ARIN 31 Members Meeting Draft Transcript - 24 April 2013 [Archived]

Opening and Announcements

John Curran: Okay. Welcome and good morning. I see lots of bright and cheery faces here. Welcome back from a night of festivities. I’d like to provide some reminders. Welcome to our Member Meeting. Our Member Meeting is open to everyone. If you do approach the mics, state your name and affiliation each time you’re at the mic. Comply with the rules and the courtesies outlined in the program. Don’t forget the meeting survey, arin.net/ARIN 31/surveys.html, and you’ll be entered to win a Google Nexus 10.

There is CaribNOG going on Wednesday afternoon through Friday in Peninsula 2. For those people who are interested, CaribNOG, the network operator forum for this region, might be something that you want to attend, and just want to let you know it’s running concurrently.

Today’s agenda. We’re going to have the ARIN departmental reports. We’re going to have the ARIN Advisory Council report, the Financial Report, the Board of Trustees Report, and an Open Microphone. It might be a very short morning.

Okay. At the head table I have Chairman Tim Denton; I have our treasurer and vice chair, Paul Andersen; I have Board member Aaron Hughes; and I have AC Chairman John Sweeting.

(Applause.)

John Curran: It’s always the last one, too. Okay. So here we go. I want to start right out with the reports from the various departments. Which is the first department up? Financial. Yes. So Bob can’t be here. So as people may or may not know, Bob is out on medical leave, and our thoughts and hopes are with him. But I’m going to have Val come up and give the presentation.

ARIN Updates: Financial Services

Val Winkelman: Good morning. I’m the ARIN staff accountant. Myself and Michael Abejuela and Tammy Rowe are here. I hope you see them all. I’ll talk about the staff, the ARIN Online experience, the new fee schedule and how it’s affected FSD, finishing up the financial audit, and some statistics for you. On the staff, Tanya, Amaris, and Amy are back working very hard, taking up the slack for those of us who are here working on the meeting.

The credit card system is now totally in ARIN Online. You can print an invoice and pay while in ARIN Online, or you can pay outside of ARIN Online if you don’t have a login. And, as always, ARIN does not keep credit card information on file. And since we’ve brought the credit card system into ARIN Online, duplicate credit card payments have been reduced by 95 percent from January 2012 to January 2013. So it’s been very effective.

The new fee schedule. FSD has been working very hard with engineering services so that we can implement the fee schedule with our division of accounting system. Basically now the information comes out of JPM with the resources and will update division, and we’ll have our first live billing with the new fee schedule for the July 1st, which will occur next month. And if you get your invoice and you have any questions, you can always log in to ARIN Online and use Ask ARIN or email billing@arin.net, and they will help you with any questions you have.

The financial audit is complete. There were no changes made to the original trial balance that the auditors received. The draft of the financial statements right now is with the Board for their approval. And we’ve received a draft of the 990, which we will be reviewing in-house before it’s passed on to the audit committee. And here’s some payment types. Credit cards actually exceed checks in the numbers that we receive, but the larger amounts are still coming in by checks. And invoices. We send out about a thousand maintenance invoices per month and 300 ISP invoices per month. And, again, even though it’s a small amount of invoices, the IPv4 is the lion’s share of the revenue. The registration revenue mix. V6 is getting a little larger and v4 smaller, and it will be interesting to see what happens next year. Any questions?

John Curran: Wait. Stay there. I just have a comment. So when we report these numbers for registration revenue and we report v4 versus v6, because of historically how the billing has worked where you have a separate fee for each and you’re billed the larger of the two, an organization that has v4 resources or v4 and v6 resources is billed as v4 in that revenue, and what you’re seeing for the line for v6 is v6 only, okay? So as it turns out, under the prior schedule, the growth of v6 was never going to be very large because it was only going to be those people who didn’t have any v4 as well.

When we moved to the new schedule, we will have revenue coming in by categories, because everyone’s category includes both v4 and v6. I just don’t want people to think that only a small number of folks have v6. There’s a large number of people paying v4 registration fees who have v6 resources. Any questions for Val?

Rob Seastrom: This may seem a little bit nitpicky, but – Rob Seastrom, ARIN Advisory Council, Time Warner Cable, and somebody with – a lot of people who ask me ARIN questions. And it seems that people are puzzled as to why they get messages from a role account called collections@, when in fact their account is not late. And it would seem that pre-due bills, it would be nice to have them coming from an account with a name like “billing” or “receivables” or something like that, because it gives people entirely the wrong idea.

John Curran: We’re not sending the people with the bludgeons and the handcuffs on the first notice. Okay. Collections as opposed to billing or – got it. So taken, sir. Any other questions? Thank you, Val.

(Applause.)

John Curran: Okay. Next up we have the Human Resources and Administration Report with Mary K. Lee.

ARIN Updates: Human Resources and Administration

Mary K. Lee: Good morning. The report for Human Resources and Administration – I never thought I was going to say this – from the soon to be former director of Human Resources and Administration, because I will be leaving ARIN the end of next month. Just get that out there for the people who don’t know. Talk about organizational support and our general HR practices, and then just a little bit about us.

Lots of facility improvements. We’ve been making changes inside the company. The two biggest things are we’re reconfiguring one of our group offices for better work with our Agile methodology, and we are about two-thirds of the way through a major HVAC installation, replacement of our old system, since we renewed the lease and we’re going to stay at ARIN longer. It’s been quite a project, and we’re glad it’s moving along well.

We have a new phone system, which really falls under administration, but all that work was done by Steve Scally, and I have to thank him for what he’s done. It’s fantastic. Totally fantastic.

(Applause.)

Mary K. Lee: We’re ironing out a few quirks with it. But it ties into everything for us, so we can work offsite disaster recovery, because it’s all soft phones, and our phones are completely portable with our laptops. So have phone and laptop, have work and travel for all ARIN employees now, so it’s great. And general travel and administration. I want to thank Misuk Kwon. I hope you all got to meet her. She’s been working the desk outside most of the meeting. It’s her first ARIN meeting. She was very excited to come.

And Thérèse Colosi is back at the office holding down the fort since a whole bunch of us seem to be here. And they take care, of course, of all of our general travel and administration and all the small things that make things run so that we can take care of all of you. Some things –

John Curran: Round of applause.

(Applause.)

Mary K. Lee: And I think – this is general. I think today is Administrative Assistant Day. I could be wrong. I think it’s the third week of April. It usually seems to happen when we’re at the meeting. So thanks to anyone who does that kind of work, because it is quite amazing. Annual performance reviews were completed in December, and a few into January.

Total compensation statements. We send those out at the end of the first quarter. It’s a roundup of not just your salary but all the various benefit programs and things that ARIN has for the employees. Annual audits. We pretty much provide support to financial services, Val and her team. We participate in both the financial audit and the 990, which we’re working on right now.

And hiring. Hiring has been busy. We’re converting a lot of the contractors into permanent employees and hiring some other employees, pretty much all in engineering at this point. We’ve had seven hires in the last six months, which is a lot for a little company. We have three more hires coming on in the next two weeks, one of which is my replacement that I’ll be training, and then after that just one more opening. And that will put us at 58 full time employees, full time positions, of which 57 will be filled by early May. So we’re looking very good in that department – in that area, I should say.

