ARIN 57 Public Policy and Members Meeting, Day 3 Transcript - Wednesday, 22 April 2026

Opening and Announcements

Hollis Kara: It’s Wednesday. And folks are, as I said, the elevators are slow and busy this morning, and we have folks coming down from 25. So I expect they’ll be trickling into the room. But let’s get started for the benefit of those joining us online, sticking to schedule. I’d like to welcome you to day three of ARIN 57.

This morning, we have a lot of ARIN business reports. Before that, for those who are here, let’s hear it for our volunteers on the Board of Trustees, Advisory Council and NRO NC. (Applause.)

They do a lot of important work as volunteers to this community, so we really appreciate all of their contributions.

A few quick reminders, which again I will say kind of slowly because we’re waiting on elevators.

Folks online, I know you have been busy in the chat because I’m watching when I’m sitting over at my little corner. Please keep chatting in chat. Enjoy it. Talk to each other. I know folks in the room have been joining that conversation. That’s wonderful to see so much community building in that way.

Do remember that when we get to Q&A portions of the agenda that you do need to submit those statements either into the Q&A or raise your hand and we’ll bring you live into the room to make your statements, leading with your name and affiliation. Makes things go quicker.

In person, again, happy to see you joining the online attendees in the Zoom. Please remember, if you choose to do so, to mute your microphone and disconnect from audio, because we like belts and suspenders.

If the Zoom happens to drop, please try to connect again in case it’s a glitch on your end. If you cannot connect to the Zoom, please head over to the livestream, we will be providing updates on getting Zoom back online. If you can’t reach the livestream, keep an eye on your email. We will be letting you know when you can rejoin the meeting. Hopefully none of that will be necessary.

For folks in the room, very much want to hear from you. It was great seeing so much lively conversation yesterday. Hopefully we can keep up some energy this morning. When you do come to the microphone, please remember to speak slowly and clearly for the benefit of the transcriptionist. Do get close enough to the microphone so that we’re picking up your statements and to lead with your name and affiliation.

We do want to hear from everyone. So, again, if you’re not comfortable approaching the mic, you are welcome to join the Zoom and submit comments and questions that way. Or if you have a challenge that prevents you from coming to the mic, please pop a hand in the air. We do actually have an extra microphone on the floor and we’re happy to bring one to you if you do want to speak.

Wi-Fi is available. Surely I’m trusting that everyone has found it by now, but if you’re still struggling, Registration Desk is outside and they’ll give you a hand.

Today, we’re going to lead off with some department reports. These are not in order in which they’re going to appear on stage. It’s going to actually be HR and Admin, Communications, RSD and CXS, which is a lot of acronyms, and they’ll explain themselves.

We’re then going to have an update on our work in Outreach and Fellowship, and then we’re getting an update from Registry Integrity and Oversight. Then we’re going to take a little break.

We’re going to come back and get an update from our General Counsel and then finish up the day with a preview for ARIN elections and kind of setting the stage because we’re coming up very soon on nominations opening and, in fact, we’re currently recruiting for the NomCom.

If that’s something you’re interested in, please check that out on the website. You’ll hear that again later. And then we’ll finish up the day with an Open Microphone and we’ll get you outside hopefully around lunchtime so you can enjoy the beautiful day.

Again, Standards of Behavior in are place. Everyone agreed to them. We’ve talked about them quite a bit over the past few days, so I will not belabor the point. However, if you do have a question or concern, our ombuds Stacy Goodwin Lightfoot is here with us through the day, and she is happy to hear from you. If you don’t get a chance to talk to her before you leave and you have something you want to follow up on, you can send those emails to arin@hintonandco.com.

Like to have a round of applause for our Network Sponsor, Spectrum. (Applause.)

Our Platinum Sponsor, AWS. (Applause.)

Our Silver Sponsor, IPXO. (Applause.)

And our Espresso Bar host Verisign. Don’t forget to thank Beruke on your way out today. He’s been here doing a yeoman’s duty making sure everybody stays caffeinated, and he’s really been a great addition to the meeting.

Also, we do want to know how we do. Please take time to fill out the meeting survey and provide your input on things that we can do better in the future, things you liked, all of it. We review all of that feedback very thoroughly. We take it very seriously, and we try to implement as much as we can from our community feedback.

Doing so, you have the opportunity to be entered into a drawing for a Nintendo Switch 2 console, and it’s not ever too early to get ahead on your Christmas shopping.

With that, I’d like to welcome up Erin Alligood, our Chief Human Resources Officer, to give an update on Human Resource Administration.

Department Reports

Human Resources and Administration Report

Erin Alligood: As Hollis shared, I’m Erin Alligood. I’m ARIN’s Chief Human Resources Officer. Just to tell you a little bit more about myself, I’ve been with ARIN since 2013. So I did a quick calculation, I think this is either my 25th or 26th ARIN meeting.

So I’m happy to be here and share the latest updates from my team. So first I’m going to introduce my team. And Nancy, great minds think alike.

You see here, we dressed up for Derby Day. I’ll start by introducing Natalie Harold, ARIN’s HR Generalist. Natalie has been an integral part to our team for four years now managing various HR projects that we have planned throughout the year to include payroll and benefits administration, recruiting and onboarding new employees.

Our next team member is Melissa Montgomery. Melissa is actually working registration, so please be sure to stop by and say hello so you can see her in person.

Melissa was actually recently just promoted to Operation Support Specialist, where she now provides travel support for all the ARIN employees and then she also provides travel and administrative support for our ARIN volunteer groups, to include the Board of Trustees, the Advisory Council, the Address Supporting Organization Advisory Council, or ASO AC. And Melissa even books travel for the ARIN Fellows.

Next, we have Mindy Engstrom, who was also recently promoted to Office Manager. And so Mindy helps with managing our facility located in Chantilly, Virginia, and assists with ARIN’s internal office events and manages a variety of office administrative items for ARIN. Mindy does an excellent job keeping our office running.

Both Melissa and Mindy have been with ARIN now for almost four years. So I’m not sure if you’re aware, but today is Administrative Professionals Day.

So I wanted to take the time to thank our full administrative team to include Alyssa Arceneaux, who is here at the meeting. I don’t think she’s in the room. But we also have Thérèse Simcox, who is probably tuning in virtually. And then, of course, my full team. I want to – give them a big round of applause to thank them for all that they do. (Applause.)

And if you have some administrative staff at your own company, make sure you give them a good shout out at home.

All right. So how do we support ARIN? You can see here that we manage a wide variety of responsibilities, all pieces of human resources, as well as some of those other responsibilities to include travel administration and office and facilities management.

So we’ve been busy since my last presentation last April. You can see the buckets here, compliance, operations, and social initiatives that we’ve had throughout the last year.

So in terms of compliance, in 2025, we successfully conducted our required annual audit of our 401(k) plan for the 2024 plan year, which returned a favorable letter from our auditor. Fun fact, our participation rate in our 401(k) plan is over 95 percent, likely due to ARIN’s very generous employer match of up to 9 percent.

Oversight of the 401(k) plan is conducted by our Fiduciary Investment Committee, which consists of Michael Abejuela, our General Counsel, Richard Jimmerson, our Chief Operating Officer, Brian Kirk, our Chief Financial Officer, and myself as Chief Human Resources Officer.

We also completed various training programs in early 2026. This included our annual harassment prevention training, as well as inclusion and diversity training, and both of these training modules were completed by all of our employees and our volunteer groups to include the Board, the AC, and the ASO AC.

So in terms of operations, as you might remember, I mentioned in my presentation last year, our building lease is due to expire in early 2027, and Hank mentioned this in his presentation, I think, on Monday. So in order to determine if we would renew our current lease or look for a new office space, we conducted an employee survey seeking input on office use and used this information as a tool to evaluate our future office needs. Other data points included feedback from our department directors and executives and, of course, cost and the current commercial real estate market.

I’m happy to report that due to the overall costs and benefits, we will be staying in our current office and have renewed our lease for another 10 years, continuing under our hybrid work model. This option will be significantly less disruptive to our core business services and our employees and was the most cost-effective over the life of the lease.

So based on feedback from the Board of Trustees, over the last two years, the executive team has worked to enhance our management continuity planning. This included building standard operating procedure documents for all director and above positions, as well as drafting succession profiles for better understanding of succession planning and timelines for these key positions at ARIN.

ARIN reviews and updates our employee handbook annually, and as a result, requires employee signature acknowledgments at that time. We recently updated our handbook in 2026 to include some new policies, such as an environmental impact policy, showing ARIN’s commitment to sustainability.

And then we also enhanced our background and reference check policy for both new hires and existing employees.

And as Christian Johnson, our Chief Information Security Officer, mentioned in his presentation yesterday, we will be rolling that out through the rest of the year in a phased approach for those existing employees.

So some social initiatives that we’ve had in 2026 and in early – excuse me, 2025 and 2026, included a school supply drive where we contributed several backpacks, lunch bags, and monetary donations to local schools for children in need. And then we also have a holiday tradition now where we sponsor an annual toy drive with a local charity during the holidays, and this is always a very meaningful exercise and activity for our team where we help local families give their children a more special holiday.

You can read more about these on our blog site on our website. And then last, we hosted several interdepartmental events at the office to encourage engagement amongst the staff while we’re working in our hybrid work model.

So, as I typically share during my presentations, I wanted to take the time to highlight ARIN’s value statements. These statements were developed actually by our employees with direct input from the employees.

And I’ll just read them briefly. “We are Passionate about our Mission, Service to our Members, Customers and the Global Community, Our People Matter, and We Are Accountable.”

We think it’s important for our community to be aware of these value statements. You can read them in full on our website, and these statements will provide you with a great understanding of what’s important to us as employees, and as reflected in the statements, our employees are proud to be part of this community and serve ARIN’s mission on a daily basis.

Now, moving into some employee statistics, which is always kind of a fun slide to show, fully staffed, we are at currently 106 employees.

You can see in this graph that we have a significant population of tenured employees here at ARIN noted in the 20-plus year category, the 15 to 19 years, zero (should have been 10) to 14 and five to nine years, and I’m happy to report that our employee tenure continues to be strong. In fact, it’s over nine years on average, which is excellent.

And then as always, ARIN continues to actively staff and identify new talent in the zero- to four-year category to support the evolving needs of the community and the organization as a whole.

Speaking of tenure, Mark mentioned this, one part of this in his presentation the other day. We wanted to take the time to congratulate two recent retirees from ARIN who retired just last month.

Reggie Forster was our Director of Operations in Engineering working for ARIN for six years. And Reggie was instrumental in our data center move at the office that was talked about earlier this week.

And then Tammy Rowe, really highlighting the 26 years of service for Tammy. I mean, Tammy was with ARIN for quite some time as you see as our Accounts Receivable Manager in Financial Services.

I think it’s due to give them a big round of applause. Please join me in congratulating them on their years of service and their retirement. (Applause.)

Hopefully Reggie and Tammy are tuning in at home or will watch the stream later on.

All right. So what do we have planned for the rest of this year? Our 401(k) audit for the 2025 plan year is currently underway and should be completed later this year.

We are also in the process of developing management training through ARIN’s Learning Management System, or LMS, where all people managers will be required to complete this training module once finalized.

We also will be conducting our salary survey later in 2026, which is a project that we conduct every other year to ensure our employees are compensated both in their positions at ARIN and within the Washington, D.C. job market.

We also analyze our benefits package, comparing it to other companies to ensure that we’re competitive in the market. And this overall exercise helps us to retain our current staff and attract new talent at ARIN.

These are just a few highlights from my team, and I’m happy to answer any questions.

Hollis Kara: Anyone have any questions or comments for Erin?

Erin Alligood: All right. Thank you so much.

Hollis Kara: Thank you. (Applause.)

Communications Department Report

Hollis Kara: With that, we’ll move ahead into the Communications report. I’d like to invite Ashley Perks, our Communications Manager, up to provide that presentation.

Ashley Perks: It’s me again. Hi. All right. I will be giving the Communications Department report today. My name is Ashley Perks. I’m the Communications Manager here at ARIN. This is my, I think, fifth year at ARIN, which is crazy. It has gone very fast.

So first we’d like you to meet the Communications team. You have myself and our fearless leader, Hollis. Alicia and Beverly create our training and education materials for ARIN Academy and our outreach events as well as our how-to videos. Melissa is our events manager and she ensures that every ARIN event goes as smoothly as possible even from 500 miles away.

Des is responsible for our beautiful meeting graphics. Don’t forget to grab your sticker and T-shirt before you leave.

John is our man of all trades and he provides support to our programs as well as removing all of the hyphens I try to sneak into our content. Craig is our technical writer who works with our engineering team to write documentation for our services.

Christina is our stellar content creator. You can see her in the back there. She manages our ARIN blog and our social media accounts.

