlyn, actually speaking in my capacity as somebody who has helped run elections in the past for a nonprofit. I just had one suggestion.

You mentioned for members who don’t want to vote for a particular candidate but still want to maintain their voting for the three-year term. I would suggest maybe instead of having them cast a blank ballot, maybe offering the option for them to abstain from voting for a particular candidate.

I just think that would help clarify in the question of did they just skip somebody by accident, that way you know they’re truly voting abstain.

John Sweeting: Thank you. I’m sure the Board was listening.

Nothing? Nothing. All right. Thank you. Now I think you can go on the break.

Hollis Kara: All right. Thank you, John.

Okay, you guys, we ran right up to it. It is time for another break. Give a round of applause to John for that long slide deck. And we will see you back at – let’s see, it’s 2:30. Can I do math properly? That would be 30 minutes. We’ll start back at 3:00 to wrap up the day with a few last presentations and an Open Microphone.

So please do enjoy a bit of fresh air. If you are joining us from home, stand up, stretch your legs, do whatever you need to do, and we’ll be back at 3:00. Thank you.

(Break from 2:28 PM to 2:59 PM.)

Hollis Kara: We’re in the homestretch, folks. I’m just waiting for a couple of people to wander in the room and then we’ll get started and wrap up the day. Or we’ll start now.

Welcome back, everybody, the last section of the day. I’d like to invite up John Curran to give the NRO Update. He’s already here.

Number Resource Organization Executive Council (NRO EC) Update

John Curran: Thank you, Hollis. (adjusts lavalier mic) I’ll use this microphone.

Okay. So, I’m John Curran. I’m President and CEO of ARIN. I’m also the Vice Chair of the Number Resource Organization. I’ll talk a little bit about the Number Resource Organization, what it is, and give you an update. So let me start right in on that.

This is the Number Resource Organization Report we give at all the RIR meetings. This one has been updated for this month.

The NRO was formed in October 2003. And there was an addendum signed in July 2020, which included some other elements – agreements that we would not violate the Internet number registry system uniqueness and that we would take measures to promote the Internet number registry system and that we would publish Internet number registry systems publicly so as to enable timely global Internet operations and to cooperate together in the provision of a consistent, effective global number registry system.

This was entered into by all the RIRs as MoU. And it sort of says we have a joint project to run this Internet number registry system. And so, in doing that we’ve also reviewed our strategic plan and made sure we’re doing all the right things and actually resulted in a change because some of the ways we’ve been trying to promote and advance the Number Registry system weren’t working as efficiently or as coordinated, I guess – I’m not sure if we gained any efficiency – but not as coordinated as they might be.

So, our mission: To coordinate and support joint activities of the RIRs to provide and promote the joint Internet numbers registry.

Our vision: To be the flagship and global leader for collaboration of Internet number resource management as a central element of an open, stable, and secure Internet.

I think you folks know this, but you can’t have an open, stable, and secure Internet without at least a very solid framework for unique identifiers for network traffic underneath it. And that’s what we’ve effectively built. And that’s our joint mission of the NRO.

The Executive Committee, Oscar Robles, from LACNIC, is our Chair. This year I’m the Vice Chair. Hans Petter from RIPE NCC is the treasurer. And Paul Wilson from APNIC is another member.

We’re missing the fifth member. AFRINIC has not appointed someone. So, the Executive Committee is running with four members.

We have a permanent Secretariat hosted by APNIC with German and support from Laureana.

We rotate the roles of the Executive Committee.

So, when looking at the strategic plan of the NRO, we actually made some changes, and I mentioned this earlier. We realized we were doing not enough coordination in some areas – RPKI, RIR cybersecurity and government engagement.

What we mean by that is that even though we were all doing RPKI, our RPKI systems looked fairly different, in terms of implementation, functionality, how you interfaced with it.

If you were an organization working with multiple RIRs, you really knew there was a difference in our RPKI services. And that made it hard to utilize.

We actually created some joint programs which are funded out of the NRO. And we’ve actually started the first one, the NRO RPKI Program. When I say, “funded out of the NRO,” I don’t mean there’s 15 people in a room with NRO nametags developing things. What I mean is we have a Program Manager who is doing – is an NRO – that’s their full-time job, is NRO program management – who’s coordinating the work of all five RIRs.

So, the coordination is funded from the NRO budget. We’re setting common goals for all of us. It’s a very different way of working. But in terms of resources, it’s really the addition of a Program Manager.

So that has happened. And actually, Sofia Silva is the Program Manager for the RPKI program. And you’ll actually hear a report tomorrow from her. It’s to give us a more consistent RPKI service that helps remove the barriers presently that exist for people who want to use multiple RIRs, RPKI services.

While we’re five different RIRs, it’s one registry. So, we should be avoiding differences if at all possible. You can see the NRO announcement, where we talked about it. And there’s a blog on aligning the RIRs on RPKI also available.