A little bit about us. Here’s our chart with tenure. And even with some slight turnover, ARIN just continues to have absolutely amazing turnover. We have – let’s see. Well over half the company has been at ARIN more than four or five years. So we just have a seasoned, tenured, experienced, smart group that supports all of you. We’ve had some anniversaries. ARIN itself was 15 years old in December. And Cathy Clements, who is here, and Bob Stratton and Michael O’Neill have all celebrated their 15 year anniversaries with ARIN. So congrats to them. Quite an accomplishment.

(Applause.)

Mary K. Lee: And some other general stats. We currently have as of today 55 employees. That’s 31 men and 24 women. And I used to give some stats about other facility things, one which was age and people said not to do that. But I want to reassure you after I leave ARIN the average age is going to drop significantly.

(Laughter.)

Mary K. Lee: I feel really fortunate that I get to say how much I liked – pardon me – working for ARIN. It’s been quite, quite an experience. I myself will be at ARIN 14 years next month. An amazing thing that I got to do doing the new hire orientation for all these many employees who worked at ARIN was I got to tell them, as they were going through new hire, that they were coming to work for a place that people didn’t just come to necessarily to get a job, which of course all of us need, but they came to work for ARIN because ARIN was a really good place to work. And they found us, they targeted us, they knew people who worked at the company, and they came to work here. And I have to say that is quite an honor.

I feel like I’ve made a contribution to the community and the people I work for. And, boy, do I work with some great people.

John Curran: Here here.

(Applause.)

Mary K. Lee: And another oldie from the past: We used to do a computer survey. This was our favorite, of course. And 38 employees participated in the survey, an average of 4.6 computers per household. It got really murky this time because did that include tablets, their smartphones. We don’t know. But let’s just say that’s what it is. And it is of course a completely unscientific study. And I want to thank you all very much.

John Curran: Thank you.

(Applause.)

John Curran: As Mary K. is leaving, I’d like to take a moment and for her many years of service, for her excellent HR and administrative support, her oversight of a whole range of projects, every project that had no one loved home ended up in her lap, for always being their for the staff, on behalf of the staff, the Board, the AC, the ARIN community and many others, thank you and best wishes.

(Standing ovation.)

John Curran: Thank you, Mary K. I’ll move on to Registration Services report with Leslie Nobile.

ARIN Updates: Registration Services

Leslie Nobile: Good morning, everyone. Leslie Nobile, director of the Registration Services department. My department, in case you don’t know, manages ARIN’s number resource pool and issues those resources to our community. These are our core functions. We do lots of things, but our core functions are to manage the resource pool and issue to customers, maintain the accuracy of the data and ARIN Whois database, do policy implementation and facilitation and – what else do we do? Oh, we run a help desk. That’s right. So those are our core functions.

Our team consists of our senior team on the left with Cathy, David, Jon, and Lisa. And on the right, Doreen, Sue, Mike, Chad, and Eddie. Doreen, Cathy, and Jon are all here, so hopefully you’ve had a chance to meet them. We have a help desk outside. It hasn’t been very busy. I guess too many other distractions. So what’s new? What are we doing? Right now we’re undergoing undertaking a project to review all of our internal processes and procedures in an effort to improve the customer experience. With v4 depletion, things have gotten tense and stressful. Our customers are stressed. The staff gets stressed.

We want to try to make things easier and more fluid, so we’re doing a really huge overhaul and evaluation of things to see how we can improve some of our processes and procedures. As part of that, we’re doing a customer satisfaction survey and we’re going to use that feedback in our enhancements and changes that we make. I’ll talk about that in another slide. We’ve recently deployed the new extended stats files. I will talk about that as well. We’re now asking ORGs to confirm in-region use on all resource requests, which I did mention in the Policy Experience Report. And we’re down to 2.43 /8s in our pool.

And we’re still in Phase 2 of our IPv4 countdown plan. If anyone is interested in knowing more about that, you can get a link to that from our home page. The survey. We’re including a survey link on all of the resource requests and the transfer requests that we’re getting. We rolled it out January 15th. We started by asking ten questions, and they’re all related to the overall customer experience from the very beginning to the very end. Ten questions may be too many. People tend to skip one or two. I may cut out those questions. There are some things we know that are consistently always the same, so we’re going to probably modify it a bit.

We’ve received 56 responses so far. Actually as of this week we have 66. So it’s getting better. Overall, 93 percent of our customers were either very satisfied or satisfied with the overall process, 5.5 percent were somewhat satisfied, and 1.8 was somewhat dissatisfied. And that was a single person. This just shows the graph. And the important area for us, anyway, is the blue and the gray. But obviously the rest is important because if there are things we can do to improve, we obviously want to do that. The question was overall how satisfied were you with the entire process.

The NRO format extended statistics. This was deployed on the 5th of March. It is available via ftp and http. The old delegated ftp stats files that you all probably have used over the years will remain until the 5th of May, then we’ll be taking those down. The new extended stats define what is currently registered, what’s issued to the community, to the customers, what we have reserved, and what ARIN has available to issue. The old ftp stats had just what was registered, what has been issued to the community. These have expanded quite a bit. All RIRs have implemented this new format.

Our current IPv4 inventory – I have a different number on every slide. Sorry. I did this in different days and then I never synched them up, so I’ll just tell you again it’s 2.43. We had as of March 31st 6.43 /16 equivalents in our returned, revoked, and held bucket. That’s the space we get back. It’s a very fluid bucket. We get space back on a daily basis for whatever reason, and then we recycle that space. We hold it for three months to clear filters, and then we recycle the space. So it does change every day. And then we have a /10 reserved for that policy dedicated IPv4 block to facilitate IPv6 deployment.

This chart. Okay. I’m going to improve this the next time, I promise. This is like so much data. I’m not even going to really speak to it too much. It really is just to show you that ARIN has received space back. We have recovered IPv4 blocks and ASNs over the years, and it’s gone from some highs, particularly in 2011, when the Interop gave back almost a full /8, to the lows of 2012.

So we’ve been getting returns back for many years, and we’re just starting to see a slight drop in that, and we’ll see what 2013 produces. And ASNs, we recover quite a few ASNs. Most of those are done due to revocations.

So the burn versus churn. This shows the IPv4 space that we get back in the red. And you can see we had pretty continuously gotten back space, recovered it one way or another. And at this point we’re getting back much less. The green shows what we’re issuing versus what we’re recovering. ASNs, it’s a different story. We get back a lot of different ASNs, 2 byte ASNs, continuously. We haven’t been back to the IANA in over five years for a block of 2 byte ASNs. And we get back so many that we have been very lucky, actually, because our community is still not quite able to use the 4 bytes.

So total ORGs served by ARIN. We all know how many members we have. We always talk about the 4,374 members, but we serve many, many more organizations. We have legacy customers and non-member customers, people who have end user space and ASNs from ARIN. So we’ve got 35,440 total ORGs in our database we maintain. 12 percent are ISP subscriber members; 44 percent are our non-member customers, our ASN and end user customers; and then 44 percent of those are legacy space, records that we inherited from the InterNIC that we continue to maintain today.

This looks at v4 and v6 subscribers in our region, our ISP subscribers. As I said, there’s 4,373. 56 percent of them are still IPv4 only, that’s all they have; 6 percent are IPv6 only, which those are legacy customers who had v4 space, so they don’t have ARIN issued space, but when they came to us to get IPv6, they became members; and then 37 percent have both IPv4 and IPv6. And that number is slowly creeping up, but it is very slow. So I added two slides. Because we’re in the Caribbean region, I wanted to point out some of the Caribbean specific statistics.

