AMM transcript

Session One
Session Two
Session Three
Session Four

Session One

Friday 7 September 2007
0900-1100

Welcome

PAUL WILSON:

Well, good morning, everybody. It's 9:30, which I think is 9:00 in Indian time, and I think we'd better get started now so we can move through today's agenda.

I'm Paul Wilson, Director-General of APNIC, as I'm sure you know, and, as you also know, I'm here in New Delhi for the 24th APNIC Open Policy Meeting, which is being held jointly with SANOG 10.

I'm here with quite a number of APNIC staff, who I'm sure most of you have met, but, if you haven't, then please, by the end of the day, feel free to approach any of the APNIC staff, who are generally well uniformed today in the blue and black T-shirts, and please feel very free to call on the APNIC staff for anything you need, but also to say hello and introduce yourselves to us, because that's one of the most important things about this meeting.

So I think I would like to start by thanking the sponsors and hosts of this meeting. There's quite a number, because of the - particularly because of the joint meeting with SANOG. The list is here, but I'd like to especially mention SANOG itself, because this has been quite a hard effort on the part of SANOG to work together with APNIC and to bring this meeting to you, and I think, for the most part, it's been pretty successful.

The local host is ISPAI, the Internet Service Providers Association of India, who've provided fantastic support as the local host and worked also very closely with us, with SANOG on the local preparations. NIXI, the National Internet Exchange of India is the diamond sponsor, so they made a very substantial contribution to the cost of this meeting.

In the gold sponsor category, we have Reliance.

Ruby sponsors are Afilias, Google and I'll give a suspension mention here to the Internet Society, who are a ruby sponsor on account of a large contribution to the fellowship program. And, unfortunately for the Internet Society, their logo hasn't yet appeared in this list of hosts and sponsors, so I'd like to give a special thanks to the Internet Society and try to compensate a little.

I've put the Internet Society on this list for the first time today, but previously they've not been on the list just to clarify for the sake of those with an eye for attention to detail. Thank you, Sam.

But just to give the Internet Society a little bit of compensation for the low profile they've been given so far, I'd like to recognise that very substantial contribution to the fellow program for the SANOG meeting and the APNIC meeting, which has been very important in helping to bring people to this meeting who may not have found it so easy without that type of assistance.

I'll just jump to the bottom of the sponsors list and just mention in particular the APNIC silver sponsors for this meeting, who've come in, most of them as usual, and thanks very much for the repeated contribution from CNNIC, JPNIC, KRNIC and TWNIC.

So I would invite you all to express your thanks to all of those sponsors for all the support that they've given to this meeting today. Thank you.

APPLAUSE

OK. On to some equally important business. The question of prizes. We've got a couple of prize draws happening today. The first is to anyone who would like to go and sign up for an APNIC digital certificate or update your details at the APNIC Helpdesk. And by doing that, you won't just go into the draw, you will actually get an APNIC Eco-stapler, which is a very handy little device that pins bits of paper together without the aid of little pieces of metal. It's quite an interesting thing and quite a nice little gift, so please make use of that and also go and help us out by making sure that we've got up-to-date details for all the APNIC members here who are here.

Secondly, there is a survey in relation to the MyAPNIC service and Sunny, I think, will be distributing forms, survey forms, for you to fill out during the day, and there will be a prize draw which, I believe, is a digital multimedia frame.

OK, on to an overview of the agenda for today. As usual, we've got some reporting from the APNIC Secretariat and from the RIRs between now and the morning teatime. If we have time, we'll open the microphone for discussion, but I'd like to emphasise that this meeting, although there will be quite a number of reports today, it's not supposed to be all one way, there's really ample opportunity and great encouragement to everyone here to please participate raising issues and asking questions any time you like, but particularly during those open microphone slots.

After morning tea, we've got a session on the status of the APNIC fee structure discussions. There's been a lot of discussion during the week. That fee structure session was held on Wednesday and Randy will be reporting back from that and hopefully will be continuing the discussion, particularly about the issue of the future fee structure for APNIC.

In the afternoon, we have reports from the APNIC EC from the SIGs, which have gone on this week. We have a report, a panel session on the progress that APNIC Secretariat has made on the outcomes of the member survey and, if you recall, in March this year, we announced the results of the latest APNIC members survey, as regards to where we go in future and the Secretariat has been responding to that. And we'll be talking about that.

We have a report from the IANA, from the NRO and from the Address Council, more open-microphone sessions and then hearing the result of the APNIC fee structure vote and we'll be hearing about the next meetings, APNIC 25 and 26. So this is the agenda bashing. Can you suggest anything else that we need to discuss or fit into the schedule today? If not, I'll go straight on.

Voting procedure for interim fees proposal

One of the first things I'd like to talk about today is the voting procedure for this interim fee structure proposal that is under way at the moment. The voting, the onsite voting is open and APNIC members who have registered to come into this room and receive your registration details will have ample opportunity to cast your vote, if you haven't done so already.

I'd like to go through that now in case there is anyone, for instance, who would like to vote early and not wait. But I would encourage anyone who is going to be here for the rest of the day - and I hope most of us are - you can wait and vote a little later on, particularly, in particular after the APNIC fee structure session, which is at the end of this morning.

This vote is open to APNIC members only. It is an APNIC member business, an issue of APNIC member business. The proposal has been on the APNIC website for quite some time and you'll references to it and links to it from the APNIC website. The vote is basically, "Do you agree that APNIC should adopt the proposed interim APNIC fee structure adjustments?"

We have an authorisation system for voting contact within the APNIC membership. So we are asking that, or suggesting that only registered voting contact for APNIC members can vote. Either online - the online period has ended but we did have, as is normal now, we had the online voting period open for two weeks up until the - ten days or so up until the 5th of September. You may also be carrying proxies for other APNIC members and if so, you should have ballot papers for other APNIC members who have signed their proxy to you and, of course, what we're doing today is voting on site for anyone who hasn't voted online. Of course, you're not allowed to vote twice and you won't have a ballot paper in the case that, for instance, you have already voted in the online ballot.

So the voting is open now and it closes at 2pm, which is after the lunch break and, as I mentioned, it's fine for you to wait until the fee structure session has been - until we've been through that session and even into lunch, but make sure that you have voted by 2pm at the very latest, because ballot papers after that won't be accepted.

Now one piece of good news, particularly for the volunteers who are generally called on to count these ballot papers is that we have a new system for on site voting here, where there is a single ballot paper for each member and depending on your membership category, that ballot paper will be worth anything from one vote to 64 votes. If you recall, in the past, if you were an extra large paper, you had 64 papers to fill out and the scrutineers had 64 to count for every extra large member. I don't think this is terribly difficult to understand or to explain, but you will have, as I mentioned, a single ballot paper corresponding to your membership category and, as I've said, if you are carrying proxy votes for anyone else, then you will have a ballot paper for each of the other members who you are representing here today.

It has always been possible in the past for a member to split their votes, to take 32 votes and have one of their representatives fill out those 32 out of 64 and have someone else fill out the other 32 to vote in any combination that you like. If you would like to do that, then you can, in this case, you can trade in the ballot paper which you received for a set of individual ballot papers at the APNIC registration desk and that's just to allow anyone who does wish to split the vote or to distribute ballot papers among representatives they have here to still be able to do that as you may have done in the past.

The ballot form itself is quite simple and hopefully self-explanatory. It's a simple yes/no question, so you're being asked to simply mark one of those boxes with an X. And ballots will be invalid if you forget to mark any box, mark more nan than one or don't make a clear mark that allows the scrutineers to count your ballot unambiguously.

The ballot box is at the front of the room right now for anyone who is impatient to cast their vote. I will be calling for scrutineers before the lunchtime period and we'll be announcing the result by the close of the meeting today.

So just a reminder - the voting is open now and it will close at 2 pm sharp today for those who want to cast your ballots after 2 pm.

APNIC Secretariat report 'Big picture'

So moving right along then, we have some reports from the Secretariat here about Secretariat activities which have been under way, with a focus on the last six months since the APNIC member meeting, which was held in Bali last March.

I would like to just remind us all of the structure of the APNIC Secretariat these days. The structure was changed within the last year in order to create a collection of - a small collection of major areas of activity within APNIC and for each of those activity areas to have an area manager who is a senior manager within the APNIC staff.

At the centre of our structure is the Services area and that includes resource services, membership services and training services, and that reflects the fact that APNIC is a service organisation and services are in the centre of everything that we do. Around that Services area, and supporting it to do its work, is the Communications area, which includes documentation, policy and external relations, the Technical area, which includes network operations, software and security, and the Business area, which includes finance, office support and human resources.

So that's the way the APNIC Secretariat looks these days and we're going to have some reports now, which are structured according to the areas of APNIC, and they will be presented by the people responsible for those areas, namely myself as Director-General, Sanjaya as the Technical Area Manager and Acting Services Area Manager, Donna McLaren as the Communications Area Manager, and we don't have a Business Area Manager at this stage, so those will be covered in my own report and in the financial reporting that's later on. I'd like to mention that the other senior manager at APNIC is Geoff Huston, the Chief Scientist.

Unfortunately, Donna is sick today. Quite a number of the APNIC staff at different times have come down with various health problems of one kind or another, and unfortunately Donna's not able to be with us, so I'll be presenting her report today. So, in fact, there's just two of us up here on the podium to present these reports, myself and Sanjaya. And we'll be doing that over the next half an hour.

So Sanjaya will do it's service areas. Thank you.

Services Area

SANJAYA:

Good morning, everyone. My name is Sanjaya, I'm the acting services area manager. My name is Indian, but I'm Indonesian and I have a great respect to the Indian culture and it's an honour to present here in front of our colleagues from all over the world and India in particular.

In the services area, the service area, as Paul mentioned, is the core of APNIC area that delivers the service to the members. So this is a point for delivering service. We have four functions and units within the services area. So I'm going to go through my presentation according to the unit structure. The first one is the resource services and then member services, followed by training and then by the key projects we have.

Resource services is headed by Guangliang Pan. He's been working very hard. We are the only - going in to three quarter of the year and already exceeding the 2005-2006 allocation figure. As of August 2007, we have allocated about close to 3.5 times /8s. I have a feeling that we will still grow to the end of the year.

On IPv6, although the green bar there, although you can see that there's a huge demand in 2004 and 2005 and that somehow it probably because those who care about IPv6 already got theirs, so there's nothing much on 2006 but 2007 showed some growth again. ASN numbers are growing very fast. This is an indication of independent networks that is being brought out in this region. So it's a good indication about whether there are new networks being built, new ISPs, new companies getting hooked to the Internet in a multi-homing fashion. So it's encouraging to see that more networks come out in 2007. I think we're going to exceed 2006 this year.

In the Resource Services area, we have a few priorities that we're going to focus on the next 6-12 months. One is we will continue streamlining our procedures to ensure that people are clear when they request, well-informed - it gets done in a great manner. When people need more IP addresses, that means they're growing and they urgently need to run out their networks.

We will also be improving NIR process. I think it's already good at the moment. We have a one-day turnaround already. But any possible improvements will be explored and implemented in the next 6-12 months.

We also started to look at the resource certification service planning. At the moment there's a lot of technology being designed and developed on the resource certification but service provisioning of the certificates itself is currently being planned and designed. And I think anticipating the IPv4 address consumption, we will also start to look seriously about claiming historical IPv4 address that hasn't been routed, because it will be a waste to have a shortage on one hand but then on the other hand we have allocated resources that are not being used. So we will be focusing on that.