We do do coordination, not as tightly as we’re doing with the NRO Program Manager for RPKI, but our teams do meet and coordinate. So, the registry services teams among the RIRs talk to each other.

The legal teams, the public safety coordinators who work with law enforcement and governments, the public affairs folks, the policy, the CFOs, the financial team – so we do have cross-team coordination. But that’s really to keep us up to date on what each other is doing, look at best practices and mirror those. It’s not the tight coordination that we’re doing with RPKI program.

The finances: the NRO has its own budget. General operations of the NRO is $939,000. That’s the Secretariat support, the meeting support for the NRO meetings, for the NRO EC and the Number Council, the Chair of the Number Council travel, our governance support – we support a number of organizations that support Internet governance – and NRO programs like the RPKI program, and some support for AFRINIC we’ve been giving because there’s times when they could use it.

So that’s a part of our operations. And then we have a second line item, which is our contribution to ICANN, which since ICANN was formed, we’ve given them US$823,000 a year since 1999.

And with the IANA stewardship transition, that amount got more clearly delineated. $650,000 of that is paying for IANA Services Level Agreement.

That’s the fees for the central registries operated by the IANA. The IPv4 ASN and IPv6 free pools that the IANA manages, we pay them an amount, and we make requests to allocate blocks to the RIRs.

The remainder is a voluntary contribution to ICANN of $173,000. So, the total of that is the amount of money that has to – the NRO spends that the individual RIRs have to contribute back to cover.

We also pledged a Stability Fund at the NRO level where if an RIR were to have an adverse financial factor, they could actually tap into the funds pledged for the stability of the other RIRs.

In terms of how those costs get paid, there’s a cost-distribution formula. Now, I’m showing the cost-distribution formula with five RIRs all operating at full speed. We’ve actually – we actually are dividing that again without AFRINIC on a cash basis so that NRO doesn’t run out of money.

Right now, AFRINIC is not in a position to adopt a budget, pay us, a number of things. And so, we’re actually paying more than that to cover the outstanding invoice to AFRINIC and making sure that NRO still operates with full cash funding. And we’ll figure it out when AFRINIC gets back on its feet.

So, in terms of AFRINIC, we’ve been monitoring that situation. We are providing on-site legal support. We did that briefly. We coordinated with ICANN leadership on what’s going on at AFRINIC. We have been working with the AFRINIC community through outreach activities. And we’re standing by hoping to support elections.

AFRINIC really needs to have an election in order to get enough directors to be able to have a quorate board, a board that can hold a meeting, have a quorum, and conduct business.

The good news is the AFRINIC staff are very dedicated and have been diligently keeping the registry up, open, have been doing all the coordination that we need operationally so the AFRINIC registry is running successfully. It’s just it has a governance crisis.

ICP-2 too. As a result of looking at some of the developments that have happened in the RIR system, we actually decided to initiate a review of a document called ICP-2 in two different ways.

ICP-2 is an Internet Consensus Policy. It’s a document between the RIRs and ICANN for the recognition of new RIRs, Regional Internet Registries.

That document has never had implementation procedures. We have all adopted it, but we didn’t really worry about the process of recognizing an RIR and the obligations of an RIR and how to maintain those.

We actually drafted ICP-2 implementation procedures. We worked with the elected body of the NRO, the NRO Number Council, what’s referred to also as the ASO AC, in ICANN language, to review those procedures.

And those implementation procedures provide mechanisms for initial review and ongoing review and handling an issue with review if some RIR isn’t performing. And so, we will very shortly have formal implementation procedures for ICP-2.

The second part of the review is going to take a lot longer, which is a comprehensive update of ICP-2. And this plan is being run by the NRO Number Council, aka the Address Supporting Organization Address Council. And the ASO AC is busy building the process to engage with all the RIR communities to get input on what should be the process for recognizing an RIR.

And they’re going to do a fairly extensive process – which I expect will take more than this year; it might take more than next year – to build a revised ICP-2 document that takes all the lessons learned over the last two decades and helps strengthen what an RIR is, how it operates, how it’s governed.

I don’t know what the output of that process is going to be because it’s going to be you folks setting it, not us.

But the ASO AC is working on it. They met in Montevideo, they met in San Juan, and they are busy building their timeline. You’ll hear more about this coming up shortly. The reason I’m not giving you details is because it’s someone else’s to talk about. And they’re going to be doing all the information published on the NRO website.

(Adjusts slides). Oops. That’s backwards. Let’s go forwards.

Publications. One of the other things that the NRO does is we publish the Global Internet Stats, which you’ll hear, talking about the status of the free pools and the allocations made by the RIRs.

We do a Comparative Policy Update, which looks at the policies in every region, in various categories, and compares them. If you’re curious what a policy transfer in another region looks like, you can look at the comparative policy and get pointers to the appropriate section and a high-level summary of the differences.

In terms of other functions, as I said, we have a Service Level Agreement with the IANA. That’s actually a Service Level Agreement with the organization of ICANN and its affiliate PTI, Public Technical Identifiers. And as part of that agreement, they do the IANA function of managing the free pools.