I can’t see this very well. Fortunately it’s right here. So the left chart shows our total number of ISP subscribers in the US and Canada. There’s 4,300 in the US and Canada. Out of that, 56 percent of them are v4 only; 38 percent of them have both v4 and v6; and 6 percent have v6 only. When you look on the right chart, those are Caribbean ISP subscriber members. There are 82 total ISP subscriber members here in the Caribbean. 62 percent of them are v4 only; 35 percent of them have both v4 and v6; and 3 percent of them have v6 only.

And it’s really interesting that these two graphs parallel so closely. So the Caribbean region is pretty much the same target and on the same track that the rest of the ARIN region is as far as IPv6 adoption, deployment. So I think that’s an interesting stat. These are our end user customers. And we looked at v6 again for both end users in the US and Canada and in the Caribbean. So there’s 4,993 total non-legacy end users, end users that have gotten space directly from ARIN. 4,958 are in the US and Canada: 77 percent of them are v4 only; 18 percent have both v4 and v6; and five percent are v6 only.

When you look at the Caribbean region, we have 35 end user customers in the Caribbean: 86 percent are v4 only; 11 percent are v4 and v6 only; and one, three percent, sorry, v6 only. So it’s similar stats, actually. Similar uptake rate in the end user communities. So that is all I have. Are there any questions?

Owen DeLong: Owen DeLong, Hurricane Electric. On the v6 only, both subscriber members and end users, what would you attribute that to? Are those probably people that have legacy v4?

Leslie Nobile: They are. That’s what I said. Yeah. They’re legacy v4, and then they come to ARIN and get their v6 allocation, and then they become a member.

Owen DeLong: Is there any way to line up the legacy blocks with that and consider them in the v4/v6 category? I think that would be a more useful statistic. Or a separate category, I guess, yeah. But having v6 only subscribers up there that aren’t really v6 only is confusing and misleading.

Leslie Nobile: Quite honestly, those are the legacy v4 holders. I guess if we clarified that somehow. But that is the situation. Those are the only ones in that category.

John Curran: We’re not aware of anyone who has come who has no resources seeking just v6.

Leslie Nobile: Right. That’s correct. So that’s it. Thanks for your time.

(Applause.)

John Curran: Thank you. We’re moving swiftly ahead. Next up is Communications and Member Services presented by Susan Hamlin.

ARIN Updates: Communications and Member Services

Susan Hamlin: Good morning, everyone. Excuse my voice; I lost it a couple days ago, and I’m hoping it returns shortly. But I would first like to start with the staff of Communications and Member Services and ask Dé Harvey in the back of the room to please stand. Dé is our awesome meeting planner.

(Applause.)

Susan Hamlin: In addition to all the activities, social activities, she planned for us this week, she’s also coordinated the CTU Ministerial Meeting and CaribNOG, so she’s had a lot of extra work this week, and we thank her for all of that. And I’d also like everyone else to stand: Einar, Hollis, Jennifer, Jason, Sean, and Erin, who are all here, who all, as you will see from their titles, have jobs not related to the meeting, full-time jobs, but are also very integral to all of what goes on here at the meeting. So I’d like you all to join me in thanking them for their work.

(Applause.)

Susan Hamlin: Just a few data points to show you that we stay pretty busy as a department. Talked about members. We do a lot of updates to the website. Jason handles a lot of pages. These are stats from the first quarter of this year. We continue to do a lot of outreach. ARIN on the Road, we go to trade shows, we’re involved in the Caribbean. We’ve had many events the first two months, and we’ll be busy the rest of the year.

And this does not include all of the Internet governance activities that you heard from Cathy Handley and that Mary K. have gone to in the past. We’re also very active on social media. Our followers on Twitter and Facebook begin to grow, and we encourage you all to follow us there and to participate. Also want to put in a pitch here for guest bloggers. We have a Team ARIN site. If you’re interested in writing about a subject you think the community would like to hear, please contact us. And we also have an active suggestion and consultation process. And since Monday – the stat’s a little old – we’ve had three new suggestions that have come in. So you all have been listening in the meeting and listening to the open mic.

And this year we’ve had two updates to the Number Resource Policy Manual. And we update this when there are new policies that are implemented.

Coming up this year we’re working on a few new features for you all. We have been having registration – meeting registration and elections on legacy software. And Mark and his group had said it’s old, it’s faulty, it’s time we move on. So with the Engineering department we’re looking at various companies to outsource our meeting registration and election system, and our goal is to make this more user-friendly, perhaps only require you to use your ARIN Online password and username so you don’t have to remember additional ones.

(Applause.)

Susan Hamlin: So we’re working on this. We hope to have some of this done by this year. We’ll see how that goes. Okay. Now, I want to do something a little different. We don’t hear much from you all, so I’m assuming that means you read every ARIN announcement that comes out. Yes. Wonderful. Except for John.

You also look at our Web page daily. You read all of our new information. So instead of boring you with what we’ve been doing, I’m going to ask for you all to participate. That’s what Communications and Member Services is all about.

So I would ask you all if you would please go to the home page of ARIN, and I’m going to ask a few questions. And I have a few prizes to bribe your participation. And as I put this up, I’m going to ask you to raise your hand when you have the answer. And please do not use search on the website.

So if we’re ready first question: What two cities are we holding ARIN on the Road events in May? Kevin?

Kevin Blumberg: Overland Park, Kansas; Birmingham, Alabama.

Susan: Okay. You’re a winner.

(Applause.)

Susan Hamlin: So I’m now going to ask Jason if he would just show everybody how most people might find it so you all can learn a little bit about our navigation if you’re not familiar with it. So we’re going to Meetings under Participation, and there you’ll see what’s scheduled and coming up. And you’ll see those two ARIN on the Road events.

John Curran: May I jump in? Jason, can you go to the front page? Also that little square that says ARIN in the dark blue background has a scroll that rotates. Annual Report it says now. In a moment it’s going to say ARIN on the Road. Click on it now, Jason, at the top, click at the actual graphic. That will take you to the ARIN on the Road page, which has the current meetings. A lot of times what you’re looking for is going to scroll in that box because we keep it current. You can actually go to the bottom and flip through the pages, but if you’re looking for something that’s happening right now, it might be one of the graphics rolling by in the marquee box on the home page.

Susan Hamlin: Okay. Next question. Don’t give away the shortcuts, John. If you are a member organization, what is the deadline this year to make sure your DMR is eligible to vote?

Bill Sandiford: 12th of August.

Susan Hamlin: 12th of August. Awesome. Jason, do you want to show us how to get there? Bill. Wonderful. We’ll see if you found it the same way. Participate – again, that Participate is all about things how you interact with ARIN. So Elections falls under that drop down. And we have an election calendar that’s published, and it will show you all the highlights of the public facing deadlines for elections this year. Just a few more. How many IPv4 /24s did ARIN allocate in March 2013? And I gave you a really easy hint, because I put the graphic up there. Owen?

Unidentified Speaker: But you have to find it on the website.

Susan Hamlin: Yes, but you have to find it on the website. Owen, do you have it?

Owen DeLong: 50,000.

Susan Hamlin: No.

Owen DeLong: You said “allocated.” 8,000.