So, what have we been doing? Well, this. But also all of that. And probably more. So let’s get into it.

Some of our milestones this year, new logo, in case you hadn’t noticed. Also ARIN 57 and our annual report. We spend our summers executing support for programs and services like elections, grants, fellowship, outreach, training and more.

We’ll be seeing everybody here in the fall for ARIN 58, of course.

I want to talk a little bit about our new logo. This is one of the things that we are most excited about. So meet the new ARIN logo. This was designed in-house by the comms team and approved by our Board last year. We launched it in late March. And it has been tough to keep it a secret, I will be honest.

Why did we create a new logo? Well, for one thing, the previous logo was almost 25 years old. And as we all know, the world that we have now is a bit different than the world we had back then, especially from a communications and audience perspective.

We needed something a little bit more flexible to use for our channels, like social media, video and others, as well as something that could flex across a variety of screen sizes that exist now. I do want to give a small shout out here to the ARIN UX team, Jan Blacka and Jesse Helfrich, for their assistance with our logo implementation across our services.

I love talking about logos and design, but I will try to keep this brief. Feel free to corner me after the meeting if you want to talk about it more, though.

The first thing that you might notice is that it visually aligns with our branding that we have been using over the last few years for our Public Policy and Members Meetings. We also incorporated the first three arrows to represent the three areas of our service region as well as the three tenets of our mission statement, supporting the operation of the Internet through the management of Internet number resources, coordinating the development of policies bythe community, and advancing the Internet through outreach.

And I do want to stress that despite the logo changing, our values and our mission are unchanged. The logo and branding refresh is solely visual.

So let’s give a round of applause for our old logo. It served us well and I know we all have fond memories of it. If you have a T-shirt or a sticker with the old logo on it, I guess you can say it’s a little bit vintage now. (Applause.)

Richard talked about our annual report on Monday. But this is another comms initiative that we spent Q1 doing. We have spent the last few years really streamlining this document to make it a bit easier to digest. And I hope you like it.

So how do we communicate with our community? Well, there are quite a few ways. First, we actually send nearly every announcement that’s posted to our website to our ARIN Announce mailing list. This is a broadcast list only so there is no back-and-forth discussion. Some topics that get shared include the Fellowship Program, Internet community information, the Community Grant Program, elections and more.

If you want to subscribe, you can scan that QR code, and we do have a few more mailing lists you can join, both discussion and broadcast, on topics that range from Internet number resource policy to a daily report of issued resources to technical updates. If you want to subscribe to any of these, you can go to ARIN.net/mailing_lists to subscribe.

And we have some new communications tools for this year. Banners and pop-ups in ARIN Online. But don’t worry, with great power comes great responsibility.

They are dismissible and will only include important community information like customer surveys, consultations, community events, maintenance outages and elections.

I mentioned our social media earlier. We just started our Instagram account last year, on top of our other social media channels. We’d love for you to give us a follow @ARIN_RIR.

Speaking of social media, we have seen moderate growth on our social media over the last year, with increases across all metrics. Sorry, it’s an animation.

Our most popular topics include the Fellowship Program, IPv6, RPKI, our Caribbean outreach, and industry events.

And I do want to highlight one of my favorite things that we do here at ARIN, it’s ARIN Bits. We publish a blog post every quarter that gives a roundup of any important updates that you might have missed as well as information about future events and programs.

If you visit ARIN.net/blog and select the ARIN Bits tag, you can actually read all of them.

Speaking of the blog, we published 61 posts in 2025, and so far, this year, we have published more than 10. And you may be asking yourself, “Ashley, I am very interested in reading these posts. How do I do this?” Well, let me tell you. You can subscribe! There’s a subscribe button right on our blog homepage, which means that we will actually automatically email new blog posts to you when they are published.

As I said earlier, there were 61 posts in 2025, which means it’s an average of about one blog post a week. Not too heavy.

The comms team also manages our Consultation and Suggestion Process. These are two separate processes. Consultations are where we here at ARIN ask for your opinion on a proposed direction, such as our consultation from 2025 on AS-SET names. Suggestions are where you propose an enhancement or improvement for development.

In 2025, we had one consultation and nine suggestions received from our community. Of those nine, two were completed due to software releases. Five are still under consideration for development. And two, well, two were spam. You just can’t get away from it.

So far this year, we have received five suggestions. Four of those have actually been closed, and one is pending development. And we have no consultations currently scheduled for 2026, but if you subscribe to the ARIN Consult mailing list, you can stay in the know so you can give your feedback.

Communications is for everyone, and we support multiple departments across the ARIN organization: policy, fellowship, technical services, elections. We help support and help manage it all.

We are a close-knit team that collaborates, implements and gets it done. And speaking of getting it done, ARIN Academy is a great resource for training. We have three modules live right now: Getting Started with ARIN Online, Using ARIN’s Hosted RPKI, and IPv6 Address Planning Basics. And our team is hard at work at creating more.

If you have suggestions on training content, please feel free to email training@arin.net. And if you don’t have the time to go through a whole e-learning module, I also want to point out we offer quick-hit online help videos on our website and YouTube channel on topics like Creating User Accounts, Points of Contact, Requesting Resources, and others.

And of course, save the date for ARIN 58. I just realized that rhymes. So I may be insufferable for the next few months.

ARIN 58 will be held October 22nd and 23rd just after the fall NANOG meeting in Miami, Florida. I do look forward to seeing everybody in this room there. Fingers crossed for an espresso bar.

With that, I am happy to take any questions or comments, as long as they are extremely positive and/or flattering, just kidding.

Hollis Kara: All right. Duly noted. Anyone have questions or comments for Ashley? I would like you to be reminded of the restriction she put on the nature of comments.

Ashley Perks: Positive.

Hollis Kara: Just kidding, say what you have to say.

Kevin Blumberg: Kevin Blumberg, The Wire. Good luck with that one.

WCAG, are you familiar with it? It’s on your site. It’s a good thing.

Hollis Kara: We’re familiar.

Kevin Blumberg: Good site, good thing. It’s about accessibility on the website. When I hear pop-up banner, the last thing I think of is accessibility.

Now, I know you can make a pop-up banner accessible, but it’s not recommended. So I saw – I went to your website about accessibility, and you’ve got a whole page on accessibility. Awesome. My eyes are getting worse. Love to see things like that.

But there’s a disclaimer. There’s the carve-out that you have on the website that says, hey, we may use some third-party tools, and, quite frankly, if they don’t work, tough.

You’ve got to fix that. Either be or don’t be. Don’t be “half-be.” It’s me being nice. It’s trying to ask for you to actually not use third-party tools but rather focus on accessibility, and if the tool will support accessibility, great; you can use it. But don’t be half.

So I appreciate that you’re doing new stuff. It’s awesome. But always do it with things like accessibility in mind. It is the most important thing, quite frankly, making ourselves accessible to the communities.

Thank you.

Hollis Kara: Sure thing. And just to speak to that as it pertains to the new features in ARIN Online for notifications: One, pop-ups are not something that we plan on using with any kind of regularity, and they were designed in-house with accessibility in mind.

Chris Quesada: Chris Quesada, Verisign. I will be nicer. You will have an espresso bar in Miami.

Ashley Perks: Awesome. (Applause.)

Hollis Kara: Oh, well, that’s a promise. We don’t have anything from online. So thank you very much, Ashley, for that very thorough report.

Ashley Perks: What can I say? (Applause.)

Hollis Kara: With that, unfortunately, our director of RSD, Lisa Liedel, could not be with us this week, so John Sweeting is going to come up and talk about what’s going on in the Registration Services Department.

Registration Services Department Report

John Sweeting: Thank you, Hollis. So I’m pinch hitting here for Lisa. My pinch-hitting average is way below my normal batting average, so let’s get started.

Registration Services Department Report. The agenda: We’re going to talk about the overview, current volumes, recent operational improvements, the Registration Services audit, and some highlights.

Okay. So the key support areas of Registration Services is data accuracy. They’re the frontline to ensuring that information put into ARIN Online into a customer’s account is accurate and correct.

They do a lot of vetting. They do a lot of searching. They do Zoom meetings with customers just to make sure that the data is accurate in our ARIN Online.

Routing security. They’re the frontline for helping with customers figuring out how to get into the RPKI and how to register their ROAs. If it gets a little deep, they hand it off to Nathan Newman, who is on Brad’s team, and Brad and Nathan will take care of the deeper subjects on that.

If you want, we do have a chat. And you have to be logged into your user account, though, to use the chat. And you can use that chat to talk to them about how you request your ASNs, IPv4, IPv6 addresses, as well as anything else you might want to ask them about ARIN.

They may have to hand you off to someone else. We don’t cover financial issues on the chat, but they will get someone from the finance department to call you back if you give them a number and request that.

And also a lot of their time is spent on transferring resources because that’s where a lot of the vetting and ensuring accuracy of who is transferring to who comes into play. And that’s also one of our largest vectors for fraud.

So, the team: We have Lisa Liedel, who is the director. Lisa’s been there 15-plus years. The team lead for Registration Services is Alyson Moore. She’s been there four years. She’s amazing. She’s really good. She picked up everything really quick and quickly became the team lead.

We have six Customer Resource Analysts I – which doesn’t mean a lot. It’s just where they’re brought in. It’s how long they’ve been there. Most of these people, all these people have been there two years, between two and three years. The ones that have been there longer are actually up for promotion if they’ve passed all the steps for it. So that will change soon.

We have Emily, who has been there a little bit longer and is an Analyst II. And then Mike Pappano, who has been there longer than Lisa, and he’s currently our only customer Resource Analyst III.

Okay. Customer engagement: So here’s the stats. If you’re ever wondering what the Registration Services analysts do. This is what they do. They answer calls. They participate in live chats. They process tickets related to the waitlist. They do a lot of Zooms.

They also process all these ticket requests for ASNs and other number resources.

As you see, the biggest one is the Ask ARIN request, which is over 5,000 tickets a year.

Ask ARIN can be anything. If you are logged in, you don’t even have to be doing it for an organization. You can do it for yourself. So we get bulk Whois requests. We get Whowas questions. We get all kinds of questions. We get the question, when is the next annual meeting?

So recent operational improvements, process improvements, key benefits of process improvements.

Point of Contact linking updates: We removed a reliance – we used to allow – you could create a user account and then request to be linked to a role POC, and as long as you could receive email at that role POC email address, you could approve yourself to be linked to that POC.

Well, we had some bad players taking advantage of that. They were hijacking people’s email servers. They would hijack them for maybe a minute, just long enough, because they knew the whole process. They had figured out how all this worked. They would put in the request. They’d get their user account, and then they would request the POC link and then they would hijack that server that it was going to.

They would have an email box set up for it. That would go in. They would approve it. They would get linked. There were actually ROAs that were changed on some accounts. There were some that were added.

It was found very quickly and eradicated. The first thing we did was, email will no longer be used for any kind of verification of who people are for them to gain access to resources.

Today, there’s a process where if you want to link to a role POC, you put in your request, and that will generate a ticket to the people that are already on that role POC, and one of those people will have to log into their account and approve the linking to that.

If there’s nobody on that role account available, it will generate a ticket to RSD, and they will have you get on a Zoom call with them to verify who you are. You also have to have somebody else from your organization to get on that Zoom call and vouch for you who you are, that you should be having access to those resources.

It really tightened up the security on that, and basically we don’t use email for verification of anything anymore.

Just more points on the POC linking issue. Strong adoption and improved visibility into demand.

These are the total tickets submitted and resolved since the launch. I think like the ones that weren’t resolved meant that somebody put in the request to do it but then they never were available for a Zoom call to actually have RSD verify them and link them to it.

You would be surprised how many people try to do things, and when you say, well, you need to get on a Zoom with us and show us your government-issued picture ID, they just go away. They go, oh, never mind, I don’t need to link to that POC anyway. So those are mostly the unresolved.

Then the resolution times on those, usually less than a day. And 82 percent less than a day. 92 percent within three days.

Ask ARIN enhancements: Joe Westover from our customer – you’re going to hear from him after me, I believe. He works very closely with Lisa on all these process improvements for our customers.

One of the things we realized, like we showed over 5,000 Ask ARIN tickets, and it was very difficult when they came in, we do a triage, who gets this ticket, who gets that ticket.

When an Ask ARIN ticket would come in, it would be very difficult to figure out who does this go to? They’ve improved the topic selections so that if it’s account contact management, we know who that goes to. If it’s a finance question, we know who that goes to. If it’s a POC question, we know who that goes to. So they’ve done a lot of work on that to streamline and make the service even faster and more valuable for our customers.

They added the ability for users to add an Org ID to their Ask ARIN ticket. So one of the things we used to have – a problem we would have would Ask ARIN tickets is that they come from users. And there’s no Org ID associated and there was no way to have an Org ID associated with it.