We have an IANA Review Committee which looks at their performance each year and evaluates how they’ve been performing because they’re contracted to the RIRs. Their performance has been exemplary for all these years, but you can read the Review Committee and find their reports. The last one was published in March 2023.

We also serve on something called the ICANN Empowered Community. And this is interesting. And what this is, is the NRO as an organization has a designee, a single vote, on actions of the ICANN Empowered Community.

The ICANN Empowered Community is only five organizations that are members of ICANN that also serve an oversight role. When ICANN wants to appoint directors, change its bylaws, adopt a strategic plan, adopt a budget, much of those are either reviewed and not rejected, or actually have to be adopted or ratified by the Empowered Community.

And it’s just a safeguard. When we did the IANA transition, everyone recognized that we would no longer have the single entity of the government with ICANN that could potentially intervene if something went amiss. The community and the ICANN said we want to have something to provide a last resort.

That’s the ICANN Empowered Community, and we’re one of the five supporting organizations, Advisory Councils and supporting organizations that were asked to participate. So, we’re an ICANN Empowered Community member, which means we routinely ratify the appointment of ICANN directors.

We routinely end up ratifying changes to bylaws and approving budgets and similar things. Generally, we have no issue with that.

We do do consultations on those matters. They’re published on the NRO website, but they’re always – so far ICANN has done nothing out of the ordinary. So, the oversight has been absolutely routine. But it’s a very powerful role that we serve.

That’s it. Questions? I’ll take questions from the floor or remotely.

Hollis Kara: Please approach the microphones if you have questions for John or start typing.

John Curran: No questions. We’ll wait for remote. I know there’s a bit of a lag there.

Hollis Kara: Looks like maybe we have one question online.

Beverly Hicks: Sure. Mohibul Mahmud, in light of the 2023 IANA Numbering Services Review Committee Report, what specific improvements or adjustments has the NRO EC recommended to enhance the service level of IANA numbering services provided to the Internet community?

John Curran: Okay. Read that one more time because I heard a result of a review, but I didn’t hear what recommended changes we made. There were no findings in that. So, one more time.

Hollis Kara: The question was, in light of the review report of the IANA number services review, what specific improvements or adjustments did the NRO EC recommend?

John Curran: The IANA team, the team at PTI doing the IANA services for the registries, have performed exemplary, and that has been the findings of every review report since the Review Committee was formed.

Since they’re performing exemplary, there were no recommendations out of the review committee. You can go online to review the full report to see that.

Hollis Kara: All right. Nothing else online, and there do not appear to be questions in the room. I guess you were exceedingly thorough.

Thank you very much. (Applause.)

All right. I’m going to queue up our next presentation. This will be our first video presentation of the meeting. So, I think are we ready, everyone?

Address Supporting Organization Address Council (ASO AC) Update

Kevin Blumberg: Good afternoon. My name is Kevin Blumberg, and I’ll be presenting the ASO AC Update.

I wish I was there in person with all of you on hopefully what is a sunny afternoon, unless one of the people in charge have decided to move this around to a morning, but for now let’s just go with I hope it’s a sunny afternoon in Barbados.

So, I’ll be doing the ARIN 53 update for the ASO. And we’ll start off with just sort of a brief introduction of the ASO AC, who we are, what we’re comprised of, et cetera.

The ASO AC are 15 members. There are three from each region. Two are elected. One is appointed by the respective RIR Board. I am the appointed position for ARIN, as an example.

The terms are different for each RIR, but in the ARIN region it is a three-year term. The other two members in the ARIN region are Nick Nugent and Chris Quesada. We have a couple of tasks as the ASO AC. The first is we make advice to the ICANN Board.

We work on global policy. By work, I mean we oversee it. We don’t actually make changes to the global policy. That is done when it is within an individual RIR’s region, but we help shepherd global policy through all of the different things.

We appoint two members to the ICANN Board, and we appoint one person to the ICANN NomCom. We meet monthly by telephone, Zoom, in this case in the 2024 timeframe. And we have face-to-face meeting at least once a year. So currently who the members of the council are. Unfortunately, AFRINIC has not had an AGM where they could elect or appoint members in a while.

So currently those seats sit vacant. The current Chair of the ASO AC is Herve Clement. And Ricardo Patara and Nicole Chan are the Vice Chairs. And there is sort of the breakdown by each of the regions and our terms.

So Global Policy Development: The ASO AC is, as I mentioned earlier, there to help shepherd through global policy. And we’ll talk about global policy quickly for a minute. Global policy are specifically policies that are there for the IP address or – IP address is the wrong term – for Number Resources; that could be IPv4, IPv6 or autonomous systems – between IANA/PTI and the RIRs and vice versa. That is it. It’s not a policy as an example between regions. It is specifically for the assignment and allocation of Number Resources from the IANA/PTI to the RIRs.