The next unit we have is Member Services, which is lead by George Kuo. He's outside at the registration desk. Member Services take care of registration of new members, maintaining the current members and making sure everything is being serviced properly. As you can see from the chart there, that we are growing, even not reaching the end of August, we have more, you know, I think already the growth is the same from 2005 to 2006 and 2006 to 2007 current year to date. We already see the same growth. So by the end of the year I think we will see a larger growth in the membership. The Member Services operate many hours to service different time zones. In India, we have 4.5 hours time difference so we wait in Brisbane to make sure the people in the South Asia can still contact us when they open the office. We also pride ourselves for being able to resolve urgent issues on the spot, both on technical as well as administration. But as of lately, the most technical issues we can we get requests for is - the measurement realise more and more on diversity. So we get lots of calls and urgent requests from all members to update the reverse DNS so that they can send mail properly.

The priorities for George Kuo's team are listed here. We will focus on enhancing the membership support, both for the new members as well as the existing members. MyAPNIC being the primary part of our Member Services. We will keep on adding new features on that platform.

To make it easier for new members, new ISPs, new companies that wants to roll out the network to join in becoming APNIC members, we are going to install first a set of procedures and system support for fast and easy account opening, simple resource request form and for the first time doing the online membership agreements. So no more sending back and forth paperwork to be signed for the APNIC members. We will also work on establishing a knowledge base. This is a very useful tool for members or prospective members or public inquiries to first go in to the knowledge base and get the most famously asked questions. Last but not least we will focus on the ICONS community building. The ISP portal community building, getting more and more, getting people more involved to share Internet service knowledge throughout the region. And globally too.

Alright - the third unit we have is Training Services, lead by Cecil Goldstein. Can you please stand up? He's done a very good job this year, as you can see from the graph. Even before reaching the end of the year, we are already way over delivering training to different countries. So the part on the left is the number of courses that has been delivered. 43 courses already so far. And there will be more coming this year. The green bar shows the economies, the number of countries we visited for training. We have reached 70 countries and economies so far. And the blue bar is also very important in the number of attendees that got trained by our training team. So we're already over 1,000 people trained by the APNIC training team.

In the next 6-12 months we will keep on focusing on increasing training coverage, both in terms of content as well as the geographical coverage. We will keep on building partnerships with different countries and economies to leverage the local knowledge there, to support us in delivering training. We will soon start training - a training survey. We will announce it on our website. We will mail people to please take time to fill in the training survey. Cecil, when are we going to launch it? Probably October?

CECIL GOLDSTEIN:

By the end of the month.

SANJAYA:

We will be running an online training survey by the end of the month. Please take your time to fill in so we know what your training needs are and be able to address that. And for the future, we will work on the curriculum development and blended learning for enhanced training.

This is the last slide. The key projects we have for the whole area, service area are these. So the first is we are going to continue improvements of our resource management system. Mainly focusing on improving IPv6 support. We are also embarking on Certification Authority v2, which allows us to do it faster and stronger authorisation checks. The last one is the resource certification. It's the future work that is very important. We are doing some business impact assessments and starting the service design and planning. So that's my update on the services area.

PAUL WILSON:

We will have plenty of time for questions afterwards, so I think we'll push straight on for these reports.

SANJAYA:

This is my home base. This is my permanent role here, the technical manager of APNIC. We are a supporting unit, so we provide IT facilities for members and other parts in the APNIC organisation. We have four units and functions within technical services. The first one is network and operations, which has systems software and network. And research and development which does advanced research and statistical analysis to help with APNIC in supplying more information to members for policies, decisions and technical work. And the third one is security, which is focusing on protecting APNIC's information assets and the last one is the software engineering that develops software to support APNIC operations.

The network and operations looks like this. We have from the left - sorry if it's unreadable - on the left is the APNIC main office data centre and we have data connecting the office to a local facility. And then that is located in Brisbane, it then connects to the Internet and then we have three other locations, so far one in Japan, one in Hong Kong and one in the US. Mostly to run DNS to make sure that even if the network in Australia gets down, then the others can cover the important DNS queries.

In the last six months we've been improving our DNS software. We've been rolling out a software called AMS which handles DNS and handles volume better than the current system we have. And we have moved the publicly visible servers to the local collocation. It's in the data centre of the main APNIC office but because it has less coverage in terms of power generator, UPS and so on, we move everything to all the major ones to the local collocation and done in the first quarter of this year. After moving most of the important services to the local collocation, then we have time to build or rebuild a new data centre in the APNIC office to improve service to the internal organisation.

Realising there's a lot of historical data and critical information needed by members and by APNIC operations, we implement the intended backup server. We have to do it in both our - it does snapshots of all the important data.

Last but not least is the root server activities. There's been quite a lot of activities this year so far. We did some hardware switch replacement in Hong Kong. There's a replacement of Juniper routers in New Zealand. I-root intention to install for the first time in Sri Lanka. And also discussing the possibilities of adding more I-root servers in China. And we have to deal with some issues in Malaysia.

For the next 6-12 months, the network and operations team, which is lead by Terry, I forgot to introduce Terry. Can you stand up? The network operations team operates the web cast service that you are seeing this week by the way. So Terry's team is going to look in to improving their processes, starting by implementing the ITIL service desk. It is a framework for establishing a good IT support process within the organisation. So we are going to use that discipline to improve our IT services.

We will also be providing the new infrastructure data - the content management system, probably presented by Paul to explain what it is later. We are going to implement this later this year. We will also be looking at adding more robust document and web search interface. Part of the feedback we got from the members, or the public are that there is this, it's a bit hard to find APNIC information. So we're thinking of improving the search engine to allow for better finding of important documents by the members. And, lastly, thinking about how we can provide a good resource certification repository. We are going to put all the resource certificates that have been issued by APNIC as well as by other parties in the repository. It will be a database that the operators can quickly fetch and check for the validity of the certificates.

Alright, next is research and development, lead by George Michaelson over there. Please stand up, George. He's our research and development officer who has been busy with three mage projects. The first one main projects. The first one is the DNS measurement. It's a long-standing project we're doing. The reverse DNS being one of the critical services in APNIC, we watch our DNS carefully, look at the types of queries. So we're implementing a new DNS measurement system by installing taps in Japan on the left hand-side there, where the information gets collected to the DNS collector, and with a transmitter to both APNIC and the OARC project in the ISC, which will deliver some very interesting statistics that hopefully we can get more publicly in the future.

Another one that George has achieved this far is to introduce - since January we have started allocating 4-byte ASs, one in Brisbane and BGP nodes in Japan, to see if the 4-byte AS works. The third project that George is heavily involved in, in fact, most of his time is actually involved in is the resource certification work where we have to collaboration with other RIRs, NIRs and other organisations to work out the design, the protocols of the resource certification, which also involves IETF activities. We are designing three service models for the members. So when we're ready to launch this service, there will be three types of services. One is fill service to the members and this is given to every members with no additional charge through MyAPNIC. Through MyAPNIC it has the ability to certificates through MyAPNIC. But some of the larger members may wish to run their own software so the resource certification software. We will provide our software as open source codes, so you can download the code and run your own resource certification system. The third one, which is not committed, it is a hosted services. This allows large ISPs who wishes to issue a lower level certificates to a second tier ISPs for example. But let's say they do not have the expertise or do not wish to spend resources on maintaining their own certification system, then they could, in theory, outsource to APNIC and we will run the certification engine for them. But again it's complicated. We have no committed deliverables yet but stay tuned, we will update you if there's any progress on that service.

So the projects that George Michaelson is going to focus on in the next 6-12 months is consumption in IPv4 in conjunction with Geoff Huston's work. We are also seeking 4-byte AS peers in Tokyo and Brisbane. If you are from that area and somehow connected to the JPIX or - what's our peering point in Brisbane, Terry? PIPE. If anyone peers with PIPE in Brisbane or JPIX in Tokyo, please contact George Michaelson and see if you can peer your 4-byte AS with us.

We are also going to work on better information presentation and access and thinking of deploying more DNS data collectors.

The next unit is a function we have with security. We are implementing log monitoring and analysis, which is an intrusion detection and log analysis tool that we found on the Internet. So if you want to share - if you use the same tool and want to share it with us, please do so. By the way, this function is lead by Siamak Hadinia, who unfortunately is not available in Delhi at this time. Siamak also work on the new certification authority manager software and we have chosen that software, EJBCA, which is written in Java. Again, if you have any experience or wishing to know more about that, please contact us and let's share information.

Last but not least is the software engineering department. Sorry for the complex lines but this is how our application infrastructure looks like. On the left - in the middle is the integrated data management that we have. So that's the sort of data and information. That's the primary database that we have. The most important information is the registry data. On the left is the internal applications, the applications we use internally to update whois data and manage information. On the right side are the external services that makes use of the data and presented as a public service. So the darker-shaded colours are the ones we've done work in the past six months. The resource management system that is being used by our host masters. We did a lot of development, as you can see there. IPv4 allocations, supporting IPv6 allocations, billing and various big fixes. Events management is the software we use for events such as this one, for registration and management the schedule and so on.

We have started making changes to anticipate the next meeting in Taiwan for APRICOT 2008. So there's a lot of advance work we have to do before every event. MyAPNIC, the most important portal as far as members are concerned. We added some more features there, allowing for easier online payment, invoice generation, upload and download your information easily, more control of Whois objects, more improvements in voting system and so on.

We also did a small patch to Whois to support 4-byte ASN support, not much there. And this is also quite important. As you know, the reverse DNS is an important, is a critical service in APNIC. We are going to implement on October 9, as soon as we get back from here, the new DNS generation system that potentially allows you to update your reverse DNS record within two minutes after you submit the updates. At the moment it's delayed by about two hours. So the almost-online update is not yet publicly exposed, we're still tidying up the authentication and authorisation schema, but, rest assured, we will announce it to the public whenever it's ready.

That's it.

Thank you.

PAUL WILSON:

Thank you very much, Sanjaya. I hope that report gives you a good idea of how busy the Services and Technical areas are these days.

I have a question, I think.

By all means, fine.

Could you use the microphone, please, Dr Govind?

DR GOVIND:

Thank you.

PAUL WILSON:

Thank you.

DR GOVIND:

Sanjaya, I just wanted to know that you mentioned about the IPv4 addresses which has not been allocated so far and that is it going to be used or given again. How that will impact the IPv4, you know, extension - that it will take some more time it can exist? The other thing is how will it affect the IPv6 allocation also? Will it be prolonged? Days or months? How will it impact?

SANJAYA:

Thank you. I think the intention is to recover as much of unused IPv4 address exactly to address what you suggested there, that it may prolong the availability of IPv4, new IPv4 allocations, so people, especially the still-growing regions, you know, they can still get these unused IPv4 address given to them, instead of sitting there and not being used by anyone. So it may help in relieving the IPv4 address consumption.

How it will affect IPv6, I don't know. I mean, people - I don't think that it will matter, really, because there's - even if we recovered all the IPv4, it will run out again eventually anyway, you know? And I don't expect that it will affect the run-out time significantly. Did I answer your question?

DR GOVIND:

OK. The other thing is in NIR you said there some improvements you are going to suggest. What are those kind of improvements, specific improvements, you are suggesting on that?