So when you’re looking at the ticket, you’re like, they’re asking a question about their Org ID. You’re like, you don’t know what that is, so you have to go back and ask them.

Well, now they can actually add Org ID when they send in the ticket in the first place. And also another benefit to that, that ticket then shows up when you’re doing ticket history under the Org ID and not just under the user.

These are the metrics from 5-2025 till 19 March 2026. That’s the breakdown of the different topics of the Ask ARIN tickets.

So the initiatives driving the improved customer experience. Continued coordination with Registry Integrity Oversight team, which I think you’ll hear from Reese today who runs that team now. It’s a team we put together to, really blunt, to fight fraud. They do an excellent job of doing that, and I’ll leave the rest to Reese to talk about.

RSD audit, the scope of the audit. The auditor was Baker Tilly. They’ve been doing it – I think this was their fifth or sixth time doing the audit. They’re very familiar. They go through them. They select I believe it’s a little bit over 200 tickets of different types. They bounce that against the policy and whether RSD or ARIN has actually followed policy.

And the ticket types, of course, are the IPv4, IPv6, AS numbers. They get a bigger amount of transfer tickets because that’s our biggest workload, and it’s also the place where the most variation of following policy could happen.

They really hone in. We kind of ask them, yeah, do more on the transfer tickets, make sure that we’re following policy there.

Key findings: It was confirmed full compliance of RSD personnel processes and technology with the Number Resource Policy Manual. Meaning that if somebody asks for IPv4 to get on the waitlist, they went through that ticket and they looked at it and they were watching the policy and said, okay, yep, everything that was required to be met to go on to the waitlist was met.

Validated consistent execution of internal procedures, demonstrated mission commitment and strengthened the fraud prevention controls that we have implemented.

Recommendations was refresher trainings for staff. Procedure updates, which we’re constantly doing updating the procedures.

We have a team dedicated under Joe. Marty McLaughlin, who does – they look at the procedures. I go to them all the time, hey, how can we fix this? How can we make this better? How can we make this faster? And they work on it.

And then system efficiency. That’s another area where Joe’s team tracks all the things that we see that there’s , oh, we could be more efficient if we did it this way and that.

And they tracked that. Write-up stories, requirements, they hand the requirements over to engineering to get done.

Customer experience highlights. What our customers are saying. Lisa wanted to share some of the quotes. I won’t go through them here because I’m at zero and I need to get off the stage. Anyway, you can look at those quotes. 99.9 percent of our comments on our end-of-ticket survey are very positive towards the team.

We do get a few disgruntled where a transfer, maybe a merger and acquisition ticket that happened, the merger happened back in 1988 and it took a little bit of time to verify all that. We might get a disgruntled comment saying your processes take way too long.

But those are the ones that we have to take that time because there’s usually not a lot of documentation readily available.

So feedback that’s helping us improve, what we heard, general sentiment is very positive. But we still have room for improvement. Responses took too long. Like I said, usually there’s a reason for that. Sometimes it just gets – there’s a mix-up and a ticket takes a day longer than it should have. Somebody gets sick and has to take the day off and the ticket doesn’t get picked up. Lisa’s very good for watching out for that, though, so it doesn’t happen very often.

And so that’s where I say, she does this continual review of messaging and then cross-training of the staff on all types of tickets.

That’s it. Like I said, Lisa would have been a much better presenter for this stuff, but I try.

Any questions or comments?

Hollis Kara: Thank you, John. Anybody have any questions or comments, online or in the room?

John Sweeting: I can’t say enough of how great I feel about our RSD, Registration Services Department. They work very, very hard for you guys to make sure that you get what you need. Their motto is hey, if what you want to do isn’t possible with policy, we’ll help you figure out a policy that possibly you can use to get what you need done.

Chris Woodfield: Chris Woodfield, woodfield.tech and ARIN AC. First off, thank you for all of this, and by all accounts you’re doing all a great job serving the members here.

The question I had was based on, there was a fairly well-publicized incident in December where a block was misallocated from one organization to another.

I congratulate ARIN and thank ARIN for being very public about the incident and publishing a full postmortem. And that’s great. Mistakes happen. It’s what you do with a mistake that really matters.

The question I had was that that postmortem had near-term mitigations and a number of medium-term resolution steps. Can you report at all on the progress on those medium-term items?

John Sweeting: What we can report, I’ll let JC report because I saw him turning on his mic.

John Curran: John Curran, President and CEO, ARIN. As it turns out, that incident and sort of review that happened has been a high-level focus item for the ARIN Board of Trustees.

In December, when it happened, I was involved in the review, and we had an analyst who made a mistake. But that wasn’t the issue. We have multiple systems that directly work with the database. And a loss that results in a situation where we don’t have common business rules in a single place to mitigate access.

So that was actually the issue that was a little more significant because the types of controls you would have expected even in a manual process, a more service-oriented business rule sort of approach might have solved the problem.

When I saw that, I realized I needed to explain to the Board of Trustees the state of the systems. They’re very solid. They do the job. But they’re not where we need to be at this time and age.

So the Board asked me to have an external auditor come in and do a specific audit about where we stand on some very strong requirements for auditing, logging, treating the number resources more as you would like financial accounts as opposed to just a table of values.

And against those requirements, we did not do well because those requirements we haven’t aimed for.

We’re in the middle of building a very serious effort to re-engineer the registry control plane at the bottom that will treat them with the level of financial resources and auditing and controls and central business repository on top of that.

I’ve been doing this actually with our General Counsel, of all people, Michael Abejuela. I was on sabbatical for six weeks. We were testing our CEO continuity procedures. Another thing that the Board is very serious about is our business continuity.

We wanted to see whether the organization would run without me. And I’m happy to report it runs just fine without me, which I guess is scary to think about.

So Michael and the team put together a proposal and the Board heard about it this past weekend, and we’re moving ahead. I expect when we get to August we’ll actually commit on a major plan, and at some point we’ll talk to the community about it.

But that single customer incident has set sail a thousand ships, and we’re doing quite a bit of work to reengineer how we do our systems as a result.

I guess, Nancy, do you want to add anything as Chair?

Nancy Carter: No, thank you.

John Curran: Okay. So we will give you a plan, but I need to formalize it and get it Board approved. But the work on that is ongoing right now by the whole team.

Chris Woodfield: Thank you. Good to hear.

John Sweeting: Awesome. Nothing online?

Hollis Kara: Nothing online. I think you’re free to go.

John Sweeting: Thank you to everyone that has attended in person, and a special shout out to all you virtual attendees. (Applause.)

Hollis Kara: Calm Joe. I know we postponed him and postponed him yesterday and now he’s running for the stage. All right, are you ready now? Okay he’s ready now.

Joe Westover, our Senior Director of Customer Experience and Strategy, is going to come up and talk about what his team’s been doing.

Customer Experience and Strategy Department Report

Joe Westover: Thanks, Hollis. I was actually afraid I was having to go after the TIPTOP exercise yesterday, with a data accuracy deck, excuse me, and I wasn’t necessarily looking forward to that. So I was trying to make some changes to it. Data accuracy and outer space is what I was thinking. But we didn’t get to that.

I thought I would add a little bit to what John was saying before I get started here. Let me get to the list here.

We spent the last number of years really building a tightly integrated team in the CXO office, which originally was the CCO. We didn’t have a process. We brought it in about one or two years ago. It was mostly just a “me” thing at that point.

We integrate tightly with Comms. We integrate tightly with engineering at this point. And
we’ve really done a lot of revamping and revitalization of how we identify and process areas for improvement working with FSD across the Board.

On that note, I just want to say I’m proud of that. We made a lot of transformative changes. So a lot of stuff our team does. There’s a lot. It’s hard to kind of get into one area.

We have technical services, and that’s where Brad Gorman is. We kind of looked at the RPKI IRR services as one example, resolving security, routing security issues and Internet resource requests and to define and prioritize routing security initiatives. There’s a lot of work that goes in that.

What my team does, we do support Brad in helping that prioritization, formalization of how prioritization is organized, documented and actually in-state delivered to engineering.

Registry integrity, that’s Reese Radcliffe. You will hear from him in a little bit. Fraud identification and mitigation. This is probably the biggest elephant in the room today. It’s challenging and something you don’t really want to dig into because there’s a lot there. But they’re doing a tremendous job of doing what they can with the resources we have.

And as John outlined earlier, this is something that’s a huge focus within ARIN. They’re looking at patterns and initiatives, and our process team is helping them with that on a daily basis. So there’s a lot of integration.

Process excellence, I’m going to use those terms purposely, is really focusing on advancing through, you know, continual service improvement, how we analyze existing processes, to really up the bar.

And we’re never satisfied. That’s part of the takeaway from this. We’re looking for improved service delivery. We’re prioritizing requirements. We have dedicated people who do nothing but vet these processes, procedures, looking for value add, nonvalue add, determine if there’s automation opportunities determination if there’s changes in procedure and actually documenting the resulting value improvements.

For instance, on that, you’re looking at areas like we’re doing XYZ and it’s happening 4,000 times a year and it’s only a minute each, that adds up. So when we start to quantify all that, it starts to help you actually realize real substantial improvements and the reason for doing those improvements and the feedback mechanism to say this is why we’re doing it, to actually quantify something outside of just an opinion.

We have the Qualified Facilitator Program. We met with them yesterday. Premier Support Plan is another thing that we manage as a program. And of course Policy Support with Eddie Diego, and that’s been all through this part here. That’s the administrative support.

Community engagement. That’s Amanda Gauldin. You’ll hear about that after this. She helps me a lot with the CXO program management. As a part of that, I want to stick that in that because that is critical. We managed so many moving parts, and a lot of it is incredibly proactive versus reactive. It’s not, here’s your task items, you do those and you stop. We’re constantly looking for other areas of improvement. I think it’s probably at least a once-weekly conversation with John.

Within Amanda’s purview, we have the Fellowship, the Community Grant Program. And industry events, if you look at that amount of time and the scope, but the reach that’s happening with all of these different outreach events, it’s mammoth. But internally within the team, we need to know just how important these are.

Go to where the customers are, get the feedback, helping them real time, those little wins. But we’re also getting such a tremendous amount of information back that it’s just insurmountable.

So the team itself. We had a little bit of a re-org at the beginning of the year. So I have Brad Gorman. He’s the CTS. You’ve heard a lot from him.

I don’t need to explain what he does. Amanda Gauldin. Senior Project Manager, she handles a lot of the programs, the outreach. Really kind of a right hand in terms of program management for me personally.

Reese Radcliffe recently elevated the senior manager registry integrity and oversight. He provided a couple of people per John’s comments, Henry Romero Cruz and Jon Worley to help him with that. So that’s just a daily deluge of vetting that these people are doing. And I’ll talk a little bit of that and touch on it and then he will touch on it a little bit also.

Marty McLaughlin, I worked with him in the past, previous to my ARIN stint, as process management roles, TWC and a few other places. He is that, he’s kind of a methodical process person.

So underneath him, we’ve got Prabha Bhattarai. She’s a customer success analyst, fields a lot of, like, just general customer third-party inquiries. She helps FSD reaching out to customers before their services may or may not be stopped.

These are little proactive things that weren’t necessarily done in the past when we were relying more or less on coming to us. And if they didn’t pay, we wouldn’t kind of be proactive.

Reginald Alcancia. He’s helping Marty and then Eddie Diego, who we all know.

I’m looking at the clock. All right. Next we have Customer Technical Services. So this is led by Brad Gorman. Really the focus there is the strategic vision. He divides – defines and guides the long-term growth and development of routing security with a number of other people. He’s tightly integrated with engineering, doing the same.

Operational support. We have folks, Nathan Newman, provide some of that first-level escalation from RSD, who then Brad is also an escalation point.

Customer empowerment, really supporting the customer understanding and adoption of RPKI. And you heard a lot about that while we were here in terms of the adoption metrics and what are the good adoption metrics, what are things we can do to improve to really measure that.

Then we get to Routing Integrity and Oversight. This is again led by Reese. You’ll hear from him in a little bit. Really focused on fraud mitigation, identification, mitigation, identifying, analyzing. It’s a Swiss cheese of efforts on his behalf to try to discover these things.

Some are presented proactively. Some things they stumble across. They assist with law enforcement research efforts. All the above. So again, the proactive, but there’s also case activity support.

Initiatives for preventing fraud. He’s in charge of leading that. He’ll work with Marty and other people on our process team to discover areas where we can do this better, discover areas where we can make them more efficient from reporting, from automation, but a lot of it is really a slow grind of research, which is something that is challenging but also never-ending. He probably has the best job security in ARIN of anybody.

Then inter-RIR collaboration. He works with other regionals to kind of share some of the best practices lessons learned, you know, without too much there. So that’s his job right now.