The last global policy that was worked on by the ASO AC allowed for, as an example, IPv4 addresses that were smaller than a /8 to be allocated in a fair manner.

When a policy is worked on, it can come in from a number of different ways. It can come in from an individual member within a community submitting a proposal. It could come in from the ASO AC itself. It could come in from the ICANN Board. It can come in from a number of different ways.

It’s our role and responsibility to make sure that it is then submitted into all of the regions. In order to do that, we have what are called the PPFT team, Policy Proposal Facilitator Team. Each region has a member of the ASO AC who is there to look for global policies and then be able to make sure that it is updated to the ASO AC, and we’re then providing that information to the other regions as required.

So here are the members. And for 2024, for the ARIN region, Nick is the one who is responsible for that.

ASO AC transparency: All of our meetings are open. You are free to join in on a teleconference. You’re free to check out our Mailing Lists and see the archives of those.

We try to keep as much as possible open. We do have a closed list when it comes to things like our Board appointments where individual personal information is discussed, et cetera. Those would be a closed list.

But otherwise, when it comes to the work that we do, our archives are open, our Mailing Lists are open, and our conferences and in-person are open.

We’ve got links there for the archives of the mailing list, et cetera. Definitely sign up or take a look there. The calendar is there as well. Our meetings are a little early for Eastern time Canada or the U.S. Very early for West Coast U.S.A., as an example. But they are consistent. The meetings are posted well in advance on the website.

So next is the current appointments that we have. We’ve got the Seat 9, Board, which is Alan Barrett; Seat 10, which is Christian Kaufmann; and the ASO representative to the ICANN NomCom, Ron da Silva.

Every three years is an ICANN Board seat. So, we are basically running Board appointments every two out of three years. We’re currently finalizing Seat 9 and we’ll go through that in a little bit.

Next, our work plan. What we’ve been working on. So, this is actually completed a little earlier in the year, and we talked about it at the last ARIN meeting, in October. But the ASO AC did a fairly significant review of our operational procedures.

The procedures are available, again, on our website. And the main goal was to clean up some of the things we learned during our COVID times where some of the numbers, some of the quorum requirements, et cetera, were difficult.

And as well, some of the requirements in terms of the number of regions or the number of participants from the ASO AC, those were all clarified in our procedures.

So, we updated the meetings, the Global Policy Development, the voting. We simplified the voting massively. I believe there were 23 different ways within our procedures that votes were handled depending on what it was. We simplified those significantly for everybody.

Next, we’re going to talk about the ICP-2 work. So, in October of 2023, the NRO EC sent a letter to the chair of the ASO AC asking for our assistance in two tasks. The first was to review an ICP-2 implementation procedures document.

And the second was to work on a review strengthening of the ICP-2 document itself. And we’ll talk about ICP-2 in a minute. But those were the two requests.

We had a face-to-face meeting in Montevideo, Uruguay, at the LACNIC offices. And we were able to provide a full report to the NRO EC in February 2024 on the implementation procedures.

At that time, we used Montevideo to start off the work on the ICP-2 review, and we’ll go into that again in a minute. It’s a fairly long timeline. It’s both 2024 and 2025. The goal is to wrap it up for June of 2025.

And lastly, I just wanted to talk about our Board seat selection. We’ve got Seat 9, which is currently open. We’re near the final phase, we’re in the selection phase, which is deliberation has started.

And voting will commence at the end of the month. Once the voting is finished, we’ll have an announcement, probably mid-May, to finish off that activity.

So, what is ICP-2? Probably we all play the acronym game. There’s a lot of acronyms in our industry. But, fundamentally, ICP-2 is a document that was written in 1999 – 2000, sorry, was when it was written and then it was finalized in 2001. ICP-2 is for the formation of new RIRs. That was what the document was there for. And it was what LACNIC and AFRINIC then used to become full RIRs. So APNIC, ARIN and RIPE were pre-ICP-2.

And AFRINIC and LACNIC were then using the ICP-2 document. So that document is now 23 years old. So, what the ASO AC is working on is to identify what work needed to be done. That was the very first thing. And we came up with – we approved a timeline.

And it’s going to be done – for the community to explain it – it’s going to be done in two phases.

Phase one is to distill the key principles from the existing ICP-2 to add principles that we believe are key to the document to do these RIR updates that’s going on now.

We’re going to be adding a public page with the timelines, more than just here but with timelines, and with the working documents, historical documents, relevant documents to the ASO website.

So, we’re in this process right now of developing and honing this principles document. The goal is to then have the principles document available for review by the NRO EC, to get it out to the community in July of 2024 and to then have a consultation where we get your feedback on the principles, ask questions, you provide your input, et cetera, and that gets us to August of 2024.

Once we have the consultation completed, we will take all of that feedback and work towards drafting a new ICP-2 document. We don’t know what it’s going to be called yet. What will it be, ICP-2.biz? Will it be ICP-2.5? We don’t know what the name is; the name isn’t the important part. It’s what the function of this document is going to be.