SANJAYA:

Sorry, I didn't get... Improvements on...

DR GOVIND:

NIR you -

SANJAYA:

NIRs?

DR GOVIND:

Yeah.

SANJAYA:

Oh.

DR GOVIND:

What are the specific improvements you are suggesting, as per the NIRs?

SANJAYA:

For the NIRs?

DR GOVIND:

The NIRS:

SANJAYA:

Starting with the reverse DNS system that we're going to deploy in October, we will probably start with the NIRs to allow them to update their results within two minutes. They would be the first one that gets the facilities. That's one example.

Another example would be...what did we discuss in the NIR...?

GUANGLIANG PAN:

The response time.

SANJAYA:

The response time? OK. Improved response time in allocating to NIRs.

DR GOVIND:

ok

OK.

SANJAYA:

So thank you, Guangliang, for the additional information, which matters a lot.

So, yes, improving the response time of allocations to the NIRs.

DR GOVIND:

OK, thank you.

SANJAYA:

Thank you very much for the question.

PAUL WILSON:

Thank you, Dr Govind. The next questioner, could you state your name please? Thanks.

SURESH KATUKAM:

Sure. This is Suresh form Cisco. You were talking about 4-byte ASNs you started issuing. Of those - who are the people asking for 4-byte ASNs now?

SANJAYA:

Who? Yes!

SURESH KATUKAM:

So who are the people asking for the 4-byte ASNs? Is it enterprises or service providers? Who are the people asking for 4-byte ASes?

SANJAYA:

Guangliang, do you have the profile?

GUANGLIANG PAN:

We only assigned two AS. And, yeah, it is not very for the... I think one is assigned to Japan and the APNIC one is for research. And also JPNIC got a small block allocated to their members.

SURESH KATUKAM:

So when do you expect to see 4-byte ASN proliferation? Would you expect to see them, like, in the next three or four years? When do you expect to see 4-byte ASN proliferation?

SANJAYA:

Proliferating? Well, maybe, Geoff, can you help us out here? You're the oracle of APNIC. He can usually predict the future better than I can.

RAJESH CHHARIA:

My name is Rajesh Chharia.

SANJAYA:

Yeah.

RAJESH CHHARIA:

My question is also about the AS 4. First of all, I want to ask what is the difference between the AS-2 and the AS-4.

SANJAYA:

OK. Good question.

RAJESH CHHARIA:

While applying for the membership into the APNIC registry, I requested for the AS-4 number and I have been allotted the AS-4 but it's very unfortunate on our part in India where the upstream provider doesn't know about the AS-4 and when I allocated them my AS-4 number for the announcement to their network, they clearly told me that this is the wrong number and you have to come out with - with the AS-2. What I request or suggest to the APNIC, at least start some workshops, especially in India, to make our stream provider to know what is the difference between the AS-2 and the AS-4 and what are those benefits which we are going to get from the AS-4.

SANJAYA:

Thank you.

RAJESH CHHARIA:

And better our equipment, like the Cisco and from which number, this Cisco equipment or any equipments are capable to handle this AS-4 number. OK. Geoff, would you like to respond to some of the questions, please? Thanks.

GEOFF HUSTON:

Well, you know - Geoff Huston, APNIC - the wonderful thing is that we archive all of the proceedings of our meetings, so the first thing I would actually encourage you to do is go and look at the archive. You will find at least three presentations about 4-byte ASNs that clearly describe precisely what's entailed here. So I won't answer here and now. I will simply say that information is available already in a massive amount of forms, both written and in slide ware. Next thing that came from the original question - the current consumption of ASes continues at an extremely predictable rate so at the 16th of November 2010, notwithstanding any other factor, you're going to run out.

RAJESH CHHARIA:

When?

GEOFF HUSTON:

The end of November, 2010, but we have already put forward policies, so don't forget, 2007 and 2008, you will get a 2-byte number by default if you say nothing and you'll get a 4-byte number if you actually ask. More than two folk actually have asked in the APNIC region and there are about 504-byte ASes out there already worldwide. 4-byte AS support exists on implementations of OpenBGPD, on Quagga, on certain types of Cisco gear and on certain types of Juniper gear. So the stuff is already out there.

For those people who actually get a 4-byte AS number, the world doesn't change. You can see them. They can see you. Alright? So that's not an issue. But what you do need is to run an independent BGP that knows about them. That's the only factor.

And it's not ubiquitous, but it is entirely backwards compatible, so it's really not a very big issue at all but you need to deploy it on gear that understands it. As for the question you had from the Cisco side, you and I need to sit down and figure out where you're going to put it in the rest of your products, which seems to be a very good conversation.

PAUL WILSON:

Could we have one quick comment please? I think maybe this conversation could go on for some time. It should be, if it's going to continue, we can take it to the afternoon open-mic sessions. Brief comment, Rob.

ROB SEASTROM:

The comment is very quick. The phenomenon of people getting 4-byte ASNs and not being quite sure what to do with them is by no means limited to this region. Would encourage you - and I would encourage my colleagues and friends in all of the RIRs - to, when they send out a 4-byte ASN, which people sometimes request simply because it's bigger and it must be better, right? - a white paper that leads to places where you can get information about, you know, explaining to your upstream ISP what this new twice-as-big number that you have is, and also some pointers on the latest software. It's all on slides from presentations, but it needs to be brought together into sort of a 'here's one of these newfangled 4-byte ASNs and here's what you need to know to make use of it.'

PAUL WILSON:

OK, thanks and thanks to our friends who asked the questions. It's obviously an issue to be focusing on in the training area as well.

I'll move along into the report from Donna on the Communications area. A brief report before we then move on into some reports from our RIR colleagues.

We have reports from four RIR colleagues.

Let me highlight a few things in the Communications area. This is the team here. And, in Bali, we have Louise and Vania from the external relations team. We don't have a picture of Louise. She's a very new recruit at APNIC.

In our publications area, we have James and Tina who are both in New Delhi with us and Sunny and Sam from the policy area are both here as well.

In the events area, one highlight of course was APNIC 23 in Bali and this meeting itself in New Delhi. The next meeting will be with APRICOT 2008 in Taipei and we'll be hearing a little more about that meeting by the end of today. We also will have an announcement about APNIC 26, which is in a year's time, I think the APRICOT - the APIA is ready to also mention the APRICOT after next in 2009, so you'll hear some more news about these by the end of the day.

The liaison team is a team of staff not all located within the communications area. In fact, liaison officers come from different parts of APNIC and such as the hostmaster area and Training area in particular, and they are employed as liaison officers as well because of their own particular expertise in the areas that are assigned to them. So Guangliang, Elly, Anna and Kapil are our liaison officers for China, Pacific, South East Asia and south Asia particularly. And through the liaison officers we've been working with our network operator groups intensively and successfully, so far, PacNOG, SANOG, NZNOG, PHNO GCNNOG and others seem to be forming in the wings as well and it seems that the liaison and the work between APNIC and these network operator groups is really quite an appreciated activity in this liaison area.

We've also been coordinating visits to APNIC from staff of NIRs and four NIRs have done or are in the process of visiting at the moment. We've participated in other major events such as the China IPv6 Summit.

In the project area here we do have a new and very comprehensive contact management system, which is an open source things called SugarCRM.

The Policy Unit is responsible for the coordination of policy activities of APNIC, in particular the policy agenda of this meeting, and also the coordination of policy implementations that happen as policies or are approved by the APNIC community and membership and then they come for implementation to the Secretariat.

So as of the 9th of March this year, we had the implementations of policies 32, 33 and 35, the first one being to amend the APNIC IPv6 assignment and utilisation requirements, 33 being the end-site Assignment Policy for IPv6 and 35 the IPv6 portable Assignment Policy for multihoming. So those policies have been implemented with the appropriate procedures and so forth within the Secretariat.

There's been quite a lot of work also in the policy unit to clarify, simplify, to provide more support on the policy development process itself. So this diagram is one that's taken off the website and it illustrates in broad terms what the policy process at APNIC is and you'll find in connection with this that there is more information these days about the APNIC policy process.

I'll just stress this does not involve any changes to the policy development process itself, because that requires policy change to do that. But what we do find is that more support and explanation is needed for the policy development process and it's something that's come to us through the member survey as well.

You might also notice some more information about that in the latest issue of Apster.

And talking about which, in the publications area, Apster is the quarterly newsletter, which we continue to publish. We are undertaking an overhaul of the website at the moment, which is a member survey request. We're also looking at a lot of internal documentation, which has to do with streamlining and simplifying the APNIC procedures. There have been some activities in the multimedia area, providing information about APNIC in other formats that are more, possibly more interesting and more multipurpose than our website our self. We are also in this area providing a lot of support to the N RO through our role as the NRO Secretariat, so the publications team and the communications area team in general are looking at the IGF in 2007, which is coming up in November, the revamp of the ASO website and the brochure materials that are planned to be released in connection with the IGF.

So that's a brief update from the communications area and, again, if there are any questions then please feel free to raise those.

APNIC Secretariat report 'Big picture'

I will then to move on to a few notes from myself as the Director-General of APNIC, looking at some of the - just a brief overview of some of the bigger-picture issues we are looking Atwell APNIC at the moment.

So you've heard quite a lot of operational reporting, which I hope has been interesting for you from the various areas of APNIC.

But there's more to APNIC and this meeting is about some of the bigger-picture issues that we face together as a Regional Internet Registry. Some of those include issues of RIR coordination through the Number Resource Organization, which is an important component in the global address management structure. Our activities in connection with Internet governance and the Internet Governance Forum and not just limited to that forum. IP addressing has been a major theme of this meeting and I expect, as you would predict yourselves, that it's going to be a major thing for some time to come and we'll hopefully have some very substantial developments along the lines of both - in both v4 and the v6 area.

Also as APNIC grows, we've hit a size of approximately 50 staff at APNIC. I've mentioned the organisational restructure that was undertaken in the last year in response to that. We have, I think, some challenges in the organisation development of APNIC, which I'd like to address briefly as well.

So firstly on the NRO side of things, one of the discussions that you may recall has been going on for quite some years is in connection with forming a formal agreement with ICANN, both for our support of ICANN and for ICANN's provision of services to us.

Now, discussions about contracts with ICANN have been under way for quite some time and the acronym OBE here means 'overtaken by events'. We have, for a number of reasons, which are common amongst the RIRs well back from the original intention of forming a formal contract with ICANN. Are numerous reasons for doing that, but those of you who've been watching the ICANN situation for some time will have seen that the contractual arrangements with ICANN can sometimes be quite complex and interesting and whether it is in connection with ccTLD contracts with ICANN, with RIR, with other members of the ICANN community, for instance, the root server operators, contractual discussions seem to go on and on without end with ICANN.

What we're looking at now is a more lightweight structure, which is in lieu of a contract, instead of a contract, looking at an exchange of letters with ICANN which is more formalistic and more symbolic way of expresses our relationship but it at least puts on paper something about the future understandings and intentions of our - around our relationship with ICANN.

In - because of the likelihood of a formal contract with ICANN, we have not actually paid the full amount of the RIR contributions, the voluntary contributions, which have been agreed with ICANN. Now, these are quite substantial sums of money. The overall NRO contribution - that is the collective contribution from all of the RIRs - is just over $800,000 US per annum and, of that, APNIC is responsible for approximately 25%. We've recently paid another 50% instalment of some of those outstanding ICANN contributions and the common intention among the RIRs is not to finalise and complete all of the payment of outstanding ICANN contributions until we do actually finalise this exchange of letters arrangement that's being discussed at the moment.