Process excellence. Again, this team is led by Marty McLaughlin. Process delivery is really our key, where that team is really dedicated to CSI, Continual Service Improvement. We’re never satisfied.

Looking at business objectives, we really try to take a lot of focus on looking at what the top-level business objectives are and laying all this stuff so it’s aligned at the end of the day. And that’s the prioritization of requirements, which is so important. I think that’s the main thing that team has brought. Because if I could show you a laundry list of things that have been identified over time that this team has actually identified over the last one to two years, it is beyond the pale of getting things done.

So you’ve got to stack. You’ve got to prioritize those things. And we do that through value add exercise. We do that through the feedback from the community, from outreach, and internally.

So we really, I think, have done a really good job working with engineering prioritizing the right things. And you heard a little bit about those earlier today, with Ask ARIN improvements, POC linking, with reactive, but we helped with that, too. Again, that’s a whole service and program part prioritization.

So what are our focus areas? So really modernization is the key. When we have meetings, we’re trying to focus. It’s like modernize, modernize, modernize. Always look forward. Right? Never be satisfied.

So some of our primary objectives, really with the ARIN database, is enhancing data accuracy. I wasn’t able to give that deck yesterday, but that’s a pretty loaded question. But there’s a lot to that, from POC validation, to people having accurate just information and databases and Org, and that’s where the RIOT team – you’ll hear from them in a little bit – have a lot of input into that as well. That’s the data integrity. That’s where we can strengthen controls.

ARIN Online. We’re looking to improve operational efficiency, and you’ve seen some of the results of those things in the RSD deck especially. Elevate the customer experience. That’s a little subjective. But we do our best to do that also.

Again, these are our guiding north stars. And optimizing staff workflows. That’s the stuff that might not touch the outside world, but it does. Indirect versus direct. That’s a focus we have.

I think in the past, a lot of folks might have thought that, well, if the customer isn’t directly seeing it, we shouldn’t be focused on it.

Personally, mantra, indirect is great. It will affect them. If we’re more efficient internally, that does translate to a better customer experience, even if they’re not directly feeling it.

So, again, this kind of goes back to some of these updates. Hollis’ team mentioned the updated message center. That’s huge for delivering messages targeted-wise to people. Ask ARIN improvements.

Just a few additional comments on that one. We revamped the categories. We added subcategories, which are only viewable and choosable by ARIN staff. This has given us visibility that we didn’t have before.

So on the quick graph chart that John showed, the largest proportion were account management. That topic, as they call them, didn’t exist before. And then within that there’s further breakdowns. Essentially, we’re able to get a glimpse of what the customer is feeling, what they’re asking for that we simply didn’t have before, which is that’s information.

And with that, we can also determine what kind of requirements and prioritization we might need to do for future enhancements.

So that’s really just coming to bear. So it’s been roughly about a year since we’ve done that. So we’re starting to look at some of the data after the year so we can dig into it, do a little more analysis.

The POC linking improvements. Again, John talked about that. That’s something that’s been really successful. I was a little hesitant of how that might kind of come across. But they’re being closed. Period. People are responding to them. There’s been nothing but good feedback in terms of closing that security hole.

And then, of course, any additional improvements, we’re the filter for bugs. If there’s a bug, it comes to my team to discover it to talk to RSD directors who they need to do that for.

Determine what the level of severity and prioritize accordingly so that with the limited resources that engineering and other people have, we have to make due with less, to make sure we’re focused on the right things with the most bang for the buck.

So again, program spotlights. Everybody knows we have the Premier Support Plan. That’s been in place for quite a few years. I think that’s very successful.

We have the 2XL and above get that by default, and then we have a number of paid subscribers as well. That hasn’t changed a lot, with the exception of maximizing the free transfer part because we found that there was a little bit of abuse on that. So we kind locked that down, but that’s been extremely successful with a dedicated account manager on the team who is there and ready.

We have prioritized ticketing if it’s a PSP plan too. And we’re always looking for ways to maybe to perhaps expand some of the value of that, add some additional things.

So I would say, anybody’s involved with it, knows about it, has questions about it, you know, come find us, send an email. If there’s things that you’d like to see above and beyond what’s there, we’d love to hear about it. Because, again, it’s a value proposition. We don’t want to determine what you would value versus what we might think.

The Qualified Facilitator Program. Again, that replaced the STLS that was in there for so long. That’s been fairly successful. We had a meeting earlier. We get a lot of great feedback with that. Then we tightly integrate the feedback with RSD, who are actually interacting with the transfer tickets on the source and recipients. I think that’s really tightened things up.

We got together on a checklist for customers that we provided to the qualified facilitators to give the customer so when it comes back in, it’s clean. Most of the work is done. That avoids a lot of back and forth.

So again encourage anybody who’s interested in that looking for someone to look at that list, but also if you’re interested in participating in it, you can go to our website and there’s a lot of information about what it would take to entail to sign up for that.

Public Policy support. Again, Eddie, the theme here is, like, there’s a lot of us that work across the Board behind the scenes to facilitate that, maintaining and updating policy content on the website. Eddie’s constantly working with Comms on that. So it’s a really group effort, a little bit behind the scenes.

You see it on the forefront in things like this, but there’s a lot of stuff that goes on around, and not just those couple times a year as we do this, it’s really happening continually.

You know, we’re coordinating Staff and Legal Reviews. And again, that’s a process that my team has worked with Eddie to make that as seamless and beneficial as possible within ARIN.

Election support. We’ll talk about elections a little later. This is something else we’re already spinning up planning on all this stuff even though it’s not until the fall. So we spent a lot of this – again, this is a year-round thing. It’s not something that just crops up a month or two before some of these events.

So just want to ensure that there is a lot of this back and forth going on across our team. Community engagement. Again, this is Amanda Gauldin, who you will hear from after this.

Programs management. We do a lot of that strategic direction and customer facing programs. We’re always like, what can we do better? What kind of feedback are we getting?

Fellowship Program. I don’t need to say anything about that. We all heard that feedback earlier.

Community Grant Program directs the Community Grant Program applications and review.

Then the big one, ARIN’s presence and engagement in regional activities. And we’re constantly fielding inquiries for doing more, not less. She’s doing a lot of back and forth, facilitating with myself and with John and others. What can we do? Who do we send? What are the right resources? What are the topics? Submitting abstracts. There’s a lot of moving parts with that. And they do a great job.

Again, we’re just emphasizing for all that stuff, the service and value to the Internet community. I think that drives our decision to go to places, not go to places, what we’re presenting, what we’re not presenting. That’s a constantly moving target. So we do our best to keep up with that.

On that, though, applications are now open for the Grant Program. Key note, up until the 14th of June. And applications for the ARIN 58 Fellowship will open up in July. A few months out. But again, I think, people are paying attention. You might want to get on top of that.

So what are we looking at for what are our key priorities? We’re continuing to focus on internal work flows, ACSP improvements, to bring in that customer request element into that and really continuing to push the bar, make sure we’re delivering top-tier programs for PSP, QFP, grants, fellowships, because they’re so outward facing among others.

Strengthening outreach, real-time feedback loops. That’s something we focus on continually. And again leveraging that CSI term for continual service improvement, never being satisfied, always looking for iterations and really kind of bringing in that methodology and ideology within ARIN across the Board to just try to promote that.

Outside of that, we obviously have the compliance and data accuracy, and that’s RIO and there’s whole other things going on that we do our best to maintain. And that is it.

Hollis Kara: Thank you, Joe. Any comments or questions for Joe either online or in the room? Please feel free to approach the mic. I’ll give it just a moment.

All right. I’m not seeing any sign that anything’s coming in. Nobody’s rushing to the microphone. So I think you’re good to go. (Applause.)

Hollis Kara: All right. We have time for one more presentation before we go to break. I would like to welcome up Amanda Gauldin, ARIN’s Senior Project Manager, to talk about what we’ve been doing in Outreach and Fellowship.

Outreach and Fellowship

Amanda Gauldin: Hello, everyone. Happy Wednesday. And I’m here to speak with you about outreach and fellowship. We got a little sneak peek with Joe, but I’ll try to dig a little bit deeper.

So there’s a lot of elements of ARIN outreach that you’ll see here, and I’ll go through – and hopefully you’ve seen us at one or more of these examples over the past couple of years.

We attend and often provide organizational updates at other Regional Internet Registry meetings. We speak at virtual conferences or conduct webinars with organizations upon request. We operate an ARIN booth at industry conferences like CES and CANTO and often set up a customer service desk to answer attendee questions and provide solutions.

We go to conferences like CanWISP, Internet2 Community and Technology Exchanges, NANOGs, and WISPApalooza, and that’s just to name a few. We gave presentations or speak on panels at those industry conferences, like the ones I just mentioned. Or sometimes we sponsor such industry events or host our own, like ARIN on the Road or the ARIN RPKI Deep Dives that you’ve heard about.

And lastly, sometimes, believe it or not, we just attend and go to the conference without one of these other elements involved.

Here are the smiling faces of Brad and Jon, who are likely one of the faces you’ll see on the road speaking and providing that customer service support. And some of the speaking topics will include IPv6, RPKI or network autonomy or simply just an update on what’s going on in the organization.

These smiling faces are from the ARIN Fellowship Program at ARIN 56 in Arlington, Texas. So now that we’re day three here of this ARIN meeting, hopefully you’ve met most or some of our ARIN Fellows who are here in person and a wave to those online attending virtually.

And I’m happy to talk more about this program. It’s 17 years old now and has had nearly 300 participants over those past years with a lot of program evolvement recently.

Now selected Fellows participate in six educational sessions virtually leading up to and following the ARIN meeting. They’re also paired with a member of the ARIN Advisory Council for mentorship throughout the program.

One of my favorite things to see is where and what Fellows do after they participate in the program. So this graphic gives an example of some of those ways some of them have applied for our grant project funding to help, or some of them have helped coordinate outreach events with us, like an ARIN on the Road.

A number of have gone on to run and, in a few cases, have been elected to positions like ARIN AC, Board of Trustees or NRO NC. A number of them share about their experiences on the ARIN blog, or they volunteered on a committee, or, as we see, they continue to just be involved, attend the meetings virtually or in person and speak up at the mic or type in chat their thoughts on policy discussions.

So these are our ARIN 57 Fellows. They have been selected either in person or virtually. So congratulations to them. They’ve been a great group here. It’s been a lot of fun.

The application process has gotten more and more competitive each year. So a special shout out to these individuals. They’ve invested a lot of time into learning more about ARIN policy and more over the past few weeks.

I’d also like to recognize our ARIN AC mentors this go-round who have spent all that time with us. Doug, Gerry, Matthew and Kaitlyn. They’ve taken small groups of these Fellows, three or four of them, and taken the time to answer their additional questions and provide that mentorship component throughout the program.

We also had a number of guest presenters throughout the program to enhance the content that we share. Alison, Brad, Eddie, Kevin and Kat, and they’ve been really supportive and have shared additional insights into policy, routing security and global Internet policy.

So a little bit about the schedule of our program. We have a few prerecorded sessions they start with, and then a session specifically on the ARIN Policy Development Process. Then we look closer at some of the policies on the docket for this meeting, learn about how Internet policy works on a global scale. Then there’s breakout rooms for that small group discussion.

New this year was an additional workshop time for more time on policy or routing security. The Fellows joined the meeting orientation, have been here at ARIN 57, and then we have one more session next week to wrap everything up, take some time to digest it all and talk about where they go from here.

As Joe mentioned, the application site will open in July. So if this program sounds interesting – and I hope it does – we’d love to see your application for the next program, ARIN 58.

The site will open in July, but in the meantime you can visit the ARIN website and Fellowship Program page to get a sneak peek into the application, questions we will ask.

The ARIN 58 program includes participation at the NANOG conference that takes place in the days leading up to the ARIN 58 meeting. In-person Fellows receive conference registration for that and then hotel and airfare covered and then a small travel stipend as well.

That meeting is late October in Miami. If you want to learn more about ARIN, the policies the community’s discussing, network and grow your industry contacts and gain confidence to be more involved, then certainly take a look at the program timeline – we’ll post soon – and consider putting in an application. And thank you.

If you all have any questions, I’d be happy to answer them.

Hollis Kara: All right. Microphones are open. Please approach if you have questions or comments for Amanda.

Kat Hunter: Kat Hunter, Advisory Council chair and community member, Comcast. I don’t know if everybody remembers because you’ve been around for long enough, Amanda, that participation is not an issue like it used to be.

I remember doing my election speeches a while ago saying I wanted to see more from the community, wanted to see more people coming to ARIN meetings. That is not a problem anymore.

Not only are the Fellows participating, they’re repeatedly participating. I’ve had vice chairs that were Fellows. I’ve had people on the Advisory Council. What you’re doing is amazing for this organization. Please keep doing what you’re doing.