Susan Hamlin: No repeat. 8,345?

Owen DeLong: Yeah.

Susan Hamlin: Jason, if you will walk us through. Stats are now under the Knowledge section. Did you all know that? And it happens to be the first graph on that page. Second graph. Sorry. What’s the next event we have listed on our Internet governance page? Andrew.

Andrew Dul: Fifth World Telecommunication/ICT Policy Forum.

Susan Hamlin: Exactly. Fifth World Telecom/ITC Policy Forum. So, again, Internet Governance from the home page is under Participate. And this is a fairly new section we put up this year, and we’re trying to keep it current. And on the landing page of Internet Governance, you’ll see the upcoming events. Just one last one: What’s the last functionality we added to ARIN Online? This is great usability testing. Disqualified. Who said that? Wonderful.

Jason, if you’ll show everybody where the ARIN Functionality page is. John referred to this the other day under Number Resources, and it’s a long page that talks about what’s there now, what’s next in the queue, what’s planned, and other things desired that have not yet been prioritized. Thank you all for playing. And when I get down, I’ll pass out the hats.

John Curran: Any questions for Susan?

Susan Hamlin: I’m not quite done. So participation is key. Many ways to participate. You attend these meetings. You can attend remotely. We have these meetings. We have the new Public Policy Consultations. The next one will happen at the NANOG meeting in June. If you can’t come to New Orleans, we have the same type of remote participation: webcast, chat, raise your hand to vote. So we encourage you all to do that.

The mailing list. You’re all familiar with those. Elections, suggestions. And then questions and comments. We, CMSD, don’t hear a lot from the community. I know we do in various departments, Leslie’s group. But there’s an Ask ARIN feature and ARIN Online. There’s an info@arin.net email that if you have a general question and don’t know where to direct it, send it to us. We encourage you all to get involved in social media for everywhere.

And that’s it. Hope to see you. Our next ARIN Public Policy Meeting will be in October in conjunction with NANOG. And we’re starting a new format. NANOG will be Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and the ARIN meeting will be Thursday, Friday probably through mid-afternoon. We’re finalizing that schedule. But we hope to see you there.

John Curran: Any questions for Susan on her presentation? Thank you, Susan.

Susan Hamlin: Thank you for participating.

John Curran: We have all been educated. Okay. Mark, come on up and give the Engineering Report.

ARIN Updates: Engineering

Mark Kosters: Sadly I will have no training exercises today. This is Mark. I’ll give the Engineering Report. And what I want to talk about is our theme for the past year, including 2013, is that our 2012 and 2013 success has been aided by contractors, but not near as many. And as Mary K. was going through her presentation, I realized how much we’ve used her over the last six months. So right now I have a staff of 20 filled positions of engineers. Seven of those have been hired over the last six months. So that’s pretty amazing.

Now, one of the things you can say, wow, that’s a lot of turnover. One of the things we were able to do was arrange a lot of the contractors to come over as full-time employees. So we lost no training, because it really takes three to six months of training to get engineers up to full speed. We do have one full-time slot available. So if you know of any quality assurance people that want a job, have them come and talk to me. And we have a lot more work to be done, and you’ll see about that.

Here’s how our breakout is broken out. We have seven people in operations, two managers. Seven people in development and a manager, fully staffed. One contractor is going to be here for a little bit longer. He’s an amazing coder. His name is Jay. He does a great job. But his time is coming to an end at some time in the near future. Quality assurance. We have four QA. We have two contractors still, and that’s waiting for a full time conversion. Project management. Peri is in the back as our Project Manager. And of course me.

Operations. What has operations been working on? Upgrading end of life equipment. I look at the back room and usually the old equipment is the stuff that has this yellow stuff on it, and I keep on looking back there to see when am I going to see all this equipment with the yellow markings go away. And they’re slowly going away. We have a good bit more to go. Also coupled with maintaining our various environments that we have running: production; operation test and evaluation; development; QA; and staging. And all these are important for us to put out for you guys to test with OT&E, but also for us to make sure that you have an error free as possible upgrade to new systems and so on as we put out.

We’ve had lots of EMC and Oracle challenges I’ll talk about in the future. We’ve also had some load balancer stability issues. And the load balancer issues have been we really want to put out some really cool features, but we need to do so with v6. And unfortunately whenever we try to enable some of these features with v6 enabled, it has led to unstable behavior and we’ve had to actually regress to earlier versions to keep things running reasonably.

We look forward to the days where there is actually feature parity with load balancers and everything else, v4 and v6, so we can actually add new services. Like, for example, one of the things we want to add is https offloading for Whois RWS so you can actually come in and – through an authenticated channel and see what’s actually happening.

We are also moving our production facility from Chantilly, ARIN’s headquarters, to a colocation facility. We’ve had some issues. One was that over the winter our generator wouldn’t start. And I went over there with my truck and we were able to jump start it and get it going, which was very important because the battery was about to run out. But those things, you never know what’s going to happen, and we think they will probably get better service out of colo.

IT support. There’s plenty of that going on. We’ve been working on billing integration, some of which you’ve heard about already, mainly with invoicing. And we’ve replaced our 12-year-old PBX with a VoIP system, again with Mary K.’s help. And what I’m going to do now is go through some of our core statistics so that you guys can see what the uptake is on various sorts of services that we have. First start with ARIN Online. You can see in 2013 that we’re having close to 5,000 new accounts activated; 2012 was a pretty good year, almost 15,000; and 2011 was a banner year, having over 20,000 accounts activated.

So you can see that ARIN Online is still getting a fair bit of traction. You can see how many people are actually using it. While there’s a few people that never have logged in, there’s a significant number that have logged in once. But what’s interesting is you go up the scale, a lot of people are power users of ARIN Online. And what I should do is find out the person who has used it the most. I think I’ll do that for next time. But there’s certainly a lot of people that come back for ARIN Online on if not a daily basis quite often.

Unidentified Speaker: Give them a hat.

Mark Kosters: Give them a hat. I like that idea. Now, here’s the interesting thing that I’ll bring up that Andy talked about yesterday, and that’s RESTful provisioning that is actually happening. Most people do reassignment with templates, but that is changing. And you can see that REST is actually – these are cumulative totals from the past three meetings.

You can see that REST is quickly approaching the amount of templates that – number of reassignments that are put out. And they’re close to if not exceeding what templates are doing in terms of transactions. Whois RWS loads. We’re actually running fairly normally now. We’re seeing about 420 queries per second, which is not too bad. It’s up 18 queries per second from the last meeting. What’s interesting as well is that RESTful calls have overtaken Port 43, which is traditional Whois service. Since March of 2012 has been consistently over what Whois – Port 43 is.

Here you can see what our load is. And I came aboard in 2008 – or 2009. And what was interesting, in 2010 we saw this tremendous spike of traffic. And we were going – the operations guys and I were talking about this, saying we need to become like Amazon or something, because if this keeps up, this is unbelievable. It’s since then quieted down. We had a number of very interesting scenarios that occurred, and they’ve all seemed to have gone away. But definitely the traffic has stayed up from where it was, starting in 2009. But it’s still not near as what we were seeing in 2010.