Now, within the NRO, also, there are global policy discussions, which are being coordinated and overseen by the Address Council of the Address Supporting Organisation. Those include two policies which we've heard a lot of talk about this week, which are the ASN allocation policy, not so much talk about that, actually, it's a fairly minor matter, and the large one being the interesting proposal from JPNIC about the remaining IPv4 space.

And last, but not least, APNIC has been under some additional load this year because we are the Secretariat and I personally am the secretary of the NRO and the NRO Executive Council so, as I mentioned before and particularly in the Communications area, we've been undertaking quite a few - some fairly laborious and time-consuming - activities on behalf of the NRO. So that will end at the end of this year, when we pass on the NRO Secretariat to AfriNIC.

Internet governance. The NRO has been very active in this area, most particularly through the WSIS and the following Internet Governance Forum processes. We really have worked hard and we have achieved a high level of visibility and recognition within the - this whole set of processes and that's, that's very clearly indicated by the fact that two of my counterparts within the NRO, namely Adiel from AfriNIC and Raul from LACNIC, they are members of the multistakeholder advisory group, the MAG, of the IGF and that does represent quite a substantial amount of influence that - or a relatively amount of influence that can be brought to bear and at least recognition and the ability to bring issues to the rather closed group of that environment.

The NRO has decided to make, in the past, financial contributions to the IGF Secretariat in the name of making sure that that Secretariat can do its job well and properly support the I GF meetings, so we have done that in the last year and this year, a total of $50,000 US, which is a shared contribution among the RIRs.

The IGF, the Internet Governance Forum in Brazil in 2007, November, is something that we're also following closely at the APNIC staff have been working quite hard on, particularly as the Secretariat of the NRO, so there'll be, an exhibition presence of the NRO, information semination presence at the IGF. We'll be participating in workshops on IP addressing. We're producing our version of one of the - of the continuing cooperation of report which was requested and which was one of the outcomes of the Tunis summit, that is that all players involved with the Internet governance area are asked to produce reports on their cooperation activities and we're undertaking that at the moment.

There have been a number of questions about the process of the IGF in Brazil, the way the multistakeholder advisory group has been formed and the way it's continued in its mandate without too much consultation. There are also some questions about the way the group is being chaired for the Brazil summit. So there are a few question marks, I think, over the future of the IGF and the widespread nature of support that the IGF has enjoyed so far. But we do know, at least, IGF 2008 is going to be right here in New Delhi in India and APNIC - I've had some interesting conversations already this week about the role that APNIC could play in making sure, in helping to make sure that that event is as successful as it possibly can be and I hope to avoid any of the difficulties that we might be seeing in the Brazil round of the IGF meetings.

The next issue I mentioned is IP addressing. We've heard a lot about that in this meeting and I'm not going to start rehashing all of the discussions but I've characterised what we're doing in IPv4 as projections, policies and politics, because these are three quite separate areas that have become - in which we're becoming quite active. The political area is quite interesting, particularly in the lead-up to the IGF, it's something that we'll be representing through participation, through the NRO, in workshops of the IGF, where this issue of IPv4 addressing is starting to gain some prominence. I think it's a lesson for us that we need to be keeping up with the debate very much because there is a huge amount of interest in this area and we need to be following it. Following it is quite a time-consuming process, but it's something that's an expense that we just need to incur.

The politics of IPv4 addressing isn't just restricted to the IGF and the UN world. There's starting to be a lot of interest in this area in the EU, and thanks to the RIPE NCC, we're seeing that part of the world very well covered. Also the OECD is also starting to take a big from in this and is projecting to release a major report at the - in the middle of 2008. So we know now that that's - that work is under way and that it's going to produce some very important results that we need to follow as well.

IPv6, I think, is the message is the same as it's been for about ten years, which is that we really need to promote it. There's not a great deal that needs to happen at the policy level at all these days. It's fairly well covered, but we need to get moving and help people within this region to get moving and make IPv6 happen as soon as it possibly can. We can't alone in this region. It's something we need to coordinate across the world and we can do that particularly through the RIRs and other global activities we're involved with.

Organisational development. It's a little internal but I think it's very important at the time of life of APNIC at the moment. I initiated a Secretariat restructuring about a year ago. That's still, actually, an ongoing process because, as I mentioned before, we've got two major senior management positions, which are again to be recruited. The APNIC finances at the moment are making it a little bit difficult to be confidently going out recruiting those positions, I'm afraid, so we're in a slightly limbo position at the moment, but I would hopefully have the fee structure voted at the end of this day in the current week and that would give us some certainty about some of those aspects of APNIC's fundamental sustainability and how that reflects on our ability to really develop the organisation properly.

I'm looking also at business continuity. Am hoping to have some assistance from the RIPE NCC in this regard because they've undertaken a business continuity planning process and it's an interesting set of processes on behalf of the organisation.

Activity planning and budgeting has come up this week and it's something, which is under way internally within APNIC. There are discussions about that a little bit later this morning.

OK, with that not so brief overview of the big-picture issues, I'd welcome some discussion about that during the day today.

I think at this time I'll hand straight on to the next report from the Secretariat. In fact, from our Treasurer, Kuo-Wei Wu and he's going to provide the report of APNIC financial statuses.

Financial Reports

KUO-WEI WU:

OK, this is our financial status for the APNIC right now, from the EC.

First of all, the first half of the financial status of APNIC is a surplus for $247,000. The expenditure is about $3.3 million, the revenue is about $3.5 million. Our continuous membership growth is about 110 increase in the first half. Membership status right now is 1,472 total by June of the 30 this year. But actually, as you know, the APNIC revenue is based on the US dollar. Our expenditure is actually based on the Australian dollars. So you will see some variation, and what's happened now.

Right now, we try to project for this situation by end of the 2007. It's very possible we might be in a negative deficit for close to $1 million. It's about $930,000.

This is based on the exchange rate of 0.79. By September 4, the current exchange rate is one Australian dollar is 0.82 US dollars and this projection is based on 0.89, because it seems that the US dollar depreciation is going in such a change.

So over the budget is we - expenditure, we are controlled 8% over the budget. This is based on the US dollar. But we are 1% below the budget in the Australian dollars. The revenue right now is we project for the $6.8 million, it's 2% above the budget.

The exchange rate is still, in this situation, as you maybe see in the recently in the last six months, so that is what we project by end of the year is 0.89. When we do the budget of the 2007, actually we based on 0.7889, so you can see from the budget 2007, we did, but earlier this year, from that time till now, actually, there is already a big change in the exchange rate between the Australian dollar and the US dollars.

OK, here is a statement, and actually you can get a hard copy, I believe you can get a hard copy somewhere, and it will be put on the website. You also can download it.

So you can see that, on the first column, there is actually it is 0.8131, that is average exchange rate from the first half of the year, because it is moving around. So the total expenditure by US dollars is $3.29 million, and project by the whole year, 2007, we expect the exchange rate will keep going down in USD, so there will be, that is what we expect is 0.8613 and the total expenditure will be up to $7.7 million. So the budget 2007 is what we passed by the earlier of this year. I think you remember that is reported in the Bali meeting. So that was $7.1 million, but you look at the exchange rate, it's about 15% changing when we set up the budget. So that is a reflect to our project happen this year.

So right now, we expect to have $573,000 budget differences.

For the revenue part, the same thing is actually right now we are - we have the total revenue $3.5 million. We project by the whole year is about $6.7 million. And here you can see we have one row is in second last two rows is the exchange rate gain and loss. That is the first time we tried to assimilate what is the situation. Because when we get the US dollars we put it in the bank but we didn't convert it. So if we convert also the US dollars to the Australian dollars right now, you can see we have some loss there because we project by the 0.7889 by Bali meeting in February of this year.

So right now, we are looking around the $6.781 US dollars and we project the budget would be up 2% of the income in USD.

So when we talk about the operating profit and loss. So we have $247,352 gain, but actually, by end of the year, we project we have - it is very possible we have a close to $1 million loss. Of course, it is still very depends on the exchange rate. The exchange rate not going to be even worse, than we might have a very different resolution about that.

But, for the budget we approved by the member at the Bali meeting in February of this year, is - it seems like that is what we're working out. And actually in the Monday, the EC spent a whole day, we had discussion how to work in together with APNIC to make sure the financial end of the year would be maintained on the budget we approved by the Bali meetings.

OK, the balance sheet right now, you can see that it is - you know, because we remember in the very beginning in, I think it is a long time ago, we agreed to, you know, the APNIC, to keep that the reserve at least for 1.5 years to maintain operations. So that is, you can see that in the past several years, we already have some reserve there. We still have about $1.1 million US, and non-current assets is about $3.8 million, and total liabilities is about $5 million and total equity is about $7.8 million, so this is our currently assets of APNIC. So of course, we don't want to run the operation on a loss.

OK, and this is the membership status. I already tell you, and that is just based on different classifications of the memberships.

And also, the memberships changing. You can see the bottom line is the leave us members, and then we have new member come in. And so on the first part in the yellow line, that is actually track the member leaving the APNIC and plus the new members, that is what is our member changing.

OK, currently, first of all, of course, we are trying to improve the fee collection procedure to reduce the overdue accounts. And second of all, of course, we try to enhance the payment facilities. And number three, we try to enhance the integration between accounts and member data. And the most important right now is that we try to keep working on the fee structure and also work together with the APNIC office to how we can work together to make sure these operations will be kept as the budget approval by the Bali meeting as we can.

OK. Any questions about that?

OK, thank you very much.

PAUL WILSON:

Thank you very much, Kuo-Wei.

OK. That concludes the reporting from the Secretariat. We're running a little late, but it is India. Son what I'd like to do, although it's now the morning tea time, I'd like to continue with two of our four RIR reports. The first two will be from AfriNIC, Hisham, and from ARIN, Ray. And the remaining two, from LACNIC and RIPE NCC will be deferred until after lunch.

RIR Reports - AfriNIC

HISHAM ROJOA:

Good morning, everyone. I'm Hisham from the Membership and Communications Department of AfriNIC.

So since we're already running a little bit late, I'll be probably a bit faster than usual.

This just shows the membership growth in our region. As of end of June 2007, we have 48 new members, so, as you can see from the graph, the growth is still increasing in our region. We have more and more members joining, new ISPs being set up in Africa.

And this increased growth, of course, will impact on the allocation of resources. We are using more and more IPv4 and ASNs. We are also increasing the allocation of IPv6, although the take-up is not that great in our region.

We are trying to increase the take-up by increasing the training and awareness of IPv6 in our region through more training and meetings, open policy meetings, which are focused on IPv6.

So recently, we've started an IPv6 campaign, which started with the board saying that, because of the imminent exhaustion of the available pool of IPv4, we have to increase the IPv6 activities, training and outreach. We've reviewed the fee schedule for IPv6. We've done a press conference during a regional ICT Conference in Mauritius, and we've informed members about the IPv4 exhaustion and IPv6. We've also launched a webpage on IPv6 and we are planning to cover all countries within our region by the end of 2009.

This year, we've carried out IPv6 and LIR training in Abuja and Dar es Salaam and Abidjan and Luanda. We're going to have three more countries by the end of this year, South Africa, Algeria, Tunisia.