Amanda Gauldin: Thank you.

Kevin Blumberg: Kevin Blumberg, The Wire. I’ll echo what Kat said. The improvement to this program, especially for those of us that are doing the mentorship over the years and things like that, is night and day. And I really appreciate that.

It goes also to the people in this room being able to do that.

ARIN 58. Set aside a room. Get your educational videos in. Happy to do it. But that’s it. So you know, there’s others. Great. But if you do want some educational videos so that you’re not tying up people’s time during the day, the mentors during the day, things like that, I think we’d all be happy to do that. If that’s something that would benefit your program, just put us in a room with some nice lights and a camera. We’re happy to do that.

And lastly, I know there’s some truth in advertising. I’ve got to change my photo. That was – I think that was the pre-pre-pre-Kevin.

(Laughter)

Amanda Gauldin: Thanks, Kevin. You’ve shared some great ideas. So happy to chat more.

Altie Jackson: Altie Jackson, ARIN Fellow. This is my second time doing the Fellowship Program. And everyone in the room, I would like you to put your hands together for Amanda because she’s been doing a great job on this. (Applause.)

I’ve interacted with her twice, for the past two years now. She’s been doing a good job. She keeps us informed. She keeps us in check. Amanda, thank you.

John Stitt: John Stitt, Hopkinsville Electric System, Energynet, ARIN 56 Fellow. Also echoing everyone else. Thank you, Amanda. Thank you to all the mentors that help and everyone else that does things with this program.

Most of the people in this room probably aren’t the audience that most needs to hear about how beneficial this program can be to you, but if you haven’t done it, even if you’ve been to a meeting or two, it’s well worth doing for just how in depth you get on the policy process.

And everybody that I’ve talked to that didn’t know about the program is now wanting to do this after hearing about it. So I hope you’re able to continue it for many more years.

Amanda Gauldin: Thanks, John.

Rodney Payne: Good morning, Rodney Payne, ARIN Fellow. I’ve a cardinal rule not to repeat anything in an exchange, knowledge exchange, not to repeat anything that was said before. But I must say thank you to the Fellowship Program.

I came in knowing just about what the ARIN acronym meant. I’m leaving with a better understanding of what the Internet is and how that address space can be leveraged for development in the Caribbean. Thank you.

Amanda Gauldin: Thanks, Rodney.

James Lord: James Lord, ARIN Fellow. I just wanted to say how thankful I am for this opportunity and how great this experience has been. I’ve learned a lot. And I hope to apply to ARIN 58, maybe.

Amanda Gauldin: Sounds good. We’ll be in touch.

Altie Jackson: I’m so sorry, I missed out my mentor Gerry, and last time I had Doug. And to the entire team, it’s been good being here. It’s been good working with you. Thank you all.

John Sweeting: John Sweeting, Chief Experience Officer for ARIN. I just want to point out to everyone in the room that isn’t aware of it and all our virtual and everybody in the ARIN region, that imitation is the highest form of flattery. And all the other RIRs are now trying to keep up with Amanda’s Fellowship Program. They’ve expanded it. They’ve added all the things that she’s added. (Applause.)

My challenge to Amanda is don’t let them catch up.

(Laughter.)

Amanda Gauldin: Sounds good. You all are so kind. Like thank you so much. It’s so great to see all the returning Fellows and the current ones and speaking at the mic. It means a lot. And there’s so many people involved in this. You’ve heard about all it these couple of days, but the whole ARIN staff just is supporting me, supporting the Fellows. So it really is a team effort.

Everyone’s, like, saying thank you, Amanda but there’s so many, so many people at ARIN and the community with the AC and even the Board as well, NRO NC, who are all being a part of this and encouraging new voices to participate and be involved.

It really is a group effort. So thank you for the compliments, but thank you back to everyone in this room as well for being such a great part of this program. Thank you.

Hollis Kara: Thank you, Amanda. (Applause.)

Hollis Kara: Before we go to break, I’d like to add on to that by calling out some folks by name. Particularly John Davis, who provides a ton of support to the program. Beverly Hicks and Alicia DiCiaccio with assistance with production and also Christina with all her help with promotion. It’s very much a team effort.

We’re very happy to have Amanda out there as the spokeswoman for the program.

So with that, we’re going to take a 20-minute break so that our captionists can flex their fingers, and then we will return with the remainder of the agenda. Thank you, everybody.

See you back at 10:40.

(Break)

Hollis Kara: Hello, hello. If folks can come back in the room, we’re going to wrap this party up.

Folks, we are back. We have three more presentations and an Open Microphone. So let’s get this done.

First up, I’d like to welcome up Reese Radcliffe, ARIN’s Manager for Registry Integrity and Oversight, to talk about what’s happening there.

Registry Integrity and Oversight Report

Reese Radcliffe: I’m Reese Radcliffe. I manage the Registry Integrity and Oversight team. And as John said, in short, we manage fraud and a lot of compliance stuff. Manage fraud prevention. Big green button, right?

Hollis Kara: Big green button.

Reese Radcliffe: I will be talking about these things today. Moving right along. So managing the fraud and compliance is key because we’re part of, I guess, the data accuracy program as well, we work tight with them, we work close with CTS. We work close with RSD, of course. And it’s important for the data in our database to be accurate.

Fraud opens the door to – and it’s really more of a compliance than fraud part. That’s the easy one. The hijacking of the domains, and you know, those are big things, those are all hands on deck. It’s not just my team. It’s a cooperative, collective effort to work on those. But the compliance is a little harder. And as we dig into it, we see there’s a lot more than we thought there was.

From a compliance perspective, we’ll get into the nitty-gritty of those, sort of. So we’re trying to take steps to prevent that, to minimize that, to identify it and take steps when we can.

So what do we do? We’re going to put this into integrity and compliance. Integrity of the data, again, probably closer to a data accuracy thing, but again, two separate projects, but sort of working on the same thing.

So we get requests that come into our team, and we evaluate those to ensure that they’re valid requests. We’re seeing AI is presenting an issue. Sometimes we’ll ask people in the Zoom calls – because every customer that we deal with, we meet with on a Zoom call, every single one of them, because we need to verify the identity that they exist as a real person. Sometimes they need to take their glasses off so we can make sure that it’s really a person on the other end. So we do that. In the event we run into problems, then we take action trying to fix that.

From a compliance perspective, we see – as John had mentioned on the 4.10 front – those additional requests for additional 4.10 space, we field all of those. And very few of them get through these days because very few times is there a genuine, legitimate reason for additional space. It does happen. Just doesn’t happen a whole lot.

Reports on policy violations. I’ve got another slide on that. But we do that as well. And I would say that last year when I spoke on this – because the team’s only been around for about a year. And last year, we didn’t really have a whole lot to say because we were just getting started.

This year, we actually have some stats that we can share with you of things that have been done and progress that was made. So these are the landscapes we’re working on from identity theft and fraud, which were covered earlier in the session.

This is people that really don’t exist that are trying to create accounts and things. Have a separate slide for that. But this would be the genuine fraud and the hijacking that occurs.

We have the unauthorized reallocations or reassignments of the number resources to people or organizations that shouldn’t be. Again, this is largely kind of a 4.10 thing. We talked about some of the issues with 4.10 yesterday as well.

But you know, 4.10 NRPM, Section 4.10 is for the transition to IPv6. It’s kind of an issue if you’re not announcing your IPv6 but you are announcing your 4.10. Tough to make an argument that you’re transitioning to IPv6 in those circumstances.

Then we have routing hijacks and misinformation. I think there’s an interesting stat on there, the first stat, we have two stats in the 30 percent range. When we have customers that come in and the customers are out of region, that’s fine. Plenty of users that are out of the ARIN service region. But they’re working for or with an Org ID within the ARIN service region.

But when they’re coming in, they’re brand new, and this is greenfield, and they want to expand into the ARIN region, one of the things that we will make a point to point out is, hey, look, we recognize, we see that you’re out of the ARIN region. Just FYI, there is a Section 9 within the Number Resource Policy Manual that dictates there’s a certain minimum you have to use the ARIN resources in region before you can begin using them out of region. And they all acknowledge that in the call.

Unfortunately, within two months, 30 percent of those users, historically in 2025, are already announcing it out of the ARIN region. So just a stat.

In terms of our activities, Org Creates are a large part of what we do. Every single Org Create that comes into my team, let’s talk about that. So the process is an Org Create will be submitted. RSD will review that Org Create, sometimes, right out of the gate, they’ll go, “this one should go over to RIO.” Then sometimes, in the course of them working that ticket, they’ll come across something and go, you know what, we need to escalate this one and bump it over to the RIO team.

So when we get those Org Creates, we have a bit more of a vetting and a deeper process to look for other information and other things, and then we try to schedule a Zoom call with the customer, which also helps with the Know Your Customer part of this, right? We get to meet with them and learn a little bit about their business and what they’re doing, how they plan on using the resources.

So we get approximately, I guess, 15 percent of the tickets coming into RSD. But they take a lot more time to work. However, we have another around 30 percent stat up here, which is, when we start marching down this path, about 30 percent of the people we’re working with just go away and abandon us and don’t want to join the Zoom call or just ghost us, stop communicating in the ticket.

So, I don’t know, I’m viewing that as a win. We’re stopping somebody that otherwise we probably would have approved in the past.

And back to that expanding into the ARIN region, about 42 percent of our tickets in 2025 were people not in the ARIN region who wanted to expand into the ARIN region.

So 4.10 is unquestionably the largest number of abuse compliance issues that we run into on a daily basis. We’ve got it down into four buckets here, but they’re not mutually exclusive. 4.10 is, again, it’s a reminder, supposed to be for transition to IPv6.

So it’s not to be announced outside of the ARIN region. It was never intended to be, and I think there was even a policy report discussed for that yesterday, just to codify that.

It’s not supposed to be reallocated or reassigned to a customer. It can’t be if you’re using it for IPv6 transition.

There are – were – well, probably still are – there was a lot of 4.10 blocks, were a lot, that were being reassigned or reallocated to leasing organizations. Again, you’re not using it for IPv6 transition if you’re leasing it out to somebody.

Fortunately, a little shout out to our Silver Sponsor, we work with IPXO. They won’t allow anything within this reserve space for 4.10 to be leased. But they’re not the only one out there. So it’s still being done. And as I mentioned earlier, there are people who are announcing their 4.10 block and don’t have any IPv6 to go with it.

Then we have the noncompliance reports. This would be the actual official fraud reporting process. You go to our website. There’s a button you can click for I want to submit a fraud report. Believe it or not, these numbers, because we’ve got 233 of these last year, 28 of those were legit and 195, the others, were not, were out of scope.

That’s actually an improvement. Out of scope is “my boyfriend hacked into my phone and I can’t whatever.” We get a lot of those. A lot of complaints about domains, which we have nothing to do with.

But we did get 28 legit. I think last year it was like four. So this is good because last year I asked you all to help us and when you find something, say something, submit a fraud ticket. If you see things in your community that’s not right, let us know and we can act on it. We actually had 28 of those that were good last year, which is a good thing.

From a deterrence perspective, this is the big picture stuff. What we really want, as John corrected in the very beginning, fraud prevention, that’s what we want. We need to prevent it. But there’s only so much we can do.

So how do we do that? We start by identifying the ones that are out there. Once identified, we investigate what’s going on. We identify whether or not it is or isn’t within policy. Obviously, we wouldn’t be investigating it if it wasn’t. And then take action. Sometimes involving law enforcement as well.

Section 12 of the NRPM gives us the ability to do a review of a customer’s resources. This is one of the most powerful tools, I think, in our tool chest for figuring this stuff out. We can schedule calls with the customer, and we really just want to review what’s being done, but you don’t get called down to the principal’s office because you didn’t do anything wrong, usually.

So we will schedule a call because we have seen something, something came up on a report or an exception or something was submitted online by a customer somewhere about another customer. There are a lot of narcs out there. Then we will get on a video call with the customer and we can explain.

Sometimes it’s a compliance issue, but they didn’t even know they were breaking the rules. They weren’t familiar with the Section 9. There are, believe it or not, some parts of the NRPM which are a little complicated and customers don’t really understand it. So a lot of times that’s easy. We just have a call and they get a window to fix things and then it’s all good.

Other times, doesn’t end so well. So that would be that process. And as I said before, really need your help. You all did great last year. I think you can do better this year. You see something, say something. Let us know and we’ll do our best to take care of it.

Keeping your information up to date is something we struggle with every day. It’s not a good thing if we’re trying to reach out to say, hey, we need to talk to you, and the Point of Contact information goes nowhere and the Org ID information goes nowhere and the phone numbers give you, (whistling). Goes nowhere. It’s difficult for us here. You’re ghosting us.