Here you can see how things are broken out by service type. One of the things you can’t see is people coming over Port 80, actually using the web interface to do their queries, because it’s a very, very nominal number compared to those people who use the Whois clients because of Port 43 or the RESTful service, which, again, like I said, has overtaken traffic wise, query wise, and number of hits against our Whois cluster. This is an interesting graph. This is total per month. In terms of v6 traffic, we’re seeing a little bit more as time goes on. It’s now getting to be about 2 percent of our actual traffic, total traffic.

And what’s interesting here is we had a while there that Port 80 – there was just a tremendous amount of traffic over Port 80 as opposed to Port 43. And that’s since gone away. And you can see that with the light sort of color there. There was about a year where this was occurring, and it’s since gone down. But the amount of people going over Port 43 has gone up dramatically. One of the questions that came up – I’ll now move to the IRR. A couple of years ago we made a conversion to IRR to make it conformant with the other IRRs in the region allowing for enhanced security.

And you can see – here you can see that the number of maintainers has gone up since that time. Andy gave a presentation in Philadelphia, if I’m not mistaken, showing that IRR traffic usage had gone down. But since that time it’s gone up since we made that conversion. Correspondingly, route inetnums has also gone up in terms of registrations, and the same thing with route6 inet6nums. So, again, smaller numbers, but you can see that people are starting to use it more.

Production RPKI. To get the trust anchor, you have to sign the Relying Party Agreement, RPA. And 72 people have actually signed up for this to date. This is up from 27 at the last ARIN meeting, so we’re starting to see a little more uptake. For signing resources, 47 organizations have certified their resources. Of those 47 organizations, 21 have actually created ROAs, and this was at seven at the last ARIN meetings. There’s now 60 ROAs. Before there was 19. And there’s now 82 networks or autonomous system numbers, and this was 30. So we’re starting to see a little bit uptake there as well.

However, Web delegated RPKI. We put this out to the community because we were feeling some pressure from various aspects saying what we really don’t – we don’t want hosted. We want to be able to create our own certificate authority and we want to communicate with ARIN and we want to be able to – we want to run this RPKI ourselves. Fine, no problem. We found out a fairly simple way of actually doing this using the web. But to date we have zero participants. This is really not all that unexpected. There’s only a handful within RIPE’s region, for example. And in talking to Andrew de la Haye about this, it was actually extremely hard for people to actually get through the process of doing this delegated scenario and actually involved a lot of people at a RIPE conference putting this together to get the interfaces working correctly.

And the reason why it’s not popular is, one, is you have to set up your own CA. You have to have your own software suite. There’s people out there that help you do it. It’s still somewhat difficult, and we’re in the early days. It’s very hard to set up up/down protocol correctly. And there’s just not a lot of general interest from the community in general, just from a number of targeted participants. Here’s what we’re planning on doing within development/QA for the next six months. We have improvements to existing systems, bugs, a few stability fixes, that sort of thing.

One of the things that we’ve done is we’ve put out integrated invoices. You’ve probably noticed that. We have a fee calculator now, web-based RPKI, extended stats enhancements, and various minor bug fixes. Initiatives that we have going underway. Improvements to internal billing systems. We have to get rid of some of the these things that are dependent on Oracle because we’re moving to Postgres, which is a little bit further down the slide. The integration of third party election and meeting registration systems that Susan talked about a little bit earlier. The big one is moving from Oracle to Postgres. This is a big one for us. We really want to move off of Oracle. John’s agreeing.

And finally getting up/down protocol ready. We’re hoping to do some Interop testing with the regional registries at the IETF this summer in Berlin. So we hope to have some good sort of progress to mention at the next meeting. We’re also moving our production facility away from ARIN HQ to a colocation facility. And we’re creating an OT&E instance of RPKI for those who want to play with it but really don’t want to play with it in a production sense, which makes sense.
So let’s talk about some outages. One of the things we’re trying to do at ARIN is we’re trying to be telco-like. We don’t want to have many, if any, outages at all. We’ve had a number of planned outages. Usually the ones that we do are on Saturdays and they’re usually dealing with software upgrades.

But you may have noticed that we had some over weekday nights. And this is to deal with some stability issues that we’ve had with Oracle housed on our EMC. We’ve also had two unplanned outages, sadly, that again were caused by the EMC. We’ve had numerous failures with it. Secondary systems didn’t work with it. Configuration issues that we’ve had with our Oracle host, et cetera, which we found out the hard way. So what do you do? You call tech support. Well, one of the things I realized because I came from a big company – and there’s multiple ways of looking at tech support. And big companies seem to get better service than a smaller company. One is we were getting multiple handoffs. We were saying: But, but, but we’re important. Do you want your mail to stop? We really need to get these things fixed.

But we were getting multiple handoffs from people, we were getting the same questions asked over and over again by different customer support staffs, and they were asked to do the same mitigation techniques over and over again. It’s kind of like the definition of madness: Do the same thing over and over again and expect different results. It just didn’t happen. And, frankly, ARIN is, in their sense, too small and we got suboptimal support. And one of the reasons why we’re moving away from Oracle is that we think we can do better with Postgres. And escalation has been basically futile. Both Nate and I have tried multiple times trying to escalate things, and, frankly, it was not very effective. So, with that, any questions?

John Curran: “We’re trying to be telco-like.” Let’s not say that again. Okay? Let’s go for we’re trying to be carrier-grade reliable.

Mark Kosters: Carrier-grade reliable.

John Curran: A lot of people don’t want to deal with a telco-like entity. Particularly this room, actually.

Kevin Blumberg: Kevin Blumberg, The Wire, ARIN AC. It was nice to see that we all have our problems and at least you’re disclosing them. I’ve had customers in similar situations. They’re big enough to need the big stuff; they’re small enough that the big companies don’t care about them. And in many cases what they have done is found intermediary companies that will provide the support to them that have the direct relationships and work with enough customers to make themselves big enough.

And that would just be a suggestion, maybe getting support instead of paying the highest price with EMC and getting nowhere, find a really good EMC partner that’s willing to support you in that regard. Just one suggestion. Since we’ve been talking about tech for a long time, I figured now would probably be a good time to ask this question. We’ve seen a marked increase in malware attacks, specifically targeting passwords, of online resources. And I would really hope that you guys are able to add – you guys and girls – are able to add for ARIN Online and other resources two-factor authentication.

As a member, I’m more than happy to pay for a hardware token, but, at the same time, most of them now are just software tokens inside of all of the phones. And I would really appreciate being able to have that kind of support for ARIN Online.

(Applause.)

John Curran: Any other comments or questions? Microphones remain open.

Mark Kosters: I do have one thing. Kevin, if you could put in an ACSP for that, that awesome suggestion, so that we can actually record that.

John Curran: You got that Kevin? ACSP?

Thank you, Mark.

(Applause.)

John Curran: Next up we have the ARIN Advisory Council report with Chairman John Sweeting.

ARIN Advisory Council Report

John Sweeting: Good morning, everyone. John Sweeting, Chair of the Advisory Council. I’ll give a real quick report here trying to help get us out to the sunshine and water and waves and beach. Okay. This is a photo from our face-to-face meeting that we have every year in January to get some training from general counsel and our beloved leader here, John Curran. As you can see, Milton wasn’t able to make it, Stacy wasn’t able to make it, but 13 of us were there and had a real good time.

For our meetings, we actually meet three times a year face-to-face: the one in January, the one for the spring meeting, and the one for the fall meeting. And other than that, we have a conference call scheduled the third Thursday of every month. And then we can do calls if we need them for emergency business. So the AC role – oh, before I go into this, I, once again, would like to welcome our new members, Milton Mueller and John Springer.