And from a timeline point of view, we’ll take all that feedback we received from the community. We will then draft a revised policy, provide that to the NRO EC and then have a second feedback and consultation process in January of 2025.

The goal is we expect that when you get the specifics of the principles then into a document there may be nuances and differences that the community then sees, and that’s the perfect time to have that. We’ll present that to the community at the RIR meetings, and we’ll apply any final revisions that may come out of that.

In June of 2025, we will then provide that document to the NRO EC and ICANN for their consideration. And they’ll take that document, and they’ll do whatever work is required of that to have this hopefully wrapped up by the end of 2025. I’ve obviously left off a number of minor points or small things.

The goal was to sort of give an overview of the timeline that’s going on. We’re happy to provide any more specifics if you have questions. We’d love for you to join our calls and hear the type of work that we do. And we look forward and I look forward to seeing you at the next ARIN meeting.

So, I will be hopefully on the chat session or another member of the ASO AC. If you do have any questions, by all means please reach out to us in chat. Otherwise, thank you and have a great rest of your conference.

Hollis Kara: We’re actually going to use the phone a friend option. I would like to open the microphones if there are any questions.

I believe Michael Abejuela has volunteered to assist with any questions that we might have on the ASO AC presentation in Kevin’s absence because it’s going to be a little hard to read it, let Kevin type, read what he said, which is how we would want do it so it’s all on the record.

If anyone has any questions, we’d be happy to try to take those. Looks like we have one virtual.

I don’t know, Michael, it’s up to you if you wanted to come up or take from the floor mic. Either is fine.

Beverly Hicks: Mohibul Mahmud, how will the ASO AC’s review and strengthening of ICP-2 implementation procedures impact the creation of new Regional Internet Registries or ensure continued adherence to ICANN guidelines?

Michael Abejuela: Michael Abejuela, General Counsel. Could you repeat that question again?

Beverly Hicks: Sure. Basically, asking how the review of the ICP-2 implementation procedures would impact ensuring continued adherence to ICANN guidelines by RIRs.

Hollis Kara: Specifically related to the creation of potential future RIRs.

Michael Abejuela: Okay. So, as you heard from Kevin, there were two things they did when they were in Montevideo.

One was looking at implementation procedures and the other was about the updates to ICP-2. The implementation procedures are based on the current ICP-2 provisions. And so, when you look at those, that’s where that is focused on, that’s where our current methodology will be.

Then with the ICP-2 implementation, of course this will be reviewed in light of the relationship with ICANN as well, but this is all about how we would look at the creation of new RIRs as well as the ongoing governance frameworks for the current RIRs there.

So hopefully that answers some of the question, but we will see if there’s any follow-up.

Hollis Kara: Perfect. We’ve got one more question over here.

Rayshorn Richardson: Rayshorn Richardson, Eknotech Services, Fellow. You answered one of the questions I had.

The other question I have is concerning the ICP-2. On the ICANN website, I found a page – but I’m just wondering if there’s a specific document that new participants can look at to understand the ICP-2.

Michael Abejuela: Michael Abejuela, General Counsel. Yes, the ICP-2 that you see on the website, that is the current text that we are under in what we are looking to update. I believe as we are going through the process that the ASO AC is putting together, that you’ll be able to see further updated drafts and even the calls for comments there and everything.

But if there’s something – if you would like to talk offline, too, I’d be happy to chat with you too more about ICP-2, if you like.

Hollis Kara: You’re not off the hook yet, Michael. One more question.

Go ahead, Adair.

Adair Thaxton: Adair Thaxton, Internet2.

Since the policy was adopted in 2001 and it’s currently 2024, does the review process allow for, like, a regular review schedule of that policy in the future?

Michael Abejuela: So, I think that will possibly be one of the things that will come from the updates to ICP-2. That would be a very good comment and contribution there because what we have seen is, you have ICP-2 in the very first iteration that came out was more about the creation of new RIRs, and what the piece that we’re looking at moving forward is that there’s the creation of new RIRs and the ongoing kind of maintenance of the RIRs, what obligations will they have, including particularly if there will be more frequent reviews.

I’m not sure if you’re talking about ICP-2 itself or the RIRs individually. If it’s about the RIRs, then there may be some mechanisms there for the community feedback that would go to that. And with ICP-2 review, I think that one of the things you’ll look at is, if there’s anything the community would like to review, there’s probably going to be some mechanism by which we can continue to look at that.

But all feedback, that would be good to the ASO AC as they go through their process.

Hollis Kara: Thank you. Not seeing any further questions. I think we’re ready to move on.

Michael, thank you for the assist, and happy birthday.

(Applause.)

Do we have mic? Yay. Sorry, thanks. See, I didn’t make everybody sing. You were worried. I can understand the fear.

One last presentation before our Open Microphone. We’ve got John Sweeting here to give the Internet Number Status Report.