We need to be able to communicate with you if there’s an issue. It could be a billing issue, could be a promo code, you know, whatever. Keeping that information up to date is very, very important.

Of course, engaging through consultations and community discussions, but you all are already here so you’re already doing that. You can reach us the same way you reach RSD. We are here to help you, and that’s it.

Are there any questions?

Hollis Kara: Mics are open for questions. So please come on down or start typing if you would like to ask Reese about our fraud prevention efforts.

John Sweeting: John Sweeting, Chief Experience Officer at ARIN. You hit on something, and I thought you were going to say something else after that, and that was on reassignments and reallocations. I’m not so sure you actually hit on it, the fact that we have put in place the ability to shut your Org ID off from receiving reassignments and reallocations, because that was a big problem we had that you spent a lot of time chasing down people that, hey, I’m going to reassign this space to a big cable provider and then everybody’s going to think it’s them when they look it up in Whois.

So I just wanted to point that out that that is a big development effort that we did, and it was at the request, of course, of the community.

Reese Radcliffe: That’s an excellent point, John. To expand a little bit more about that. There were customers – and while I do believe some of these were ne’er-do-wells, there was a lot that were just unclear on how things worked.

And what they were doing was, when they had an upstream provider, they were entering into an agreement with, they thought they were supposed to put a reassignment record in for their upstream provider that’s giving them service because they just didn’t understand how it worked. And each one of those – initially, we thought they were all ne’er-do-wells, but they were not.

It’s a relatively straightforward across-the-Board, a lot of people seem to think that that’s what you’re supposed to do. So in the last release, we actually gave you the ability. You can self-control, ARIN doesn’t need to be involved in this at all, you can go in and manage your ID and you can turn off the ability to have any reassignments or reallocations to your organization.

So you can just shut that off and it will never happen again. You can turn it on and off as many times as you want. If you want to temporarily enable it because you have one you intentionally want to do, great, you can open up for that and then shut it right back off right thereafter. And nobody can ever reassign something to you without your permission again.

That’s a really good point, John.

Kevin Blumberg: Kevin Blumberg, The Wire. A lot of this work isn’t scalable. I’d love it to be scalable. But if it does scale up and you keep doing what you’re doing, ultimately, the people in the room are paying for that scaling to go up. It’s a cost. And this is a huge cost for everybody.

A lot of, I think, the concern I’ve seen in here 4.10, the reserve space, one helpful thing to do is have people self-attest yearly their reserve space, not just 4.10, 4.4, whatever it may be, have them self-assess. Yes, I’m using it in the region. Now they know it’s in region. Yes, it’s being used for IPv6 transition. Thank you for reminding me. You know, all of that sort of stuff.

It may actually help you cut down the amount of time you spend because you don’t have to worry then about, well, we didn’t know. Or what do you mean? By doing it yearly, it’s sort of helping jog everybody’s memory.

It might save you a lot of time. Anything you can do to lower the amount of time. I’m not saying don’t do this work, keep doing it, but I’m more worried about the scalability of it, and it’s important work to do.

Reese Radcliffe: Thank you. Good point.

John Sweeting: John Sweeting, just to address Kevin a little bit. As Reese pointed out, this team was put together like a year ago. So they’re in their infancy.

We’re targeting, looking, going through tools and things we can use to help us automate. AI’s not out of the question. Of course, we have to look at that really hard.

But, yeah, we’re doing that kind of stuff. And then again, Kevin, anytime there’s a merger or acquisition transfer that involves 4.10 space, we have to receive a notarized affidavit from the receiver that they understand that that is special reserve space and they’re going to continue to use it in that capacity.

So we are doing things as much as we can to try to cut it down. Like I said, we’re looking for tools to help us be more efficient. So if anybody has anything they’d like to recommend to us, feel free because we’re looking for them.

Kevin Blumberg: So appreciate that, John, and, yes, any automation. Again, that’s just the – I think you’ve already got that. I have CI space as part of TorIX. I’ve never been asked in the history that I’ve been there, eight years, hey, are we still using it? I get my yearly, is my email valid? That’s great. I think that was an important thing that people wanted.

Just if we’re doing all this work to root out, it’s a very simple thing to add, and I don’t think it’s a huge encumbrance to the people who are getting the reserved space. But it can languish and this and that. That’s all.

John Curran: John Curran, president and CEO of ARIN. There’s an opportunity to dramatically increase the amount of time it takes to handle these. Not decrease. Increase.

It’s a strategic question. But it affects the community. I leave RSD to handle the fraud. But we have cases that are quite apparent, someone intentionally decided to misuse the space and make false statements to do so.

Now, as it turns out, in the United States that’s a crime. And we are not aggressively pursuing these, because it’s also possible that someone’s misunderstanding, okay.

Anyone who has views on whether or not we should more aggressively pursue that – short-term it’s a lot more resources to do, to actually take people engaging in this and pursue them through the criminal system. Long term, it might actually reduce the problem. So it’s an interesting tradeoff curve.

I am around. Find me if you have opinions on that. I try to be a nice person until people are really abusing the stewardship we do and the resources we manage for you. We do have people doing that, and I just want to know, would it surprise ARIN if we start engaging more aggressively?

It’s, short term, much more resources to do that, obviously. But it may have a deterrent effect. If you have opinions on this, find me at some point. Thank you.

Rob Seastrom: Rob Seastrom, ARIN Board of Trustees. As a trustee, there are only two things that people complain to us a lot about ARIN. One is misapprehension that we are “NOARIN,” as Richard pointed out yesterday, we’re not that and haven’t been that in decades.

And the other is, hey, there’s this guy over here and I obey all the rules and he’s getting away with something that’s transparently bold. And I love being able to be able to point them at the reporting mailbox and I love being able to point them at statistics like this to be able to say, this is not a blackhole, this is not falling on deaf ears. Thank you for publishing this.

Reese Radcliffe: Thank you. Well, again, the goal is fraud prevention, fraud mitigation, and I would say with 30 percent of the tickets, because catching it at Org Create, that’s the start gate. You have to get through that one in order to do anything else. And stopping 30 percent of those in 2025 is a little chip away at fraud prevention and fraud mitigation.

Hollis Kara: Awesome. Nothing further. Thanks, Reese.

Reese Radcliffe: You bet. (Applause.)

Hollis Kara: With that, I’d like to welcome – there he is – Michael Abejuela, ARIN’s General Counsel, up to the stage to provide a legal update.

ARIN General Counsel Update

Michael Abejuela: Good morning. Good morning. All right. Since we’re in the home of the Kentucky Derby, known as the most exciting two minutes in sports, I will try to make my presentation as close to two minutes as possible. But it might take a little bit longer.

So, first, I want to thank everybody for their participation this week. It’s been a great meeting. I think we’ve had really good conversations, and it’s really a part of all the feedback and the comments that you all make. So this is wonderful to see, get everybody together and I hope you continue to do so.

I’m going to take a few minutes just to give you an overview of the legal department, what ARIN does.

I want to introduce the in-house legal team. It consists of myself, General Counsel. We have Jennifer Lee, Deputy General Counsel, who is there in the back, as well as introducing our newest member of our team, Matt Kalayjian, who is also there in the back as well, our new Associate General Counsel. And the team together, we are the in-house legal department.

And since we’re in Louisville, we see Muhammad Ali is one of their hometown heroes here, and he had a quote that said, “The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses, behind the lines, in the gym and on the road.”

So we try to think that the legal team does try to do a lot of work to help win the fight to help defend ARIN to do all the work that we need to do behind the scenes. Hopefully you don’t see us too much. I actually hope that I don’t give too many updates to all of you because that will mean that we’re taking care of our job and making sure that we’re staving off any kind of challenges and, jokingly, away from the witnesses.

We’re going to take a quick view of what the legal team does. They’re kind of different in different categories of what we handle. Let’s start out with administrative and operational.

We essentially are an in-house legal department as a law firm to all of our various departments at ARIN. So we handle the legal issues that will pop up invariably. One of them being that we have vendor contracts across the ARIN organization.

HR, as you can imagine, sometimes has some legal questions and thoughts that we need to consider.

One of the things, particularly the presentation that you just heard from Reese, our Registration Services Department has quite a bit of legal issues that pop up. We help with the review of documents. We help with the review of due diligence items that come in, and so that is a lot of the work that we do.

Jennifer and Matt will be helping our Registration Services Department quite a bit on that. And then, of course, we want to make sure that we are completing our legal and compliance filings, which I did not hit the thing so you didn’t see all of that while I was saying that.

So the next one. Support to our ARIN volunteers. So, of course, you’ve seen our ARIN Board of Trustees, our Advisory Council, the Number Resource Organization Number Council. They have quite a bit of work. They do a lot of things in furtherance of what the community wants, as well as making sure that the organization continues to do the work that we do. And with all of that work, not surprisingly, every once in a while, they will have legal questions.

So particularly with the Board, I do a lot of the main support for the Board and their committee work when there are legal issues that may pop up.

With the AC, Jennifer is the primary legal support for the AC. And as we all know, with the Policy Development Process, every policy, when it makes its way all the way through at some point asks for a Staff and Legal Review. So John Sweeting and his team take the staff side and we take the legal side and we try to make sure that we’re aware of any kind of issues that might pop up.

The other thing that we do is that we support the NRO NC, and these past couple of years that has been a tremendous amount of work. You’ve heard some updates about the ICP-2 review with the new RIR governance document.

And I have spent a lot of time working with our counterparts at the other RIRs as well as the folks over at ICANN and working with the overall NRO NC to truly try to find a way to do a robust update of this document that has not been updated in over 20 years. That’s been a big part of our work. We’re hoping we’ll be able to finish that in 2026 and be good to go.

Fraud investigations. Let’s dig a little bit deeper into this one. I mentioned that we just heard Reese’s presentation and we assist Registration Services and the CXS team.

Part of this, I will say is that we help them in the sense that we are watching. There are people that think they can just submit items to ARIN and that we will just take them at face value. That is not what we do. We have a very, very strict mandate to try to keep an accurate and up-to-date registry and that means trying to avoid fraud.

This does take quite a bit of what we do. And we have seen many, many different ways that people will try to defraud the organization. They come up with new ways.

We’ve talked about AI, and so we’re constantly keeping up to date on trying to see the new methods that that will happen as well as trying to support the team because that’s a tremendous amount of work and it’s very, very important.

So we help with the internal reviews, the requests that will come in. And then the other side of it is outside parties. So law enforcement that has often come to us as they do their fraud investigations, they may be doing their criminal investigations, and so we do work with them.

We don’t just do whatever they want and just make sure that we do follow process. If there are formal subpoenas, we do have to go through the proper processes there to make sure that everybody’s aware of that.

But we also do a lot of education and outreach and training with them to know exactly the information that we have. And one of the things that we talk about is that law enforcement may come to us and say, well, give us all this information. And we have the breadcrumbs on the way of what they probably need but we usually don’t have the final end. But we do help them find who they need to be talking to and where they can get the information.

From a legislative perspective, and legislative may not be the most accurate word, but it’s also a bit of government relations.

Part of what ARIN does and what the legal team does, is that it oversees the Government Affairs Department. So both from the legal side as well as the government relations, we have a lot of work where we’re monitoring legislation that’s coming through that may affect the services and the mission that ARIN does.

As you can imagine, a lot of this as seen in the past with regard to privacy, cybersecurity. So we’re maintaining an eye on that to make sure that we can continue to do our operations, we can continue to do the mission that we have and be able to continue to serve all of you.

But that also incorporates engaging with the various governments in our region. So while ARIN is based in the United States, we encompass a rather large region. That includes the US, Canada, mostly English-speaking countries in the Caribbean. So we maintain relationships there.

You’ve heard from Nate and from Bevil earlier in this meeting. I would really encourage you to go back, if you have any questions, to look at their presentations. I won’t go into all of that right now. But they do a lot of work to make sure that we continue those relations. And we just want to make sure that we can continue to do what we do.

So questions or comments? Otherwise, that is all I have for you right now.

Hollis Kara: Anyone have anything for Michael? Nobody wants to go on the record with legal.

Michael Abejuela: Nothing on the record on legal.

One thing I will say is a little random fact, in Louisville, if you didn’t know, is that one of the viral songs that we all know is Happy Birthday, right? So make sure you say happy birthday to Lee Howard. It’s his birthday today.

Hollis Kara: Thanks, Michael. And happy birthday, Lee. Finishing up.

Tina Morris: I wanted to point out that Lee is so invested in ARIN that he had his 57th birthday at ARIN 57.

Hollis Kara: Wow! (Applause.)

Are we allowed to say that? I don’t know. Anyway, you did it. You’re Board, you can do what you want.