So the changes to the IPv6 fees, for existing LIRs, we're not going to count the IPv6 allocation, so it's only based on the IPv4 allocations.

For new LIRs, we give them a discount on set-up and membership fees and this discount is over the three subsequent years.

We had a request from research networks and the education networks, they wanted to have an incentive when they get resources from us, so we gave them a 50% discount on sign-up and membership fees. We want to encourage research on IPv6 in our region. And we're currently working on a new fee schedule for IPv4 and IPv6 for 2008.

MyAfriNIC is the equivalent of MyAPNIC. It should be launched during our next meeting in AfriNIC-7. It has more or less the same features, but probably less as - this is version one of MyAfriNIC. We have come through the trial and we are continuing the final testing and functioning.

Some policies recently we've implemented, three different policies. The IPv6 provider independent assignment for end-sites. We've changed the allocation and assignment period to 12 months. And the HD-ratio, the IPv6 HD-ratio to 0.94. The last two is to align with the other regions.

There are currently six policies under discussion in our region. These will be presented at our next meeting. The first one is we're revising our policy development process. The second one is the global ASN policy. Next one is the IPv6 Address Allocation and Assignment Policy I. Then you have the global policy for the allocation of the remaining IPv4 address space. IPv6 ULA-Central and the end policy for IANA IPv4 allocations to RIRs.

Some of the policies are also being discussed in other regions. We had two of these - well, three of these are also discussed in this region.

Public policy meetings. The last meeting we had was in Abuja in Nigeria, where we had nearly 200 attendees from a wide range of countries and a wide range of sector of activities, ISPs, education and governments. We tried a few new things, like newcomer meetings, BoFs on I've four and the policy development process, which ended up with us revising - proposing a new policy development process, on ICONS and anti-spam. We also had for the first time the hest master consultation. And six policies were presented at the meeting. Three reached consensus, two were withdrawn or to be amended and one didn't reach consensus.

Other outcomes of the meeting. Like I said, the policy development process is being revisited. We had IPv6 workshop, thanks to Philip and Jordi, where we also trained some trainers within the AfriNIC team. So these will be used now, also, to deliver training.

We also increased the awareness and had discussions on IPv4 exhaustion and especially with regards to the impact of the exhaustion on emerging markets like LACNIC and AfriNIC. And also we had a round-table to prepare for the IGF in Rio.

Our next meeting is in Durban. It's very soon. In two tweaks, I think. So we're going to have IPv6 training, one day is going to be dedicated to policy-makers. This is also for our outreach to regional governments and we are having two and a half days of conference and global and policy meeting. So you're all welcome to attend this meeting.

AfriNIC-8 is going to be in Rabat, Morocco, from 3 1 May to 6 June 2008. It's going to be held together with AfNOG and INET Africa meetings.

That's it.

Thank you.

PAUL WILSON:

Thank you, very much, Hisham. Are there any questions for Hisham?

OK, well Ray is coming now to the podium, so before Hisham goes, I'd like to present him with a small gift of appreciation.

APPLAUSE

ARIN

RAY PLZAK:

Good morning. I'm Ray Plzak, president and CEO of ARIN. I do not use Power Point slides for this presentation. Instead, being passed out now is a newsletter for you to read. It is in English. If there are those of you in the audience that would prefer to read that in Hindi, please raise your hand and we will distribute it in Hindi as well.

Anybody want it in Hindi, please raise your hand.

These presentations in both English and in Hindi are available on the APNIC Web at the meetings page for this presentation. What I'm going to do is just highlight a few areas in this report and then you can read it at your leisure and then any questions you can e-mail me and I'd be glad to respond.

Things of interest to note in the ARIN region - discussions around the Omega state of IPv4. The ARIN board in May and then again in August has issued two statements regarding these matters.

In May we said that at some point in time in the future, ARIN will no longer be able to provide large contiguous blocks of IPv4 address space and that people should be taking measures nought to move to IPv6.

Further, the board directed staff to undertake some outreach activities to this area and one of the manifestations of that is also noted in this newsletter, is we have set up an IPv6 Wiki, which in fact will be registered as a domain name for it. It's again, IPv6.info. And there you can contribute to things you may know about implementing IPv6. It's a resource page for getting information and so forth. And the last thing this resolution directed was for the Advisory Council to take into consideration matters of policy formation that may assist in the transition.

The second resolution basically reaffirmed the policy development process. The ARIN board sees that as a well-established and stable means of dealing with the current situation and that no other process is really needed to do so.

Now, this will obviously mean that calls for unrestricted markets and so forth are not within that policy process but it doesn't preclude that policy process from generating some sort of rendatory aspects to a market.

It also reaffirmed the principles that were established in two RFCs and those RFCs basically documented long-established principles with regards to IP address management. Those are RFCs 2008 and RFC 2050. 2008 as a reminder for you, is the RFC which basically states the principle that numbers are not property. and they're-to-not to be bought, sold, traded, transferred, etc. And 2050 is the first codification, if you will, of address management policy for the RIRs. There had been previous policy-type statements done in RFCs but those were pertaining to the Internet registry, which presided the RIRs, such as the DDN-NIC and the InterNIC.

Other things of note - and actually not in this bulletin is a report from ARIN 19, but the results of ARIN 19 proposals were adopted and the implementation of those proposals is highlighted in the newsletter. I will point out that there were 13 proposals dealt with at that meeting. One was continued on and will be discussed in the upcoming ARIN 20 meeting and seven were abandoned. Now, three of those seven actually went all the way through the policy process and when they arrived at the board and, we discussed them and said, "These are not really policy matters. These are really operational matters," and so the board said just that and, in turn, instead of turning them back into the policy process saying, "Hey, these are not policy matters, think of something else about how to discuss these things," instead directed the staff to implement them and these three policies had to do with crypt graphic authentication. To that end, the board actually went beyond the proposed policy and, besides directing staff to implement crypt graphic authentication, the first one by PGP authentication, which by the way will be rolled o out on 15 September, also to produce training materials and so forth to go with it.

So this is a clear example, though, of matters that probably could have gone through the ARIN suggestion program. We have implemented a suggestion program. There's a report on that in this newsletter as well. And in that suggestion program, to date, we've had 37 suggestions that have been worked on. Some have been worked forward in terms of being implemented. A few have gone out to consultation and so there have been - it's been a very successful program. Been one modification that we've made to the program based upon use and that is the one that deals with the fact that we now have put a time limit which basically says that, once a person submits a suggestion, they will get an answer within ten days as far as what is the proposed action to be taken, or if it is going to take a little longer, what is the expected completion date and so forth.

Lastly - second lastly, we have established an RFS for the public policy mailing list, which is a quite active list, and our object is we've expanded them and I've been present at a lot more of the industry gatherings. One of the things that we have undertaken at these outreach activities is to bring along our registration services personnel. We actually established what amounts to a meeting Helpdesk there. People that are ARIN potential customers or ARIN customers come by. An IP analyst is there, can answer their questions, do a consultation on records. We have actually - people that didn't know they qualified from address space from ARIN have walked away with appointments and, in some cases, have gotten address space on the spot because the application that was that simple.

So besides providing informational outreach, we are also working to expand our membership and registration services.

I don't think there is time for questions this morning, at this moment, but, as I said, after you read through this, you can always send me an e-mail and I'd be glad to answer your questions. Thank you.

PAUL WILSON:

Thank you, Ray. I'd like to open the floor briefly for any questions for Ray or, indeed, for Hisham. And if there are none, then I'd like to thank Ray very much for his presentation.

APPLAUSE

And I think we can break for morning coffee and come back in half an hour's time, please.

Thanks.

(End of session)

Back to top

AMM - Session Two

Friday 7 September 2007
1130-1300

APNIC fee discussions

PAUL WILSON:

Welcome back, everyone. Now we'll move straight on in to the session which will run from now until lunch time. We allocated 90 minutes for it. And of course it's the APNIC fees working group. Up here I have the co-chairs of the fees working group, Ming-Cheng Liang who is from the APNIC EC Council and Randy Bush from IIJ. I'll hand over to which ever would like to launch, Randy Bush or Ming-Cheng Liang. Thank you.

RANDY BUSH:

I'm going to try and be dull and boring so that maybe we can catch up with some time and not take the full 90 minutes. But we'll see. So the fees working group met on Wednesday for 90 minutes and this was the agenda we had and we made it to six. OK. So we reviewed the agenda and, in fact, the treasurer of the Executive Committee gave a presentation on the interim fees proposal, which you are voting on now. JPNIC and a number of people asked for why 7%? Was that magic pulled out of the air? And so the EC and the Secretariat explained the 7% as it's mostly to bring salaries up to competitive levels because APNIC was losing people because of salaries.

Questions - that was the main question there. And KPMG had a report on their review of the fees and I had to give it because Michael Hiller of KPMG has an illness in his family and that's why he's not here today. And I'll do another bit of another of his presentations in a minute. And then we had an open discussion where essentially the EC is realising that more detailed and longer-term planning is something that's going to be a change that's going to happen over the next year. So even though this environment of change - IPv4 run out etc, etc, planning three years ahead is tough. But that's another matter. We kind of discussed all this stuff and it was a very cooperative atmosphere, which I think is important and I think we made a fair bit of progress and we're trying to converge so at least everybody understood each other as much as possible and as much information as could be given was.

Now I'll give you a little bit about - and so you see, we made it through the past and didn't make it to the future. 8 and 9, those are the tough issues. The proposals and what you're voting on today and during the week, is the interim fee structure, to hold us so that we can actually get in to the rather difficult issues of long-term planning? And so I would like to focus on that now, the long-term issues for a minute, and then we'll have open discussion and we'll discuss whatever you want to discuss.

So KPMG kind of reviewed the long-term options. So there's activity, the issues of having an activity plan and an adopted budget. The interim proposal addresses what currency should the fee be charged in? It would be smart if it was the same as that of which the expenses occur. How do we review fee and how do we escalate that process? What kind of application fees are there as opposed to per address fees or maintenance fees, etc? What are the memberships tiers classes, should those change under the NIRs, the per address fees which we've been discussing. Do we give discounts for NIRs for other things they do? Currently our address allocations are 2 bits for IPv4 - so, it's not. Should that change? What's the service model and how much does it cost? Should we have a continuous formula for total address holding? What should be done for lesser developed economies? What the bright idea of ageing of address holdings? What will happen in v4 run-out? What will happen when people want other bits of address space and what will happen as we discussed yesterday on transfers? These are the long-term and difficult issues that, you know, will take us a year or two to try and understand the new physics and the new infrastructure under them.

And maybe that what we might move to is a budget set according to the activity plan which is costed and chaired with the EC. That's kind of what happens now but does it go to longer term? So they take member surveys and stuff like that, that goes to the EC, then there's an activity plan and actually it's a cycle, because then there's, "This is the plan, what's the budget? Get rid of cost. Plan again." It goes here and here. Then once the costs and the expenses have been rationalised to services, then what are the fees?

Again, here are those issues that are really the long-term difficult issues. This is only some of them. I think Geoff Huston, I saw the other week, had another list which is overlaps this list considerably. I don't know what else I can say? The fees working group kind of discussed the current proposed interim fee structure and I'm not sure if some people here want to speak to that? Izumi-san as usual was always very eloquent. So maybe we can make her. Or anybody either want to speak to the current fee proposal or I'd like to also start talking about the physics of the long-term issues.