John Sweeting: Okay. Should we start out singing happy birthday to Michael? All right. Let’s do it.

(Singing Happy Birthday.)

Since this is the last presentation before John Curran comes up closing us out with Open Mic and closing remarks, we’re going to try and get through this pretty quickly.

Internet Number Status Report

John Sweeting: This is the Internet Number Status Report. These statistics are collected, and the presentation is produced by German, who is the secretary for the NRO. The statistics are sent in from each of the five RIRs quarterly, and then German massages those, puts them together and adds them to the presentation.

We’ve changed some of the slides that we’re going to present in there, and so I don’t have the deck from Q1 because German is still massaging that. But I do have the deck for the Q4 of 2023.

Okay. So this is just – we show this every time. It’s all the IPv4 addresses distributed by IANA and who it was distributed by.

So you can’t look at that and say, well, that’s not what it is today because, yeah, that’s not what it is today. That’s what was distributed by IANA historically. And with transfers and stuff, things are moving around.

Okay. So total IPv4 addresses, this is much more interesting. Managed by each RIR. You can see AFRINIC, 7.23 /8s, APNIC – and ARIN is 99.08 /8s, of which – well, less than half now, used to be half, but less than half of that is legacy space now.

LACNIC – APNIC is 53.10, and RIPE is 49.94, and LACNIC is 11.33 /8s. That’s a lot of space.

Okay. So available IPv4 space in each RIR in terms of /8, you can see zero down there across ARIN, LACNIC, and RIPE. APNIC has 0.15 of a /8 left. Big holdings. Big holdings. And AFRINIC has .07.

For ARIN, so people say, well, how is ARIN still doing a Wait List and the special reserves? We don’t count those special reserves, NRPM 4.4 and 4.10 space, as available because it’s not available to everybody. It’s got special use. So we don’t count that as available.

IPv4 space issued by RIRs per year in terms of /8s. You can see that there was IPv4 space handed out by each one of the five RIRs in 2023, including ARIN, even though we don’t have any available to the general membership. But special cases still, special reserves.

So IPv4 transfers. Everybody loves IPv4 transfers. I could talk about them all day long but I won’t because I’m the last thing between you and the wrap-up with John and the beach or wherever else you’re going.

Okay. So intra-RIR IPv4 transfers. You see RIPE does a lot of transfers. I feel sorry for that RSD team. They do a lot of transfers. After that, it’s ARIN, APNIC, LACNIC and AFRINIC.

That was by the number of transfers – no, what was that? That was by the number of transfers – yeah, transfers per year. Oh, this is all – okay. I was expecting to see something different. But we’ve changed those slides around, so I have to get used to this.

All right, so this is just the last five years’ history of that. And as you can see RIPE has still been doing a lot, a lot of transfers every year, way more than the other RIRs. But I think that’s because they have policies that allow for transfers that some of the other RIRs don’t.

So the inter-RIR transfers is between, the sources in one region and the recipient is in another region.

So as you can see, AFRINIC does not participate in the inter-RIR transfer process. They do not have a policy in place that allows them to do that. So there’s zeros all the way across.

And you can see APNIC and ARIN and RIPE are the majority of the inter-RIR transfers, with RIPE probably leading the way. RIPE pretty much leads the way.

So that’s interesting for anybody that wants to understand how the space is moving between the RIRs.

IPv6, this is the IPv6 address space and how it’s allocated from IANA, the Global Unicast /3, and then these are – up in the corner, the box in the corner talks about stuff that was given out before they came up with the policy of when an RIR went to them and they got a /12.

So since that time, since after 2006, ARIN and RIPE have both received a /11 of IPv6 space from IANA. LACNIC, AFRINIC, and APNIC are still on their first /12, which will probably change soon for one of those at least.

IPv6 allocations issued by the RIRs. So this is prefixes allocated each year by RIR. Nothing too interesting there. RIPE does a lot. They did a lot in 2019 and 2021. But it’s pretty much what you would expect.

Total allocated space since RIPE gave out more each year, they have given out more over the total of the years, and then you’ve got ARIN and APNIC and then LACNIC and AFRINIC. Again, pretty much what you would expect.

IPv6 assignments. So prefixes each RIR per year. As you will see, there is no ARIN IPv6 assignments in 2022 or 2023. That’s because they all changed to allocations.

We didn’t go back – to that one question I had earlier – in our database, our assignments were changed to allocations, but we didn’t change the historical data that was captured in these slides. So you can still see the assignments that ARIN did do in 2019, 2020, 2021. As we move along in the years, it will just show no assignments done by ARIN.

Total assigned IPv6 space, ARIN, you can see we’re at 3 million there, but those are /48s. That shouldn’t change unless we have another change to policies or the way we issue space out.

LACNIC has given out a lot of /48s. I believe they had a policy where they gave IPv6 to everybody. If you came into LACNIC and asked for IPv4, you got IPv6 with it. And that’s why they have so much assigned IPv6 space. And it looks like RIPE, looks like you do most of yours in allocations.