So, let’s go. This is actually a presentation I’m very excited to see on the agenda. We’ve had the community ask for this over several years that we do a little bit more preparatory to help folks understand what’s coming for the upcoming election cycle.

So with that, Joe’s going to come up and talk a bit about that, and then we’re going to have this year’s Board election officer join him to talk a little bit about the specific Board role in that, which is probably more than I needed to tell you, because Joe’s going to say it again. But I did anyway. Go ahead, Joe.

2026 ARIN Election Preview

Joe Westover: Thanks, Hollis. As long as I maintain my voice for this, I’ll be happy.

So I’m going to go through some of the mechanics as a refresher of elections, and then Ron da Silva will be stepping in for a different subject on this.

So this is just a preview. Each fall, not a surprise, we hold elections and they’re done by General Members. And that’s for the ARIN Board of Trustees, Advisory Council, and the NRO.

So what do we do? They’re each fall, I just mentioned that, they’re elected by General Member organizations, which is a very small subset of the larger service management side of things. They’re held for the Board of Trustees, AC, and the NRO Number Council annually.

You can go to ARIN.net/elections, read all you want about it. If you’re interested in running, this summer there’ll be plenty of notifications going out from our Communications Department announcing the opening of the nominations. And that will be sometime in early summer.

And again, between now and then or all the time, General Members should really maintain the fact that their voting contacts are up to date. There are deadlines for such a thing in the fall. And it’s better to get ahead of that if you can so you don’t miss something and suddenly you can’t participate even though you should have been eligible as a General Member.

Again, I’m going to cover some of these subjects here. I’ll just go through, who can vote, the roles, the process, candidate assessments, and what about the NRO NC.

So membership matters. That kind of says it all. I’m not sure what else I have to say. So we have General and Service Members. It’s roughly like 25,000 Service Members, and again that’s a sub amount of General Members. General Members commit, there’s a little checkbox, they commit to participating in the governance process in ARIN Elections.

So again, all customers that have an active ARIN Agreement are Service Members. As that, that gives you the privilege of entering into and opting into becoming a General Member and participating in the process that we’re all seeing today and in the fall.

Again, numbers we have today, 25,000 and change, and roughly 1,500 General Members. In addition to that, we also provide services to 14,000 other organizations that are not under agreement. So when we talk about the magnitude of customers, there’s quite a bit.

Again, the importance of voting contacts, as I kind of referenced earlier, you can’t do it unless you’re a General Member. You must have a voting contact identified, otherwise it’s kind of moot that you went through this process. They have to be finalized by a certain date, and this will be seven days before voting begins on 7 October. And that’s because we have to download a list, set in stone, verified by Legal, to make sure that’s adhered to.

So just don’t delay. Go to Your Org ID. Select an Org handle. If you have a designated Voting Contact, it will be displayed in the Voting Contacts section, otherwise it’s empty. Self-explanatory. If not, you can manage voting contact from an actions menu on the right and take care of it yourself and add that in.

This is a screenshot that people can refer to after the shot, of where you would go, but essentially in the actions menu on the right, you can request General Membership. So again, really promote and encourage people or Service Members who might not know they’re a Service Member. First off, go in here and if you have the “Request General Membership,” that means you’re a Service Member and you should be encouraged to go ahead and apply to enter into that process.

So the roles of the Board, AC, and NRO NC. So the ARIN Board of Trustees is really, provides a strategic direction, fiduciary oversight of ARIN, and really keeps us all aligned with our mission and all the work that kind of trails on down to the staff level to accomplish that. That permeates through the organization.

Mechanically, Board of Trustees, they ratify policy changes recommended by the Advisory Council. There is 10 members, again, the nine elected plus the president and CEO. And again provides strategic direction for scope, mission, financial oversight.

We heard a lot about that in previous presentations here on the financial health of the company, et cetera. And again, they serve three-year terms.

Qualifications-wise, and I am speaking on behalf of — but this is obviously adopted by — the Board, professional experience in a number of different areas. That would include technology, public policy, finance, legal, or nonprofit sectors. Kind of looking for, really, an even keel across the Board, a real diversity in views that can be brought to bear across the Board.

Strategic governance insight, corporate-level decision-making, again, advising on that sort of thing, really accounting for ethical integrity and accountability. That’s a huge thing just in terms of ARIN as a whole.

I think we take that mantra to heart just at the staff level. Awareness of the Internet number and resource ecosystem. It’s kind of a no-brainer. That’s helpful.

I think if you’re getting involved with ARIN, you’ve already checked that box at the very least. And again, the commitment to open-minded collaboration. This is the bottoms-up approach. That’s very different from a lot of organizations. So being in tune with that.

The AC facilitates communication regarding proposed changes, and we all in this room know how that process works. It’s very open, very community-driven, very bottoms-up, everybody gets a fair shot at what’s submitted through the shepherds on down. And again, those shepherds are guiding proposals, policies through the entire ARIN Policy Development Process. They recommend community consensus policies to the Board. So at the end of all of that, it’s actually recommended to the Board to adopt or not adopt. And that’s how policy becomes policy and becomes ratified.

They consist of 15 members, three-year terms, sounds familiar, except for the 15. They present on the status of policies at ARIN meetings, which we saw yesterday has been a topic throughout this. And they meet monthly.

Again, these things are constantly going. There’s a huge shoutout and thanks to folks who are, in a sense, volunteers and are taking time out of their schedules, because it’s not just leading up to here. There’s monthly commitments and work in between that with shepherding. So it’s not a light duty, but it’s obviously critical to how the policies are developed and defined for the larger Internet community.

Qualifications. Just understanding the Internet number resource public policy. And I think that’s probably a given, the people who know that come from industry, come from policy. So we see that. And with experience facilitating and developing policy.

So these are some of the things that they’re looking for for people who might want to self-nominate for it.

The NRO NC, that’s the Number Resource Organization Council. And again, they’re facilitating global policy development process. And they select individuals to serve on ICANN’s Board in seats 9 and 10. They are also known as the ASO AC, which I think Amy mentioned the other day. When you think of one, you can think of the other because they’re the same.

They are also a 15-member body, three per RIR. There’s two elected, one appointed, and this year is actually an appointment year. So something to be aware of.

Qualifications for the NRO, professional experience, Internet number resource management or public policy. Again, that kind of traverses all these qualifications. Ethical integrity and accountability. Again, another resounding theme of what matters. And general awareness of the Internet ecosystem is helpful.

And again, this is a little bit on mechanics. You want to learn more, we have lots of stuff on the website under leadership. That’s really to provide a number of resources for you, for someone who is interested to read about what it is to be part of that review, leadership community.

Leadership is the AC. It’s the Board. It’s all across the Board. There’s a lot of really great resources there.

Again, join the Nomination Committee. So right now it is open until 28 April. There’s a link there folks can go to read more about it, see what’s involved, and then submit applications for.

But that is from General Member organizations to fill the seat. So that’s another important fact. If you were interested in that, make sure you’re a General Member organization, affiliated with a General Member organization.

And the path to the ballot. Not as exciting as it sounds. But these are some of the dates. I won’t really go through them. Nominations open. They close. We have initial slate candidate announcements so people can start to see who we’ll be voting for.

There’s the actual voting period itself and, of course, the results announced, so from that 8 June right on down through 6 November. And we’ll all be part of that at the meeting in the fall as well.

The process. So the nominations process goes for 14 days. There is an optional extension for that for the Board as opposed to the other components. Self-nominations only. So really there’s nothing preventing you from going and doing this. You don’t need to drum up 15 signatures, five signatures. You can self-nominate yourself, which I think is a really good benefit.

You’ll have to complete a questionnaire for review by a third-party vendor that ARIN procures. And the initial slate of candidates will be published for the community in early September. There’s a whole process behind that, obviously, to determine what goes from one to the end.

And the Election Officer Report. So right now I will hand off to Ron da Silva.

Ron da Silva: Thank you, Joe. And good morning, everyone. Every year, in January, the Board meets in their first meeting of the year called our organizational meeting where we elect our Chair, Vice Chair, Secretary, Treasurer, committee assignments, and also the Election Officer.

I’m Ron da Silva, and I am this year’s Election Officer. So the green button?

Hollis Kara: Green button.

Ron da Silva: So per the bylaws, the Board approves and publishes the election process, and included in that election process is the definition of the Election Officer. So what is the Election Officer?

It really is responsible for four things. First, to explain the assessment criteria for candidates. I’ll be doing that this morning. Secondly, review the eligible voters. Third, consult on any material issues that might arise in the evaluation process, and then lastly, at the end of the election, certify the election results.

So on to the first item. What we use —there’s really two pieces of evaluation. There’s the evaluation that’s used initially on candidates, and the second part is by you, the voters, the electorate, on which candidate you want to put forward to the Board or the AC or the NRO.

So the criteria for candidates before they’re put on the slate is enumerated above here, which is we have a third-party objective consultant who takes the job description, which Joe touched on a little bit, the requirements that are expected of candidates, basic skills, attributes, experiences that are important to be a successful Board Trustee or Advisory Council member or an NRO member.

And then there’s also a guidance letter that the Board provides every year to the Nominating Committee specifying specific additional areas of expertise or gaps that we look at across the Board that maybe we’re missing and would like to have added to give the right level of diversity of background, experience, and expertise for the Board as a whole.

So those things, along with the questionnaires that are answered by the candidates, background checks, especially, for trustee candidates, interviews and then community input from you, all of that is given to our third-party advisor. They do the assessment and come back with Qualified or Not Qualified.

So the things that they’re looking for, does this candidate meet the basic needs, the basic requirements? Are there any material issues that have been misrepresented in their application process? So they will validate information that’s put forward. And then are there any concerns from the background check, legal issues, or other red flags or caution flags that might arise.

In the end, what we’re looking for is you are a qualified candidate, meaning you meet all these requirements and are left on the slate of candidates, or you are not qualified and you are removed from the slate of candidates.

Now, this hopefully is a simplification from prior years. We used to have this “qualifications not met" or “qualifications undetermined,” all kinds of weird labels, which created a lot of confusion for the community on, well, why is this candidate still on the list and yet we haven’t qualified them, and what exactly does that mean? Should we be concerned or is it simply the third party ran out of time to validate a degree because they’re waiting for a university to come back with a confirmation, right?

So our assumption is, unless proven otherwise, right, if there’s representation on the candidate’s, say, CV and the third party runs out of time and can’t confirm that it’s incorrect, then it shouldn’t matter; it should go forward.

So these kind of little nuances have been a challenge for us in the past. We think we’re refining it a little bit more this year to make it clearer to the community when a candidate is on the list that they are, in fact, qualified.

And then secondly, in that guidance letter, one thing we did last year, if you remember, there was a big emphasis on financial skills. Why? Well, Nancy’s leaving us. Nancy came on the Board of Trustees almost nine years ago. Stepped right in with a lot of strong financial experience, stepped right into the Treasurer role.

So last year, we realized, okay, Nancy’s terming out. She’s leaving at the end of this year. We wanted to get some additional skills on the Board with professional finance experience. So you saw that in our guidance letter. And you responded. Thank you very much.

We had a really great slate of candidates last year with a lot of strong financial background. And, in fact, you voted to put Lee Howard onto the Board who was a prior Trustee, but also a prior Treasurer of the Board. So thank you for that. We are keeping that language in there, as well as focus on executive compensation. So you’ll see that in the guidance letter.

All that is given to the third-party provider. And if you’re qualified and you remain on the list and you have these additional skills, you’ll see an additional qualifier that says not only are they qualified, but they also have these skills.

So that’s what you’ll see this year. Now, for you as the electorate, there’s a second part of evaluation, and this is what you’re most used to, which is you’ll see Statements of Support. You’ll have the candidate speeches. You’ll have the candidate forum to interact with and to hear from the candidates.

That combined with the third-party assessment, we hope, gives you enough information to be able to make informed decisions on who you want on your Board of Trustees or on the Advisory Council or as your representatives in the Number Resource Organization.

Now, one last comment before I flip the slide — the next three slides are quicker — the extra skill. So I talked about what you’ll see — we’re still drafting it so it will be up soon — the need for financial expertise as well as the need for executive compensation and sort of like highlights for additional skills recommended. That doesn’t mean we need all three candidates to have that.

In fact, it doesn’t mean we need all nine Board members to have that. It is just an area that the Board feels a little more emphasis in those areas would be valuable to the net composition of the Board.

So the second task, reviewing the eligible voters. The president and CEO annually will take the role of eligible voters. One role of the Election Officer is to ensure that that process is done appropriately and the outcome is qualified.

You heard this earlier from Joe that there’s typically — I think you had 1,472 specified, but if you look at the range for the last six, seven, eight years, typically there’s 1,500 to 2,000 eligible voters, which represent about a thousand entities, many of those with multiple votes. Or in many cases, electors with multiple organizations they represent. So it’s kind of a mix.