Did I make it sufficiently boring that we can go straight to lunch?

HYUN-JOON KWON:

I have one question - is this a kind of service proposal for is interim policy.

RANDY BUSH:

My understanding is that the vote today or this week is the interim, so we can discuss and work on this. And the interim fees are - the proposal you have to vote on is the interim fees as they were discussed in the fees working group. Did I answer your question? No.

MING-CHENG LIANG:

I think you are right that the current fee, the current proposal that you are going to vote on today, were applied until we find maybe a permanent model or longer-term model comes out. The current model will still apply continuously if it gets passed today. Then that model will be used continuously for the next several years.

HYUN-JOON KWON:

I suggest I don't know if there's a way to suggest, but if I suggest if we use the interim, maybe we need some kind of timeline for this policy. If it is effective - which means there could be no more policies. If there is a new revised policy coming up, then it can be replaced. If you're using the word interim, I think we maybe need a time limit for this. That's my opinion.

RANDY BUSH:

It's probably too late administratively to change the wording of the vote, but my personal understanding is we're looking at one or two years because we hope to solve the long-term problem in that time. I don't know what the EC's responsibilities are. This is an EC responsibility. The Secretariat provides information to the EC to make these decisions. So what the EC feels about saying about time limits on the interim policy.

HYUN-JOON KWON:

Maybe this policy pass and maybe you should consider to add something.

RANDY BUSH:

I understand your point and I'm hoping that Maemura-san will speak about this.

AKINORI MAEMURA:

I'm not sure what the question is to me?

RANDY BUSH:

I believe what the gentleman from KRNIC is saying that can we realise we cannot change the words of the vote, but could you please give us a statement from the EC on what timeline is meant by the word 'interim'? Is that a fair statement? Thank you.

AKINORI MAEMURA:

I'm chair of the EC. It is ambiguous to tell how long this interim policy lasts. But for our understanding, as Randy says, that the interim is just until the long-term fix of the fee structure - so we naturally assume that will be lasting just one year, in the best case, in the shortest term, for the long-term fee structure. Then I hope and hopefully one year and in some other worse situation, if we need some more time to discuss among the membership, but the longest would be two years or three or four meetings at the most. Right now the personal prospective on this issue but I agree this is shared by all EC members. Is that OK?

RANDY BUSH:

I think that's as good an answer as I could expect. I think the important part of what you said is that we have to realise that in longer-term fee structure, it addresses these kind of complex issues, will have to be passed by the membership and when these complex issues, the relationships of NIR, the service levels, IPv4 run out, etc, are complex, the membership will control the discussion and the discussion could also be long. That's why I think Maemura-san says it could be two, three or four meetings before we know and that's a couple of years. I think Maemura-san, to put words in your mouth, would it be fair to say that by this time next year, that the EC would have some serious proposals, trade-offs and their recommendations in the space?

AKINORI MAEMURA:

Randy, one question from myself.

RAJESH CHHARIA:

In to the present condition, total of the working ISP, 50 persons - you are very small, the membership is so high that they cannot able to pay that amount. That's the reason they are being monopolised by the upstream provider. What I suggest you are increasing the 7% on to the current fee, what I'm suggesting is especially looking at the India and the very tiny sector of the ISP, after very small membership, you should come out with a tiny membership and we have the resources of the IPv4, you are allocating /21s to the very small. What I suggest you can look at /22 or /23, for the very tiny sector?

RANDY BUSH:

I hear what you're saying and what you're addressing is this point, classes of members, and how fees are applied to them. The problem is what you're doing is taking one point of the 42 difficult points and saying we should solve that one now first. And somebody else will say that I want my point solved and somebody else will say, "I want my point solved." That's why we said for the minute while we're discussing those, APNIC has to be able to eat next year. So that's why we close our eyes flat. 7%.

RAJESH CHHARIA:

We can close our eyes, flat 7%, but the fee we're paying right now is not being affordable for the smaller ISPs of India. In that case they have to have the upstream provider and they are monopolising this address for the smaller ISPs.

PAUL WILSON:

Could I just say in response to that what you've just mentioned there is very good fodder, a very good subject for a policy proposal. And, firstly, it's a policy proposal about IPv4 allocation policies and it's then a fee structure proposal and there's certainly no reason why you couldn't bring that proposal to the next meeting which is coming up in next March. And potentially have it considered and approved by the meeting to reduce the allocation size and consequently you could include some fee recommendations which could apply. These things don't necessarily have to all be solved together. They can be solved independently, in parallel and potentially with the agreement of the community, in the relatively short term. Thank you.

AKINORI MAEMURA:

Answering your question, Randy - yes, the EC of APNIC is now keen to discuss about a long-term fee structure fix and that's why we commissioned the KPMG for their external expertise to see an analysis of the current APNIC operations. And I do understand that throughout the discussion for the fees session this time, even the short fix by the fee raise and need to have more complete explanation on to the membership. So EC thinks that we need to present quite concrete, easy to understand, convincing proposal in front of the membership to get approval from the membership. And that would be done as soon as possible if it is possible in the next time we would like to bring the complete proposal to the membership. I mean at the next meeting. Am I clear?

RANDY BUSH:

I think I understood.

AKINORI MAEMURA:

Thank you very much.

SUMON AHMED SABIR:

I will add something to my friend from India - in Bangladesh we have a lot of smaller ISP and our situation is a bit worse than India, actually. Paul here is saying that dollar rate is elevating and the Australian dollar is very strong here so the complete income is reducing. In Bangladesh, in fact, Bangladesh is even devaluing against US dollars. So we are actually paying more every year because our currency is worse than the dollar. So all the time, the small ISPs and if fees increase 7%, it will really be difficult for them to pay actually. So even though APNIC needs to increase it for their reason but these issues should be considered as well if you can make something else different.

PAUL WILSON:

I sympathise with your position very strongly, personally. It is a shame that we don't at this time have a lot more progress on the issues that have been discussed at this fee structure discussion for a long time now. In presentations that I have given several years ago, or several meetings ago - there were suggestions that the APNIC community could make, that would address some of the unfairness in our situation. Personally I'm quite disappointed after such a long time we still have not got sufficient discussion of these issues that we are really even close yet to having a new fee structure. The APNIC EC one year ago, at this time, the time of our meeting prior to the last, recognised that we were facing an urgent situation. An increasingly urgent situation that we had the exchange rate issue, that we had a need for a new fee structure. And the EC result that time that we would have a new fee structure completed within a year. Now, we still don't have that so the interim fee structure is something that is necessary in order to make sure APNIC is sustainable. But it's certainly not an optimal solution. As I say, if we are able to actively continue this discussion with all stakeholders, all members representing all of the different concerns that we have and find a way to address these solutions and to do so sooner rather than later, then it will certainly be better for many of us. And I can only sympathise but express some frustration in the lack of progress that we've been making in a long period of just discussing and discussing and discussing.

RANDY BUSH:

May I insert for a second. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe in the membership survey there was very, very strong support for some kind of fee reduction, assistance, whatever, for developing economies. So I would think that between now and the Taiwan meeting, working on a proposal, that just addressed that issue, might be successful. And I'm sure the fees working group would help that process if members would care to work on that.

PAUL WILSON:

If I could add, you may be referring to not the member survey but the fee structure vote, the informal or non-binding vote that was held last year as well which revealed strong support for a discount of either 25% or 50% as the two options that are provided, well over 50% of the respondents to that survey supported one or other of those discount levels.

RANDY BUSH:

There's a path. And if we can help, please tell us.

VINH NGO:

I hope that I can clarify a few details for those who are not familiar. In the proposal we're trying to do there, we're trying to balance the budget for running APNIC at the moment. Some of you attended the working fee group yesterday, you might be aware of the increase in terms of salary for staff. In this day and age, the IT industry is very competitive. We're losing our good staff to other commercial entities. So we commission survey - what is the realistic salary for an IT staff and based on that working group yesterday, we recognised that there was a salary increase for APNIC staff. Apart from that, if you run a business yourself from day to day, OK, from my point of view we're running a non-profit organisation, but for you you're running an enterprise on a day-to-day basis. In your contract, when you sign it up, the basic increase every year is the consumer price index, which is roughly 4.5%. Looking at this figure for the last 10 years, APNIC have not increased any fee whatsoever. 4.5% in terms of consumer price index and on top of that 2.5% for the dollar fluctuation, and also the salary increase for staff. I think that justifies. Thank you.

RANDY BUSH:

I was just talking to Paul and it might be interesting to get input for people to say, given all these complex issues and the 10 that aren't on that page, which are the most, what's the priority? In other words, lesser developed economies? Small ISPs? Small members? The change that will come upon us in v4 run-out of the free pool, the relationship to NIRs, the service levels - should APNIC be doing more? ARIN does a whole lot, I'm sorry, RIPE, does a whole lot of research and deployment of infrastructure and so on and so forth. I'm not recommending it, it all I'm saying the difference between the RIRs and the service dimension is large. From the members, what are the most important issues which should be addressed first?

BILL MANNING:

As a member, I would suggest adjusting the income and outflow in to the same currency will remove some of the surprise elements which will make things a little easier to predict and that's something that ought to be relatively straight forward to do. That would be a relatively simple first step.

RANDY BUSH:

I am presuming that. OK, I have no idea how the vote is going, but I am presuming that the interim change to have the expensive Australian dollar, where the income in Australian dollars with the expenses and for the levelling increase will be passed, otherwise there's going to be a whole - we'll have to deal with a whole lot of other issues. The next step, I'm talking about Bill, which is more important - membership categories and the sizes, NIRs, and we'll have to address them all, but there's a two gentlemen saying, in fact, that lesser developed economies, small ISPs are maybe something that we can isolate well enough to start addressing immediately instead of, you know, with everything else. Early lunch?

MING-CHENG LIANG:

I think - I just talked to Paul, that, in here, that remember, in, I think in the last meeting or I think it's in the last meeting - I have proposed a continuous formula which is based on the current fee - I mean, the fee structure we are using now. But just making it become continuous. And, of course, in my assessment, at that time, I think that APNIC can get about 30% - I don't remember how many per cent, but I think it was 30% of increase. And the members will have to pay more in between, but I think the incremental would be less and maybe this gives room to increase the income and maybe something that can be discussed. I don't know whether the people think this type of idea is acceptable, because it's - the reason I think that may be more feasible is that it doesn't involve a change of any label or anything. I mean it's not going to change the structure too much, but it effectively gives us some leverage. So I would like to hear if any support or objection to this type of idea from the floor. Thank you.

Is there any comment on that?

PHILIP SMITH:

Philip Smith, Cisco. I'm not going to comment on a specific thing. I'm just going to comment on my general disappointment that we have to go round this merry-go-round every six months. We don't have any - OK, apart from the last six months, we have virtually no activity within the membership to actually try and figure out how to solve this particular impasse.

At APRICOT in Bali, we had several meetings. There has been some work done since then. But it all seems to have - well, at least from a wider membership point of view, the few good people who have been working very hard to try to solve the problem, but the fact that the rest of the membership doesn't seem to contribute kind of implies to me that they simply don't care. And that worries me quite a lot. And we end up going round and round this particular circle with trying to get what seems to me extreme positions resolved.