Percentage of members with IPv6 in each RIR. So again, LACNIC has that 91.18 percent of IPv4 and IPv6, a small percentage of IPv6 only. And RIPE is sitting there. It looks like ARIN, we’re lagging behind there. We need to get on that, John. I know it’s me. Sorry.

AS numbers. So we used to – we still do here – I think in the next quarter this is one of the things we’re changing. We’re not going to report 16-bit and 32-bit. It’s all going to be combined because an AS number is an AS number today and we don’t make differentiation between them.

But for now, you can see by 16-bit or 32-bit, what’s been given out by the RIRs. Again, we still have that separation here. This was just in 2023. ARIN has a lot of 16-bit AS’s because we get a lot back all the time. When we had – as you remember earlier, I mentioned a couple of policies that favored people that were multi-homing, they could get their own space.

So a lot of people went and got an AS number in ARIN just so they had an easier time of getting their own IP space. And over the years, they decide they don’t need that AS number, they don’t want to pay for it, and they give them back.

We also have a policy that we feed – we treat them all as one pool, but we give them out from lowest to highest. So the 16-bits go out first.

We do keep a small reserve pool in case there’s somebody who – so we don’t run out of the 16-bit. But not very large, very small. And it’s only for really technical, real technical reasons that somebody really needs to have a 16-bit AS.

This is the data by RIRs by per year. 32-bit and 16-bit. Nothing jumps out there, and then total ASNs assigned by each RIR. And again you see RIPE gives out quite a bit of AS’s, then ARIN, APNIC, LACNIC, and AFRINIC, just as we would suspect and predict.

All right. That’s it. Any questions? Nope? Good.

Hollis Kara: Please approach the microphones. Nope. Doesn’t look like we have any questions.

All right. Thank you, John.

I’m just going to sit back down because he’s already here, John Curran, lead us off on our Open Mic.

Open Microphone

John Curran: This is the Open Mic session, when the community has the chance to ask questions about anything that’s still outstanding, anything we haven’t addressed. If you ask about something that’s on tomorrow’s agenda, like a policy topic, I will say let’s wait ‘til then. Otherwise, the floor is open.

I’ll ask the Chair, Mr. Sandiford, come join me. Okay, front mic over here.

Adair Thaxton: Adair Thaxton, Internet2. I had asked this question at the break, and I got sort of an answer. I was wondering if you guys could explain what happens after we all vote on the policies?

John Curran: After you all vote on the policies, what happens. That’s actually a great idea. We have enough turnover, and we haven’t really done that in a while and talked about it.

So there’s a policy called the Policy Development Process. You can go online to the ARIN website and find it. The PDP actually got refreshed just last year.

And it basically says that when the AC has a Recommended Draft Policy that meets all the criteria, technically sound, it’s open, and it’s supported by the community, as shown by the poll that they do here, they can decide it’s ready to be incorporated in the Number Policy Manual.

And to do that, they send it to Last Call to the Mailing List. They tell you all, it’s going to Last Call, this is your last chance, if somehow we got it wrong, to speak up.

And presuming nothing glaring is found in Last Call, it will come back from Last Call and they’ll send it to the Board of Trustees recommended as adoption.

And the Board will ratify that – the Board looks, 19 out of 20 times, we ratify what they send us. We may occasionally send it back and say we’re missing a detail here; did this vote occur, or can we see this write-up? But generally, we simply ratify it and then it’s incorporated into the Number Resource Policy. So it’s pretty well structured.

Bill Sandiford: I think it’s important to note as well, too, that the AC uses various different means to gauge consensus or community support for the policy, not just a show of hands –

John Curran: That’s true.

Bill Sandiford: – in the room at the meetings.

John Curran: They actually, after you’re done meeting, they’re going to meet here and they’ll discuss all the discussion and all the shows of hand and what the level of support was and what they heard for it, and they’re your representatives that you’ve elected to do that job.

Adair Thaxton: We had one that was 71 for and zero against, I think, something like that, and then we had one that was 24 for and 23 against with very much abstention in the room.

John Curran: Right. The goal is, if you have something that’s 60, 70 in favor and no against, they’ll figure out what to do with it.

If you have something that’s split down the middle, what you’re looking for is – actually, in that particular proposal, someone stood up and said, “I’m not in favor of it. I would be in favor with changes, these changes,” is to hear what were those changes, are those changes that take it the wrong way, or would the other people in the room also support it, revise it to try to get a bigger pool of support.

So they’ll increment – they’ll come back to you with another update, or they may say, oh, the 15, 20 people who were against it were all against it because of this one thing. That’s what we heard, and that’s one that we’ve decided that we talked about. It’s incompatible, you have to do A or B, and I think we have enough support.

Now 20-20, that would be hard to send to the Board. The Board would ask a lot of questions. We don’t generally get cases like that.