Yet, even with that much of an electorate, we still only have 500 to 700 of you participating. Clearly not all represented in the room. That’s a much larger population than what we have here in person.

And of that 500 to 700, typically see 700 to 900 actual votes. So those that are online, I will encourage you to, even now, begin thinking about how you’re going to participate because it is important that we have representation on behalf of the whole membership as much as possible.

And then the General Members, the list of 1,472 members is published on the ARIN website. If it’s not there now, it will be further along in the election timeline, and that lists every General Member — come on, Rob, join us — anyways, thanks, Rob.

So the General Members will be listed on the website. That includes the General Member’s name, company name, and the mailing address.

But specifically the Voting Contacts are obscured. You don’t know who the electorate is. Especially as a candidate coming from either the Board, the AC, or the NRO, it’s kind of hard to tell who exactly these 1,000 eligible entities are that are making potentially 1,500 different votes.

And there is a piece that you’ve seen last year and prior years, trying to create some sort of communication mechanism, allowing for candidates to maybe send an email to the list of candidates, still keeping the privacy of the electorate protected, but at least opening up some sort of channel for communication. So I think you’ll see that again this year offered to candidates, but that is very intentional.

Okay. So the third item, material issues. If in the evaluation process our third-party consultant runs into something, a red flag, a cautionary statement, something in maybe a background check, a legal issue, that is brought to the attention of the Chief Human Resource Officer, the General Counsel, and the Election Officer to assess, is this an issue that could materially impact or risk the organization from a reputational standpoint or even from an integrity issue from a candidate and take that consideration into the final determination of whether the candidate is qualified or not.

Hopefully this is a lightweight piece of the role. Obviously, we were hoping to have candidates that don’t have issues that raise a red flag that requires this kind of a review.

But that said, we want to make sure there’s fairness in the process and that candidates that are qualified are before you and we don’t preselect from the NomCom or from the Board and give the most full list of candidates as possible so that the electorate has as many choices that they can benefit from in representation.

Last item. So when it’s all done, the final role for the Election Officer will be to validate that we followed our bylaws in our published processes and that the voting tallies reflect the actual data that’s been submitted during the election process.

Joe, back to you. (Applause.)

Joe Westover: Self-explanatory, wrapping up. I do want to add one comment to what Ron mentioned before we go forward.

The 1,500 to 2,000, when we converted to General Members the whole Service Member paradigm a number of years ago, we started saying there’s a three-year clock. If General Members don’t participate in the previous three elections, you get purged. “Purge” is maybe a negative word, not the best word to use, but it’s as easy as going back in and opting back in. But that has kind of helped make this efficient, ensure that people are participating willingly and not being granted things that maybe they’re just not interested in.

So while a number have come off every year, we track internally the number coming on. It’s about like a one-third to two-thirds ratio. We’ve been losing more. But we’re at a point now, I think, that will flatten out. My guess it’s going to stabilize and then start ticking up based off new people opting in.

So resources. Once this all is open, again ARIN-elections.net, after the final candidate slate is announced, community members are encouraged to submit statements in support for candidates on the ARIN Election Headquarters website.

Again that will be opened during the entire voting period and you’ll get plenty of announcements if you’re paying attention to the different kind of ARIN notification streams we have, including internally, with some of the new products that Comms has developed or had developed for them.

Final reminders, again, just to reiterate it, nominations, 8 to 22 June. The General Member voting eligibility cutoff, again what we’re talking about, 7 September. And then the actual elections, we already have a calendar out and approved, for 22 to 30 October.

And other than that, I think it’s just questions and comments. But I just want to echo real quick what Hollis talked about. This isn’t something we’ve done ahead of time. We’re always thinking waiting until closer and then we don’t have a forum like this to communicate the importance, the details around the election process as opposed to someone getting a random communication, hey, it’s open, and then trying to figure out, well, General Member or Service Member, do I want to participate? Do I not?

So hopefully this is beneficial and something we can get into a regular cadence on moving forward.

Hollis Kara: I like it. With that, microphones are open if you have questions for either Joe or Ron pursuant to the upcoming election cycle.

Kevin Blumberg: Kevin Blumberg, The Wire. Joe, please try to synchronize more. Once I’ve voted or DMR has voted, we don’t need a phone call. We don’t need another email saying please remember to vote.

In some years, it’s gotten kind of silly. So just if you can do a stand up on that. Maybe you have already. But the synchronization would be helpful.

The second thing was, this is for Ron, and just sort of a question. It said Board members get background checks. I think we’ve reached the point in our evolution as an industry and as a group and with everything that’s going on, that that should probably be expanded.

It can be lighter touch or whatever, but I am confused why — I know the Board has a fiduciary responsibility, so it’s more significant in requirement, but at this point I would say it probably needs to be expanded, and I just don’t know the process, maybe I’m just giving the advice to the Board and they can look at it for the following year.

But I think that should be expanded as a, just a check-and-balance courtesy to the community that is then electing that person.

Ron da Silva: Thank you, Kevin. That’s a great suggestion. Especially when you think about Chris talking about we’re going through the process of doing background checks on the entire organization, it only makes sense, so thank you for that input.

John Sweeting: John Sweeting, Chief Experience Officer for ARIN. So I just want to say if anybody’s gotten any calls in the last two years about ARIN Elections, it isn’t ARIN. We haven’t made calls for two years now, and we don’t plan to start making them again.

And also the emails, as you vote, you get purged off the email notification list. So I guess there could be, if you just pushed the button, you might get an email the next minute. But, yeah, you won’t get another one after that.

John Stitt: John Stitt, Hopkinsville Electric System, EnergyNet. Thank you for the very thorough presentation there.

I’m very thankful for the simplification of what the qualified, well qualified, not so qualified things mean. That has been very confusing in years past.

I also appreciate you emphasizing how few votes are cast every year. That’s something that when my boss told me, hey, if you want to vote in this, we’ll let you deal with that. When I told him how many votes have been cast, he was like, I may have just given you too much power.

(Laughter.)

So everyone that I’ve talked to that either is participating, just kind of not really thinking about it, or they have not been voting in the elections, they haven’t realized just how votes have been cast. And when I’ve pointed that out to them, they’ve realized I probably should be putting more effort into this.

So I think emphasizing that more is very important, and I thank you for doing that.

Ron da Silva: You’re welcome. And thanks for your input.

Hollis Kara: I do have an online question, if you would like to take that next. Or comment. Ashley, do you want to go?

Ashley Perks: Sure. Robert Hoppenfeld, Up in Two LLC: I agree that background checks for all is a good idea.

Hollis Kara: All right.

Leif Sawyer: Leif Sawyer, GCI, ARIN Advisory Council, former NomCom. Yeah, join the NomCom. Get on there, help support the organization.

I also just want to throw my, I guess, now third thumbs up for background checks for all.

Kat Hunter: Kat Hunter, AC chair. Question and potentially a follow-up question for the Advisory Council: Is qualified for all still going to happen this year, or are we finally going to remove that? Because whenever the Advisory Council goes up, everyone that makes it on to the Advisory Council slate is listed with the Q next to their name.

But having somebody on the AC for multiple years next to someone that is brand new within the community and on the same level as an AC member that could potentially have contributed for 20 years can be confusing that everyone on the slate is all qualified.

I would rather see no designation for the Advisory Council, because it just doesn’t make any sense. And I’ve had more questions from people: What does qualified actually mean if everybody makes it on anyway?

So my suggestion as someone that has had a million questions about it, I think it’s just more confusing. Just don’t put anything on there at all. Get rid of the qualification for the Advisory Council.

Ron da Silva: Great feedback. Based on what we’re doing on the Trustee list, maybe the same thing applies. If you’re on the list, you’re qualified. If you’re not on the list —

Kat Hunter: It’s more confusing than anything else.

Ron da Silva: That’s good feedback, thank you Kat.

John Curran: Let’s take it and we’ll take a look to see. A list of names that all have the same designator after them that says qualified for the AC may not make sense. For the Trustees, we have qualified and qualified with additional, and so we may need to have some distinguisher there.

Ron da Silva: Also, John, just responding to that. If someone is not qualified through our process, there’s still a petition option. So that’s another label that could be used to designate there’s a candidate on the slate that went through a different route.

John Curran: And it would show their name and say “by petition” afterwards.

Hollis Kara: Great. Thank you both so much. I don’t see any more questions. So thank you for your time. (Applause.)

I hope that proves helpful to everyone heading into the next election season. And to say it one more time, NomCom applications are open. Please do apply if you’re interested.

And I’d like to welcome up John and Nancy to run the Open Microphone.

Open Microphone

John Curran: Microphones are open.

Nancy Carter: Don’t all run at once.

John Sweeting: I’m going to run. John Sweeting, Chief Experience Officer for ARIN. Just to expound a little bit on what Hollis’ last comment was about the Nominations Committee needing volunteers.The initial call ends next Tuesday. We have one application for three positions. So we need volunteers. So if you are interested in everything you just heard presented and you want to be a part of it, please consider volunteering. Thank you.

John Curran: To follow up on what John said, the Nomination Committee is the one that looks at, amongst other things, the applications we’re receiving sort of bundled as they come in and realizes that they need to go recruit for positions among the members. So they’re sort of a check to make sure that we have enough people on the slate. It is an important role. It makes sure that we have a good slate for you. It does require a bit of work because you need to sometimes help encourage people to run.

Highly recommend, if folks are interested, to get involved.

Lily Botsyoe: Lily Botsyoe, two-time Fellow. Just to say, I mean, great thanks to the Fellows for what they did here. Amazing job.

But I’m also a user privacy researcher at UC. And that is why I come to the microphone today.

So for, I mean, the past days we’ve had screens left unattended, especially people’s personal PCs. I’ve read a couple of Slack messages unknowingly. I’ve seen emails and all of that. So this is just a reminder for a clear desk clear screen policy, especially if you’re not behind. Because you’re literally dragging people into private business.

Aside from that, it has implications even if you don’t know. So please, once you leave the table, just close it, shut it, take it with you. Don’t leave it there. Thank you.

Nancy Carter: Great reminder, Lily. Thanks.

Altie Jackson: Altie Jackson, technical service manager for Electoral Commission of Jamaica.

Just to follow up on what Kat is saying, in doing elections, there’s a team that they use in Jamaica. It says free and fair election. Doesn’t matter if you are coming from the background of the AC or you have a number of years and a fresh candidate coming. To make it free and fair, you don’t label the candidates so persons can see what they have to offer and then pick from there.

John Curran: Understood. Thank you.

Nancy Carter: Thank you.

John Curran: Microphones remain open. Remote participants?

Hollis Kara: Nothing online.

John Sweeting: John Sweeting, still the – I hope – the Chief Experience Officer at ARIN.

This is just a quick comment. You saw Joe giving numbers of 25,000 Service Members, 1500 General Members, and then this group of 14,000 customers that are considered legacy, not under agreement.

I just want to point out, just for anybody’s that’s interested, over 12,000 of those are a single /24 holding organization. It’s not like there’s a ton of space in that. There is a bit of space in that, but 12,000 of them, over 12,000 are single /24 Org IDs.

And we do have a program that you would have got briefed on but we ran out of time. That’s the Data Accuracy Program that is looking into all that and we’re tracking and vetting all the different organizations’ criteria that we have developed so far.

John Curran: Microphones remain open. I’m happy to stand here all day, but I will say, we probably out of respect for everyone should wrap up.

So closing the queues in 3, 2, 1. Remote participants?

Hollis Kara: There are none.

John Curran: Okay. Thank you very much. (Applause.)

Closing and Adjournment

Hollis Kara: Before we go to our closing slides, I do want everybody to give yourselves a big round of applause and my folks online, too. We’ve had great participation and turnout all the way through the end of the meeting. So thank you for sticking around.

This is probably the fullest I’ve ever seen the room on a Wednesday, and I’ve been here for a hot minute.

Thank you for joining us. Thank you for coming to Louisville and being with us online. Thank you to our Network Sponsor, Spectrum. Love a meeting with no network issues. (Applause.)

Our Platinum Sponsor, AWS. (Applause.)

Our Silver Sponsor, IPXO. (Applause.)

And our espresso bar host, Verisign, who we will be seeing again in Miami. (Applause.)

Again, we do post a daily recap blog. If you missed anything, had to step away, you can check that out, or share it with a friend if you’re trying to help them understand why participating at ARIN meetings is such a great thing. Please do complete the meeting survey. That will be open for the next week, and then we will be drawing a winner for a Nintendo Switch 2 console, and we look very forward to seeing you this fall in Miami when we’ll be back-to-back with NANOG running on the 22nd and 23rd of October.

So with that, safe travels home. And we’ll see y’all soon. (Applause.)

(Meeting concluded at 11:50 a.m.)