And I've been in the region for ten years and this discussion has been going on all the time. So we have to resolve it. And I think just trying to resolve it every six months at these sort of meetings and this kind of forum, it's just going to carry on for another ten years. And I think what we need to try and do is get bigger community involvement. In other words, the people who are standing up saying, "Oh, but it doesn't do this," and, "Oh, it doesn't do that," and, " Oh, I want this," they actually need to participate, rather than standing up at the microphone and whingeing, because you get people complaining about what is not good for them but nobody is looking at trying to resolve the actual problem.

I mean, I participate in three other Regional Internet Registry meetings and we don't seem to have this complete stuck-ness as we have here.

People from the community are actually participating. They care about it and they do stuff, and it just doesn't seem to happen in this part of the world, which I find disappointing.

Oh, by the way, a quick specific comment, I just want to echo that what Bill said, that APNIC's incomings and outgoings should be in the same currency, because the US dollar has basically plummeted. The Australian dollar, has not got stronger - I want to make that clear. It seems to have weakened against the euro and the British pound. It's the US dollar that is worth nothing these days. So the move to the Australian dollar is blatantly obvious in my book.

RANDY BUSH:

I believe you will see the US dollar go down further, so it's not worth nothing yet. You can't spend your life invading the world and blowing stuff up and not have some negative effects on your economy.

How do we do it, Philip? How do we get more people involved? At the next meeting, there will be no cookies during the break and the cookies will be in the Fees working group meeting. You have to come and you get cookies if you participate. You can't just sit there.

PHILIP SMITH:

Here's a radical idea. Those who actually actively participate, maybe they can get a discount on the new fees structure!

LAUGHTER

PAUL WILSON:

Line up, everyone.

RANDY BUSH:

But seriously, this is an important matter, this is how we are running our community as a business. Sir.

SHENGYONG DING:

I am from China Telecom. I understand that there should be an increasement in the fee, so I am wondering if you can provide some kind of new services for our ISPs. I think the fee increasement will be accepted more willingly, I mean, if you can provide some new kind of service, we would be glad to accept the new fee structure or increasement. That's my comment. Thank you.

PAUL WILSON:

If I could answer that, the Secretariat reports this morning were supposed to give some indication of the sorts of activities which are under way at APNIC. But we do have another related session this afternoon, which is a review of the last member survey and an analysis or a report of how APNIC services are being developed directly in response to that member survey.

So that survey did, in general - as we reported last time - it did, in general, request a lot of particular activities from the Secretariat and those have been reported.

At this stage, that is the primary direction that APNIC takes in determining those services and so I hope it will be quite informative about what we're doing to respond directly to member requests in that area. Thank you.

RANDY BUSH:

The interim fee - 7% - my understanding - and I don't do the mechanics, this is just me listening to the discussion - is essentially fees have not changed in the region for 11 years. In those 11 years, the difference between the US and the Australian dollar has changed seriously. And salaries in the industry and costs have gone up seriously and inflation has gone up seriously.

Given those, I'm surprised the number is not 30% instead of 7%. You know? So I'm not - I was not expecting a big increase in service to be - a tactless and rude American, as usual - when a year ago I saw APNIC lose senior talent to a university over salary. It was obvious there was a problem. So I believe APNIC did a - brought in a consultant to compare salaries, found they were exceedingly low, and the 7%, half of it, is to address that issue.

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong.

PAUL WILSON:

It wasn't a consultant. It was a consulting organisation, the Hay Group, which is the international human resources consulting company, which has been used by many companies all around the world for this sort of exercise, including RIPE NCC, actually, in recent years.

RANDY BUSH:

Philip?

PHILIP SMITH:

Yeah, it's Philip Smith again from Cisco. Just to make an observation on the salaries in Australia and especially in Queensland and Brisbane where APNIC is based, people coming from overseas are always surprised at how low salaries are in Australia. So I want to make that observation. What you can buy in Australia, say, the number value, it's the same number if you go shopping in the US and it's the same number if you go shopping in Europe. Now, the pound to Australian dollar exchange rate is about 2.2:1. People don't realise the cost of living is relatively lower.

And even then - so, with the US dollar collapsing so far, Australia is still a very, very cheap place to be but, hey, people still need to be able to live and work and eat-so-and so forth. So I echo what Randy said, the increase could have been hugely more than the 7% that's being proposed.

VINH NGO:

Hi, this is Vinh again here. Just reminding all the members that in the seven EC representing you as the whole body here, all the EC coming from various regions. I'm from Australia. We've got India. We've got Hong Kong. Taiwan, China, this is the entire spectrum of AsiaPac. We take this serious - this matter seriously. We work together. We discuss. We look at the expenditure. We look at the budget. We look - we discuss the budget seriously at the beginning of this year. We looked, we tracked it regularly and we come up with this 7% solution. It's based on the financial tracking we do at the moment, OK? I said earlier, and I repeat it again, look at the Hay Group report. If you do a search on the Internet, look at the increase in terms of salary for your staff. Let's forget about APNIC staff for one second, but look at your staff. Can you retain your good and senior staff in your organisation? Are you being pinched by other competitors within your industry? OK, that's what we're facing here. Let alone - I've got to take the opportunity to thank all the APNIC staff here. They've done a very good job. We don't retain them, we don't look after them, we will lose them. Thank you.

RANDY BUSH:

Axel.

AXEL PAWLIK:

Axel Pawlik, from the RIPE NCC.

I would like to reflect what was just said about staffing and salaries. We have been using the Hay Group for several years now and we had good acceptance within our board and our community about this. After all, APNIC is serving you as its members and its community. And I think you need to be able to pay decent salaries for these guys serving you. Otherwise, it will fade away and we're standing there without a service organisation like this.

Another thing - to be very blunt and possibly quite undiplomatic European - the one thing that seems to me to be very, very obvious and a little bit strange maybe for several years already is that you have NIRs, which is, in itself, an interesting point, but I see that very many NIRs are represented on the EC, the Executive Council, on the EC. And, to me, it's quite clear that there is tremendous potential for a conflict of interest, in that obviously the NIRs and the people within the NIRs need to make sure that they run a good and stable business. On the other hand, you are also then addressing the EC, responsible for ensuring that APNIC is run responsibly and financially stable. Of course, there are various factors that make it very difficult, more difficult, maybe, than in the European region. But that's something that strikes me as exceedingly obvious and a major difference from how we run our business. And maybe you would think about that.

Sorry about being so blunt.

RANDY BUSH:

I have one point. Sanjaya, could you stand up?

This is what a senior APNIC engineer looks like. This is what a real engineer looks like.

LAUGHTER

KUSUMBA SRIDHAR:

Randy. There's a difference between Australia and Japan.

I'm on the EC of APNIC. Axel, I just want to clarify to the all group here that the scenario of NIR members dominating the EC of APNIC is only a virtual one.

In reality, after I have become an EC, it's now for eight months, I have very cooperative EC with me, especially those who are from NIRs.

On the other side, I have to tell you here that, OK, I'm a non-NIR member and Vinh Ngo is also from non-NIR here. We have not had any situation of a conflict of interest, and I have to give you one example here that, when we were discussing about the fee, yes, as a non-NIR representative, if that is what you would like to classify me at this moment, India, again, is the second largest membership contribution to the APNIC and in NIR, if you see, it's only the discussion that happens within the NIR. But if you look at my situation in India, we have 160 members who talk to me almost on - in fact, I have a separate mailbox for them now to talk to me, OK. And that's how we have been addressing.

Whenever there is a conflict of interest, or we feel that there is a conflict of interest, or we feel that we are not able to arrive at consensus, we are taking external help. Paul has been very good in contributing. Randy has also been very good in contributing.

The classic example I'll leave you here with is the recent exercise when we started discussing about the fees, we had to go and bring in KPMG in the picture, because it's not that the NIR members or non-NIR representatives on the EC are not able to take the decision, we are aware of the fact that the community is taking a long time to discuss about this. We're also aware about the financial situation of the APNIC, which needs to be fixed fast. To be able to talk, what do we need to do better? If the situation goes more worse, there is nothing to talk about. When we called KPMG into the picture, being a neutral party, we have also proposed them to look at the fee structure in two different angles. Let us look at NIR and non-NIR. So only on the KPMG analysis, done on a 100 neutral level.

KPMG has not just done analysis of APNIC. With information available in the public domain, they have also taken the data from all the RIRs and that was beautifully presented to us in Singapore. That's when we have arrived at this interim. Thank you.

AXEL PAWLIK:

Don't get me wrong. I don't think I'm qualified to comment on the EC work's obviously. It's just the existence of the EC/NIRs, actually, NIRs in this region, is a major difference from how we are doing it in Europe and I do also see that this fee discussion is going on for a very, very long time already, so I thought I'd make the comment and hope that all goes well. And I'm happy to see that the work is done calling in KPMG and others. I think that is a major step forward already.

RANDY BUSH:

In the last months, I have had the pleasure of sitting in on EC meetings regarding fees, Axel, and I think that the problems of that kind of conflict of interest have not set off my alarms in transactions with them, but I believe the issue you raise is, you know, I sit on boards of businesses and the issue you raised formally is one.

But I think what we have in our culture here is an EC that is moving from the founding parents to a business board. And this is a transition and will take some years. It's a cultural change. And I don't know how it will be resolved. And, indeed, the most difficult - one of the two most difficult issues underlying the fee discussion, the long-term fee discussion, in my mind, the two biggest issues, are the relationships between NIRs and APNIC, and the change in financial model that free pool will run-out in v4 will cause.

So a direct day-to-day conversation with people who are wearing both hats is going to happen no matter what. And my experience in the time I've been doing this, which is since the last two meetings, since Kaohsiung, is that the discussion between the EC and the NIRs and APNIC and the Fees working group has changed from aggressive and difficult, and everybody was being aggressive and difficult except me, of course, and to cooperative and realising we are all part of the same community, the same family, and the Internet is about cooperation.

So, you know, I'm impressed and I think this is going culturally very well. And I think the EC and APNIC and the NIRs are all to be thanked and congratulated for moving forward in a very constructive direction.

VINH NGO:

Thanks, Randy.

Let's look at it this way for the smaller ISP. If you remember, when I first did my speech about four years ago when I got elected, I am standing here trying to represent the smaller ISP community out there. I understand the hurt from a financial point of view, but look at it from a much bigger picture. Extract yourself from your day-to-day business and look at it from the point of view of our community, not as an individual. We run a business, like it or not it's a non-profit organisation. If we take all those money and we invest to make a lot more money, by all means, we can come back here and say, "Forget about the fee," but the reality of the fact is we are running a non-profit organisation, OK? Everything costs. We have a dilemma. On one side, we recognise from a smaller ISP point of view, increasing 7% might be a significant increase for your annual budget, OK.

But, on the same side, we are trying to facilitate a discussion here within all members. We are trying to reach a consensus in a diplomatic words that is not easy to try and reach a consensus. We tried for the last ten years.

Do we carry on this message forever? Or do we try to achieve something at the moment?

If we don't, instead of APNIC, we do the global community now, we might go broke. That's the reality of the fact. We take it seriously. All EC, all members, we discuss, we consider seriously.

So put that in your mind. Look at it through that spectrum here when you make your decision between one another and try to understand it from that point of view.

RS PERHAR:

Randy, you know, I am reminded of something.

What happens - a man checks into a hotel and he goes to his room and he finds a PC, computer, is there in the room. And he could send e-mail messages. So what does he do? He sends off an e-mail to his wife. Unfortunately, when he is typing out the e-mail address, he makes a mistake and that e-mail lands up somewhere else.