In general, the AC doesn’t take something and recommend it until it’s pretty clear. And the AC recommendations to the Board, while not always unanimous, a 15-member AC, are very close. They may have one or two that go away, but the Board’s generally getting things that are very well considered by the Advisory Council.

Microphones remain open. Remote mics are open.

Bill Sandiford: Feel free to get your comments or questions in online as well. Right side.

Namra Naseer: I have a quick question. I was wondering and I’m also curious about what does ARIN’s interaction with organizations like ISOC, and specifically Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers look like.

I know in one of the presentations it was briefly touched upon, but I would really appreciate if you can elaborate on that.

Bill Sandiford: If you could state your name and affiliation.

Namra Naseer: I’m Namra. I’m a Fellow. I’m part of ISOC New York, as its Board member and Vice president. Other than that, I’m studying from New York.

Bill Sandiford: Thank you for joining us.

John Curran: Thank you. So, perspective; the RIRs, the Regional Internet Registries handle the Internet number resources, the number registries, IPv4, IPv6, ASN. That’s what we do. We coordinate among ourselves through the NRO, and that’s our mission.

Now, we do interface with ICANN. Actually, we predate ICANN. And when ICANN formed, we agreed to be part of that, to liaison with them. We have a structure where we liaison with ICANN, and they provide a degree of review and oversight and coordination, so you don’t have the RIRs independently determining that there’s a new RIR somewhere. ICANN can weigh in on that.

When we do something, like when we’re managing our number policies, the policies we give the IANA aren’t just what we make up. We have to make them up, and much like the ASO AC – much like the Advisory Council has to get through the ARIN Board, our global policies have to get ratified by ICANN’s Board for IANA to use them.

So our relationship with ICANN is a partnership where we ask them to provide oversight to us and they do. Likewise, unusually we also provide oversight to them because we’ve been put on the Empowered Community. So when they do changes, we have to ratify things as part of that.

Now, separate from that is the IETF, which develops the protocols but isn’t responsible for running the registries or operating the Internet.

They just develop the protocols. We work with them because it’s their protocols that end up creating the registries that we administer for the community.

There’s a bit of back-and-forth with them. And that’s mostly technical staff, both you folks in the community and our RIR staff who go and work with the IETF.

Then you’ve got the ISOC, the Internet Society. The Internet Society is – amongst other things, was the home of the IETF for many years. They were the funding source. Now there’s a little more distance. It’s an affiliated activity.

But the fact of the matter is that the Internet Society calls for the advancement of the Internet at large. They don’t just deal with things like protocols and numbers and domain names. The Internet Society deals with societal issues.

We don’t engage as much with that because we’re mostly infrastructure, and we want the infrastructure to work and the societal issues tend to be tied into – society issues inherently are political, and you’ve got a whole ecosystem there that ISOC runs to engage regional chapters and get input there.

So we’re aware of them, and we do work jointly – for example, a lot of the Internet governance activities we’ll be side by side with them at the ITU, the UN, the IGF. But the RIRs and ICANN have a very close relationship.

The IETF slightly to the side and us as the technical community, we work with ISOC.

Namra Naseer: That helps a lot. Thank you so much.

Bill Sandiford: Thank you. Any questions online? Last call for microphones. Last call to get your questions in online.

On that, we’ll call it to a close, and we’ll do this again tomorrow.

John Curran: Thank you.

Closing Announcements and Adjournment

Hollis Kara: Thank you, gentlemen. (Applause.)

Okay. A few parting housekeeping details.

Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We’d like to thank our sponsors once again, C&W Business, IPv4.Global by Hilco Streambank and Google. If I could get a round of applause. Thank you.

(Applause.)

All right. For folks who are here with us in Barbados, we will have our social this evening. It will begin at 7:00 PM. It’s over at The Boatyard.

You do need to wear your badge. So please don’t forget that. You’ll need that to board the shuttle.

Where will the shuttles be? I’ve been hearing that question a lot. Basically if you walk out of this room and turn to the right and walk, if you walk far enough you’ll land in a parking lot. Don’t fall off the curb, don’t do that. That’s where the shuttles will be, right over that way. And shuttle service back will begin starting at 8:30 and they’ll run every half hour, 45 minutes, until the last shuttle at 11:00 PM. So we’re looking forward to an enjoyable evening.

Reminding everyone that we are committed to supporting a productive and safe environment for all participants and that does include the social this evening. So have fun, just not too much. And if you encounter an issue or need to contact one of our folks who are listed as people to reach out to for violations on standards of behavior, our Ombudsman, or some other members of our executive staff, that information is available through the Standards of Behavior drop-down on the meeting website.

You could take a picture of the sign in the room, if you want it handy on the phone if you are expecting something crazy.

We look forward to seeing everyone back here tomorrow. Breakfast will be served at eight and the meeting will begin promptly at nine. That’s it. Thank you very much for a great first day.

We’re really happy to have everyone with us, and we will see you back here tomorrow.

(Applause.)

(Meeting adjourned at 4:00 PM.)