(Applause.)

John Sweeting: And I would like to thank our outgoing member, Chris Morrow, for his three years of dedicated work in helping us accomplish what we accomplished.

(Applause.)

John Sweeting: So we have a new PDP in place that I think everybody’s heard about. And we’ve been trying to adjust to it, and that was one of the main focuses of our January face-to-face. And in the new PDP, the AC role is, once the author submits a proposal, we work with that author. I assign shepherds, primary and secondary. They work with the author to ensure a valid problem statement for the proposal. Once we get that ironed out, then the AC will move it onto our docket and do whatever we need to do to move it to Draft Policy, gather input from the community, it will get posted to the PPML at that time, and we’ll continue working with the input we’ve received from the community to move it forward to a Recommended Draft Policy.

Once it’s a Recommended Draft Policy, then we can bring it to a Public Policy Consultation to gather the last little bit to present it and let you know that, hey, we think this is a good policy and we’re going to recommend it unless somebody gives us a real good reason not to. After we do that presentation and we post it to PPML for one last call so that anybody that’s out there that thinks we’re not doing the right thing gets their last word, and then we will recommend it to the Board of Trustees. Now, anywhere along that process we can abandon or remand back to the author – there’s several different tools we have to cut the life of that proposal or Draft Policy short.

I’m looking at Einar to see if I’m doing good here. He’s kind of the guy that keeps us all on track when it comes to the PDP. So, so far in 2013 we’ve had six new proposals. Well, two were carried over from 2012. We have one that’s pending. That would be 186 that was just submitted yesterday. And one that we have remanded back to the originator, which I believe April 28th it kind of dies if we don’t hear back from the originator. And four have been moved to Draft Policy. Two are moved to Recommended Draft Policy and presented here, as well as the two that are still in Draft Policy that were also presented here.

So the two in Recommended Draft Policy, we’ll look at the feedback we got from this meeting today in our meeting that follows this meeting and decide what to do with those. Some of the things that the Advisory Council participates in, besides just the PDP, which is on there, but there’s the Fellowship Program. We have a participant on the Selection Committee, and then we have a mentor that volunteers to meet with the Fellows and guide them through their ARIN meeting experience and make sure that they have a very good experience while they’re here at the meetings.

We also have an Outreach Program where we participate in the ARIN booths, which focuses on getting the word out on IPv4 depletion and IPv6 education, promoting ARIN meetings, and we also are now participating in the ARIN on the Road events. We have a member participate in the Nomination Committee and also on the PDP Committee. And then we do just about anything else that Susan or Nate or John or anyone else on the ARIN staff request of us. We also currently have an Improving Communications work group that is headed up by Chris Grundemann. And he’ll probably be sharing some things in the next meeting or at the next PPC on where we’re going with that. All right. That would be it.

John Curran: Questions for John Sweeting, the ARIN AC chair? Yes, center rear.

Chris Grundemann: Chris Grundemann, ARIN AC. As John Sweeting mentioned, we have an Improving Communications Committee that’s made up right now of myself, Bill Darte, and John Springer. So if anyone has comments, feedback, or any other input into how the Advisory Council and ARIN in general can communicate better with the community or how the community can communicate better amongst itself, we’d love to hear that, so please send it to us.

John Curran: People who have suggestions on how to improve communication with the AC or inter AC communication, hunt down Chris. Okay. Next up we have the ARIN Financial Report, and it will be given by Treasurer Paul Andersen.

ARIN Financial Report

Paul Andersen: Thank you. The Fin Com, which I head, has been busy since we last saw dealing with finalizing the financials for 2012, with our year-end being the calendar year. We’ve been doing some work with staff to improve the investment policies, both reviewing the investments themselves and also just reviewing some of the internal controls, and reviewing the quarterlies and financials, which I’ll get into in a second coming up. So we’ve also been doing a lot of work with fees. You’ve all been very active emailing. And as John announced just as a reminder, the Fin Com will be heading a committee where we’ll be looking for some volunteers. So if you’re still interested in kind of reviewing some of the principles of the fee schedule, please email John and he will put your name in the hopper. We’ll also be – go ahead.

John Curran: Just one note. We have 17 volunteers so far. If you have volunteered and you have not received an acknowledgment from me, send an email again. I don’t think I’ve missed anyone. And I will check with Paul to find out when we’re going to close volunteers and pass these all down to the Fin Com.

Paul Andersen: Do you want to just pick a date now to close those off?

John Curran: Whenever you wish. Giving people some time but allowing us to get started; perhaps the end of the week, Friday?

Paul Andersen: Yes. The end of the week, Friday. Please put your name in, and we will get back to you hopefully the week after.

John Curran: Thank you.

Paul Andersen: No, that’s a good point. We’ll be dealing with the 990, as Val alluded earlier. That’s going to be coming to our plate as well as in the next quarter. Before we see you, we’ll start the budgeting process for next year. Getting into a bit of the actual financials. I’ll go over some of the 2012 financial results. The word “draft” is in there because when this slide was prepared they were draft, but I think I can report that the Board this week did finalize that so these are now the final numbers for 2012. Go over quickly where our first quarter ended off and just give you an update on the reserves.

So last year we came in at $14,991,492 in revenue. You can see the breakoff of v4 subscription revenue is still the bulk of our revenue. You’ll see that we did post a loss. That was expected. Your Board has been budgeting a loss for the last about three years, mainly to draw down the reserves which we think is a bit high. And we’ve been justifying that because we have been investing heavily in the ARIN Online, so that’s a bit of the overage there. Even though we posted an operating loss, your Financial Services team led by Bob has outdone itself again. As you can see, we netted about $2.7 million in our investments last year. So we still have posted an increase of 2.1 million to our reserve.

Giving you a quick breakdown on some of the differences between 2011 and 2012. We saw about a 7 percent increase in our salaries and benefits. That was due to a few factors. First, there was some customary raises. We did a discretionary 401(k) payout. And we’ve had some increases in our health insurance due to family coverage. Appears the ARIN staff family have been growing their personal families, which is always a good thing. Depreciation is also up at 9 percent. This again is due to the heavy investments we’ve been making in ARIN Online in the last few years and capitalization of that project. There was a 29 percent decrease in our communications. And that’s thanks to Mary K. and Mark and their team regarding the Internet access arrangements from ARIN’s various facilities both at the office and at the colocations.

There was a series of renegotiation of contracts and vendor switches. As you can see, there was a sizable decrease. Travel was down about 10 percent over the year. There was just less travel than anticipated and less people ended up going.

Legal was down about 39 percent, and that is simply just due to less litigation. So thanks to Steve and his team for that. We did have a write off due to abandoned project we did in 2012, which is why general office you’ll see that bump. So that’s a one-time bump; we’re not anticipating that to continue. Outreach expense also is up about 37 percent. That’s due to two factors. There was more outreach. We were doing a lot more ARIN on the Road last year, and there’s also been some reclassification. Our PR firm, which you would have previously seen under Professional Services, has been moved into the Outreach.

And then all other line items, there wasn’t very much noise. So, again, about 15 million in total expenses. Going on to the last quarter. Registration revenues and expenses are pretty much exactly where we expect. We also have seen the markets – we’ve seen about a $1.2 million increase in our own book value. Going on to the reserves itself. Again, our investment advisor continues to give us strong returns. We see again in the 2012 now that unaudited work can be removed with just north of 25 million. Specifically we ended 2012 at 26,961,000 in your reserves.

Let’s get that slide. Here’s how since 2001 when we started our current investment policy – the gains each year. We’ve seen since 2001 a net gain of about $11,500,000 to our reserves. And as a reminder, our reserve policy is to keep about one to two years of operating expense. We’re currently at about 1.7. The Board has been giving directions to try and draw that a little back closer to one than two. As of the last quarter, we ended off at about $27.3 million. And, as I said, the last three budgets have tried to draw down on that. Thanks very much to Bob Stratton again who makes this very easy, and I wish him the best.

I’d like to also point out thanks to Nate, who has been assisting recently to the Fin Com, and Val, who has been doing a superb job in that department. I’d ask you to thank them right now for their efforts.

(Applause.)

Paul Andersen: And John, too. Sorry, I forgot.

John Curran: Any questions on the Treasurer’s report?

Kevin Blumberg: Kevin Blumberg, The Wire, ARIN AC. Couldn’t resist, Paul, sorry. If you could go back to the slide in terms of the expenses for – thank you. The only question I have is just in regards to that little line item at the bottom, “All Other Line Items,” which is a fairly significant number. It dwarfs some of the others. Is it just because they’re all tiny amounts?

Paul Andersen: No. So the – this is – was a select expenses. I generally have just pointed out where there’s been major variances year to year. And the “All Other Line Items” had a .72 percent difference. So we just did not – it was –

Kevin Blumberg: I understand. I’m just trying to understand what “Other Line Items” are more than anything, even if it was just – you don’t need the amounts in them, just what sort of goes into that category.

Paul Andersen: So I would suggest you can look at our 2011 – the full details are in the audited reports. The 2011 is posted, and the 2012 will be posted –

John Curran: I was going to say we’ll have the 2012 up in the next week or so.

Kevin Blumberg: Oh, okay. So the actual audited statements will show that information.

Paul Andersen: It just doesn’t fit nice onto a PowerPoint slide.

John Curran: I actually have the full delta, so if you have a particular category you want to talk about, I’m happy to go over it.

Kevin Blumberg: No, I was just – again, when I see numbers in something that’s “All Other” and it’s actually a fairly large number, I’m more curious than anything else. But you said it will be in the audited –

Paul Andersen: The entire functional breakdown is in the audited financials that are posted.

Kevin Blumberg: Thank you very much.

Paul Andersen: Other questions?

John Curran: Thank you, Paul.

(Applause.)

John Curran: Next up is the ARIN Board of Trustees report with Chairman Timothy Denton.

ARIN Board of Trustees Report

Tim Denton: The shortest, dullest report in the history of reporting. The ARIN Board met. It set budgets. It approved policy. That’s my report. Would you like it longer?

(Applause.)

Tim Denton: Thank you very much. That’s what we did. And there’s one more. You can read as well as I can. Any questions?

John Curran: Questions for the Chairman?

Tim Denton: Thank you.

John Curran: Thank you, everyone.

(Applause.)

John Curran: Okay, that concludes the morning reports. We’re now in the Open Microphone session. The mics are open for any topics, policy matters over the last week, the operation of the organization, financial topics, the reports of this morning.

Open Microphone, followed by adjournment. It’s not to discourage people. We will be here as long – as long as you wish.

Tim Denton: Why not discourage them?

John Curran: Closing is due for noon. It’s 10:14. So we have an abundance of minutes for Open Microphone.

Open Microphone

Andrew Dul: Andrew Dul. I wanted to bring up the topic of – this is related to the new fee schedule, but not the fee schedule, but whom fees apply to. As we noted in one of the slides earlier today, only about 50 percent of the people who receive resources from ARIN are currently contributing to ARIN’s operational cost, and the people who are not are all those legacy resource holders without any formal agreement. I personally believe it’s long time that those organizations start providing some monetary compensation to ARIN for the services they have received for so many years for free, and I personally would like to see ARIN begin the process of invoicing these organizations, as onerous as that may be. I believe it’s long time for that to occur.

And, finally, one of the reasons that this, of course, is highlighted now is that we have determined in our new fee schedule to raise fees on our end users and our legacy RSA holders. And so the divide between the freeloaders and those who are participating in the community is now even greater. So a legacy RSA holder is no longer just paying $100 and a freeloader is continuing to pay zero. I would like to see that range narrowed over a period of time. It’s not about necessarily collecting more revenue. ARIN does not need more revenue. I would like to see the fees overall reduced over time and more people who participate in the ARIN routing and registry system to pay their fair share. Thank you.

John Curran: Okay. Thank you for raising that. As I swapped some email earlier on this with you, it would take a conscious decision of the Board to go that course because the Board has said that we provide registration services to legacy holders without charge, that has been our position, and that we encourage them to come in and sign an LRSA which gives them certain rights and responsibilities and come under the fee schedule. So sending an invoice out tomorrow to people who we have taken a position that says we have been providing this for no charge first requires us to change, to consciously change, the position.

So I will bring this to the Board to discuss. There’s also an aspect – while we have no doubt of our ability to operate the registry according to the policy set by the community for all resources, including legacy resources, there is some question about the ability to issue an invoice to a party that we’ve never established any other relationship with. So that needs to be considered in the act of changing our position to say we will now charge these holders. But that and legal will get together, we’ll work on what’s the options and have the Board reevaluate what’s been a standing 14-year position to see whether it’s time to change. Thank you.

Scott Leibrand: I have a remote participant comment from Marla Azinger. She wanted to thank the folks who are controlling the cameras. She’s been remotely participating and said this is the best it’s ever been at an ARIN meeting. So thank you from her, and from me, for all of the work that you guys do to make remote participation possible.

John Curran: Thank you. They’re in the back. Thank you, everyone.

(Applause.)

John Curran: I’m actually not aware of a past case where remote participants have praised the facilities. So thank you very much, back there. Yes, center front.

Cathy Aronson: Hi, Cathy Aronson, ARIN AC. This meeting was somewhat light on policy proposals. Not that I’m complaining about that by any stretch of the imagination. But maybe I should have asked this maybe at the other meeting, but I was wondering if maybe we could all give some thoughts about presentations that might be interesting to this community that we could also put on the agenda if we have another policy cycle that’s light. Because it seems like there might be things of benefit, and as an AC member I’d be happy to make that happen. So if you have any thoughts, let me know.

John Curran: Okay. Thank you.

Kevin Blumberg: Kevin Blumberg. I’m going to help you out here. So over the past couple of days we’ve had a number of discussions on a new three-letter acronym, PRP, Post-Run out Policy. We know it’s happening. We’ve already now started seeing some not edge cases but some significant issues where once we hit run out, there are policies that will no longer work for most situations, especially new entrants.

So rather than giving suggestions to the community on how to clean up or to simplify some of the policies, I would ask that you all take some time to look at the NRPM and go: If I was a new entrant, would I be able to go to ARIN or work with ARIN in any way, shape, or form? If I’m an existing member and it’s been five years since I was last at ARIN, would I be able to do what I need to do? Use case studies of three or four different types of organizations, size, et cetera, and try to see are there problems with the NRPM where post-run out we run into snafus. Because by the time post-run out happens, it could be a couple policy cycles before we get this fixed.

John Curran: Thank you. Left first. Left side.

Milton Mueller: Milton Mueller, Syracuse University and Advisory Council. I’m just picking up the gauntlet that was thrown down by Andrew, and I want to make it clear to the Board and to you, John, that there would certainly not be consensus in the community on taking what some of us would view as a precipitous action and others have compared to a game of chicken. I think one of the things that puzzles me about the attitudes behind those kinds of proposals is that the legacy situation is indeed a v4 phenomenon.

It’s literally an artifact, sort of like the ccTLDs when ICANN was formed. There’s a bunch of people out there that got things in a process that was very informal. And ICANN initially tried to rope all the ccTLDs into their contractual regime and quickly backed away from that, wisely backed away from it, and ended up actually creating a whole supporting organization structure for the ccTLDs. I’m not suggesting anything like that. What I am suggesting is that the legacy problem is not something that should exercise our minds that much on a going forward basis. I think there’s a window of five to ten years in which it’s really not a problem, but I can see a lot of legal angst and a lot of conflict and a lot of problems being caused by trying to forcibly clean up this problem. And I don’t really see a problem, frankly. So just want to make that clear.

John Curran: And to note, I’m not advocating that we change or not change the position that we’ve had over the years. But having had it over the years, it’s every now and then appropriate for the Board to reevaluate it and see if it should remain current.

Milton Mueller: Another thing. There was a proposal some – I don’t know, a year ago, two years ago by a guy named Benson Schliesser that tried to deal with this issue in what I thought was a pretty creative way. I can’t remember the details of the proposal, but when you’re looking at solutions, that might be something to revisit.

John Curran: Okay. Also folks should remember that to the extent we believe address space will go to the people who end up needing it, every transfer ends up with address space ending up under a RSA. So as that space comes back in, that’s actually cleaning up that problem as well through the market mechanism of transfers. Center rear.

Jason Schiller: Jason Schiller, Google. I wanted to follow up on Kevin Blumberg’s point about post-runout policy. And I wanted to give a very clear example of something that’s not going to work, because we discussed this, and when we did, it became very clear to me, oh, there really is an issue with not just this but many other policies, and that’s slow start. So imagine I’m an organization that hasn’t come back to ARIN recently or I come back infrequently, so I don’t have a year’s worth of history in terms of documenting my need. The way slow start works now is you get a small allocation, say a /22. You consume that, you come back, you get a /21. You consume that, you come back, you get a /20.

Imagine if I as an organization suddenly find I need, oh, I don’t know, a /16 and the only thing available to me is the slow start model because I don’t have a year’s worth of history, does that mean I go out on the transfer market and I find a /22 and I use that and then I find a /21 and I use that and then I find a /20 and I use that? That’s a lot of transactions that’s going to be very expensive and it’s going to be very hard to line up all of those sized transactions in order and then knock them down like dominos. So this is a very clear example of a policy that’s not going to translate well into a transfer market.

John Curran: Okay. I know people want to respond to that, but I want to continue with the queue. So Bernadette and then remote.

Bernadette Lewis: Thank you. I just wanted to take the opportunity, John, to really commend ARIN on its outreach to the Caribbean. The fact that this policy meeting is happening here in the Caribbean again in Barbados I think is a testimony to ARIN’s commitment. And we appreciate it. I’m speaking on behalf of the Caribbean Telecommunications Union. We have our meeting, Ministerial Forum, running next door. I just wanted to put that on record and to thank ARIN for the support that it has given us that has enabled us to explain more and get the information out there pertaining to the Internet and what’s happening and also publicly to acknowledge the support that ARIN gave us to enable us to be in Dubai.

John Curran: Yes. I just want to say thank you very much. And also we greatly appreciate the ability to work with the CTU to get out to the community in this region, because being able to work together for us to be able to reach out to them is much easier than us trying to find them. And your help has also been instrumental. Thank you.

(Applause.)

Bernadette Lewis: It’s a great partnership. It’s a good marriage, a solid marriage.

John Curran: Thank you. I agree. Yes. Remote, then Owen.

Scott Leibrand: I have a comment from Kevin Otte participating as an individual. He wanted to agree with Milton and say that trying to bill for legacy users is going to be an awful lot of effort for very little gain. And he also points out that these ORGs are going to have to come to ARIN for IPv6 resources at some point anyway, so they will start paying then.

John Curran: Owen, center front. So I want to say one thing: Microphones remain open, but I will be closing them shortly. The remote participation remains open; I will be closing it shortly. Please come forth to the microphones or in the jabber room if you have comments. Go.

Owen DeLong: Owen DeLong, Hurricane Electric, ARIN AC. I want to let Jason know there is work being done by a number of different people on a number of different ways to address the impending problems that have been brought up, so I don’t think he needs to worry too much. He can sign on to whichever of the projects emerge on PPML that he likes and help in that way.

John Curran: Excellent. Okay. Microphones remain open. Yes. Go ahead, right microphone.

Bevil Wooding: Bevil Wooding, CaribNOG. I just have an update that I wanted to share with the ARIN community. ARIN has been supporting CaribNOG over the years. And this meeting – I just got news that we are well over our expected numbers for the meeting that begins this afternoon. We are now at 125 registered participants.

(Applause.)

Bevil Wooding: That will be the largest number of registered participants. And we took the registration offline last night, and we’ve been getting calls all morning for people who still want to come in. So I want to thank you, John, and thank ARIN for the support that it has given to CaribNOG, and just want to commit again to supporting you the best we can in the region in what you have to do here.

John Curran: Thank you. Wonderful to work with you. Okay. I’m going to close the microphones and remote participation. Last chance. Yes, Mr. Sweeting.

John Sweeting: I just want to remind the AC members that we are going to meet immediately following what John does next – which I believe he’s going to adjourn, thank you – in the Garrison Room, which is just out to the left and back into some doors down there. There’s signs.

John Curran: There’s no break between this meeting and the AC. There’s no beach. There’s no pool. No ocean waves. There’s just work, work, and work. Okay. People who want to work on this stuff can run for the AC. It’s fun.

Closing Announcements and Meeting Adjournment

John Curran: I will now move to closing announcements. Yes. I’d like to thank our sponsors, LIME and Google, for the connectivity and webcast.

(Applause.)

John Curran: Do not forget the meeting survey, www.arin.net/31 – ARIN 31/surveys.html. Or a paper copy. They’re available and you can deposit it when you exit the ballroom. You get entered to win a Google Nexus 10. CaribNOG, as Bevil said, will be starting Wednesday afternoon and runs through Friday in the Peninsula. Should be a very exciting time. Check your bill. You should not have been billed for wireless connectivity. It is in the room rates that everyone has paid. So it should not be there. Check it on the way out. Have them remove it if it is. Recycle your name badges. Drop these off at the registration desk. We will use them again. They are plastic. Fish don’t like them. They don’t bury and decompose. Please drop them off. We’re trying to cut down on unnecessary waste at ARIN. This is an important part. We go through these.

Okay. Thank you for being part of ARIN 31. We’re going to see you in New Orleans in June for the ARIN Public Policy Consultation. For those people at NANOG, that will be at the NANOG meeting. And then we’ll see you in Phoenix in October at ARIN 32. Thank you very much. This concludes the meeting. You are adjourned.

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