A lady in a different town who has just got back from a funeral, which was of her husband, rests for a while and then gets up to look at her e-mail messages because she wanted to reply to all the condolences messages. So the very first message she reads, she faints and falls. Her son comes. He sees the screen. The e-mail which was on the screen read, "Dear Jane," subject - "I have reached" dated 6 September 2007, "Dear Jane, you will be glad to know that I have reached. I was just checked in. I find that have good computers here. The preparations for your arrival are all ready. Waiting for you tomorrow. Thank you, your husband."

Now, why I was reminded of this is that when, from APNIC, we got the first indication of fee hikes, it was like this e-mail to us, and to the smaller ISPs. We just about fainted. Right? So anyway, Kusumba was there. He gave us the inputs and convinced the members that, in the overall interest of the community and APNIC, there are changes which are being done and they are justified and reasonable and, yes, later on, we worked out to help out smaller ISPs. So we go by that and I'm sure we will be able to get over this debate very soon and let the voting go ahead and I'm sure the results should be indicating that.

Now, before sitting down, I heard a remark by Paul a little while earlier before we went for a tea break. He said we are running a little late in our programs and it's India. Right? Right, Paul?

PAUL WILSON:

We normally do run late in these programs so it's not just India and I'm sorry if I caused any...

RS PERHAR:

Well, you know, I am reminded of another thing. You know, a man is deserted on an island. He has been there for 20 years and since he has nothing to do, he keeps praying. So the fairy godmother comes to him after 20 years and she says, "What do you want? "you have got three wishes." So he says, " Fine." Finally in his mind, the bubbly champagne comes. He used to love champagne. He asks for one, two, three cases but then he says, "Why not turn this river into champagne?" she says done and the river turns into champagne. Suddenly in his mind, the picture of Brigitte Bardot comes and he says, "I must have a woman to keep me company." He says, "Fairy godmother, I would love to have the best woman in this world." So she says, "Done," and down comes Mother Teresa. It's a matter of perception.

RANDY BUSH:

With Brigitte Bardot, you're showing your age.

KUSUMBA SRIDHAR:

Just quickly two points for everybody to remember. One thing that the class - the normal perception that we are trying to hear all the time that APNIC is different by having NIRs. Yes, it is different, but during my experience of the last eight months, I have seen that it is an advantage for APNIC. Why?

APNIC cannot be conducted as just an organisation. We are trying to look at it as a business. We are trying to look at it as an enterprise that should be there. What we are carrying as EC members is the business expertise that we have to conduct the business properly.

Now, you all know that NIR actually has similar functionality as what RIR does, more or less. So what I have noticed is that the expertise that the member services coming from JPNIC and TWNIC, that is actually helping us visualise certain policies and certain procedures and the way we conduct the business in APNIC. So we are using that as a kind of a knowledge pool for us, rather than somebody saying that it's different.

Yes, it's different but, for us, our experience is it's been an advantage.

The second point, please understand, yesterday Randy was also mentioning that if there is any change that can happen, it can happen only in membership because APNIC is for membership. Please understand that RIR do not have equity to go and ask for loans from bank. We cannot go to bank and ask for loan. The revenue source is membership. If anything can happen, it's only at the membership. We cannot go and put our stake in a bank and get a loan. So please understand that. That's a fundamental difference between a non-profit organisation and a profit organisation.

JONNY MARTIN:

Jonny Martin from FX Networks in New Zealand. We support this proposal. It seems to be a pretty Conservative increase and, to be pretty frank, we're putting fibre in the ground, buying routers and paying for staff at home, this is nothing. The cost of obtaining resource from APNIC really is nothing. And I think it would be nice if we can reach some sort of consensus and not have to revisit this every six months.

It's quite fun the first time. Second and third time, I'm guessing it's not going to be anywhere near as fun.

GAURAB RAJ UPADHAYA:

Gaurab, Upadhaya. Actually, I do support this proposal to change the APNIC accounting from US dollars to Australian dollars. I actually think it's saner because the incomes are designated in US dollars and the expenditures are all in Australian dollars and probably by any sane business thinking, that's probably not the right way to do things.

And, as Randy said - I come from Nepal so any kind of price increase is not good, given we've been going down against the US dollars. But I realise that 11 years the prices have not gone up, so maybe APNIC needs to get the 7% increase in fees.

But what I have noticed is APNIC in the last few years have spent a lot of resources on trainings, sending people around. I mean in the last three or four years, we've had more than two trainings a year almost. So that costs money. And I think that the ISPs are pretty happy with that support from APNIC. And a 7% increase sounds pretty good to me. Thanks.

PHILIP SMITH:

Philip Smith, Cisco.

I'm kind of disappointed that the NIR discussion came up here. I think it's well moan that APNIC is the only region that has NIRs. LACNIC has one. NIC-Mexico. The other regions do not. If the NIRs do so much, as Kusumba claimed, why on earth do the other regions have no NIRs at all?

I work in a service provider operation industry. I meet ISPs all over the Asia Pacific region. Nobody is convinced that the NIRs do a good job for them. They are simply a buffer between APNIC and the membership. Quite often a delayed buffer, and I really do not think that we should be entering this particular discussion now.

I note that the EC membership is mostly from the NIR regions. I was quite happy to see that Kusumba was one of the first non-EC members. Unfortunately, he seems to have gone into the same tune as the rest of the NIRs and this is quite disappointing.

So I come back to my earlier comments. We've spent ten years trying to solve this. The EC are really supportive of APNIC. They should be working a lot harder than they are now to sort this particular issue. That it hasn't been, only suggests in my book one particular thing, and I would encourage the EC to join with the rest of the community and work a little bit harder to get us out of this impasse.

BILL WOODCOCK:

As an associate member, I spend roughly ten times as much to get to these meetings as I pay in dues every year and I think, speaking for myself, I'd love to see this issue resolved so that the meetings can go on to more substantive issues.

RANDY BUSH:

Well, as far as this goes - excuse me, Izumi-san - this is a business. Budgets, income, expense, are part of running a business. These will always be discussed. The question is do we make progress. Izumi-san.

IZUMI OKUTANI:

Izumi from JPNIC. Well, I'm from an NIR and I've noticed that maybe some of the comments we made in the Fees working group during the meeting may have given the impression that, you know, as an NIR, we're protecting our interests and things like that.

But actually, we simply wanted to clarify the questions we had in order to understand the proposal better and then APNIC Secretariat did provide us with the answers that, you know, we wanted and, afterwards, we went back and then, you know, discussed about it a bit more internally, and we totally agree that we should move on and, you know, the proposal this time made sense to us after additional explanations, so we think, you know, we should move on, as the rest of the community probably feels as well. So we are in favour of this proposal and just to clarify our position.

RANDY BUSH:

Thank you, Izumi-san, I thought the discussion yesterday was very constructive - was it yesterday? The day before, sorry - was very constructive and I think the role you and JPNIC played was very constructive.

GAURAB RAJ UPADHAYA:

Gaurab Upadhaya again. Discussion has been going on for many years now about the fee increase and for members who were not at previous meetings or discussions, this is a pretty watered-down proposal from what I've seen at last meetings and so on. I'm sure Randy and the Fees working group put in a lot of work. So actually I pretty much urge anyone to, you know, vote for this and let's move forward, as other people have been saying. We've got other things to discuss. And, you know, it's sad that this comes up at every meeting. It's a business issue and if the business is to continue, we've got to make progress on it.

Having said that, I've been discussing this offline with other people and I and I know members of this organisation as well and we also have these debates in Nepal as well because the paying members are asked to set the fees, which they'll always oppose if it's going to increase. But being a member of APNIC, I think APNIC does provide value for the money they charge for the fees. So, yeah, I think I would support Bill and Izumi and others who have said that we probably should get this, get over this on this meeting. Thanks.

KUSUMBA SRIDHAR:

Are you waiting for the mic?

OK, I just want to clarify that we believe in cooperation and collaboration. We don't believe in confrontation.

When any EC member comes on to the board of APNIC, I have respected that they be not called a representative of NIR or non-NIR in the first place. As a matter of fact, I forgot to tell you that it's not just me and Vinh. Che-Hoo also, as the secretary of the APNIC EC, is also from non-NIR.

There has been absolutely no question any time on a situation that has come during our board meetings that, OK, "He is talking like an NIR. I'm talking like a non-NIR." That's one.

Secondly. Please notice one important thing - in the Asia Pacific region, the two largest memberships are Australia and India. OK, India is not an NIR and please understand whether a decision has been taken by NIR or non-NIR Representative on the EC board, Indians members have the capacity to vote out any proposal due to its large stake in the votes. It is does not really matter who has taken a decision or who has come forward on the APNIC EC. When they are on the EC board, they are EC board. I did not have any communications on the EC board that somebody is talking like an NIR. Even if somebody has come in, it was always neutral. And if there is anything coming in, don't worry, India is the largest membership, it has got capacity to vote out, and I am sure and confident that, with the kind of cooperation the EC is working at this moment and more aggressively due to the current situation that we have, we are tending to work very closely with the Secretariat, I think this situation would never come in at least APNIC.

RANDY BUSH:

Maemura-san.

AKINORI MAEMURA:

Akinori Maemura, first from JPNIC. I just comment for Philip's point. He said that the NIR is lame. But if it were so, we need to improve that to be more efficient but I personally think this is due to the complexity in the APNIC region. But we believe that the NIR is serving to their region's concerns in better service and inviting them to the policy scene of the APNIC.

But, anyway, I, as an NIR, am doing my best to serve more.

And, then, I am now wearing the hat of APNIC EC. I do agree that the EC needs to be more involved in, for example, fee structure considerations. And presenting it in front of the membership and in better shape. I do agree on that.

And I will do my job at the Executive Council. Thank you very much.

GAURAB RAJ UPADHAYA:

Thank you, Maemura-san. Gaurab Upadhaya again.

Actually, Kusumba said that India and Australia are the largest members. We don't know what the number of members KRNIC and TWNIC actually have. It seems like they're only NIR and how many real members they have in those countries is not transparent to us. And if anyone is using APNIC allocated resources, which is a limited resource, then those numbers should actually be made public. I mean, you know, otherwise it seems to me like Australia and Indians and others smaller countries are actually cross-subsidising the NIR operation because the NIRs don't disclose their membership. Thanks.

I would think that this would have a better time to discuss the NIR versus the other members. So I would like Randy to get this back on the fees thing if possible.

VINH NGO:

That's exactly my comment as well. Gentlemen, it's not time for discussion in terms of NIR or RIR or whatever. We are here to discussing about the fee issue. It's one o'clock now. I'm not sure about your tummy, but my tummy is really hungry at the moment. Let's get this over and done with and get on with the job.

BRAJESH JAIN:

With an ISP in Japan, how many dollars do they pay for the number of IPs they get from the NIR? I'm quite surprised to learn that we do not even know that. And for how many IPs, what is the amount in Japan or in Spain. And if we do not even know that number, I am very surprised at what EC is doing. Thank you.

ROB SEASTROM:

Rob Seastrom, ARIN AC.

When I was younger, my friends and I rebuilt the engine in a car. And when we were done, we wondered why it worked so poorly when we tried to fire it up. And then when we finished sorting it out, we wondered why it worked at all.

So I think the question here is why does it have to be so high as to be 7% but why is it so low as to be 7%? Is that enough?

I mean, after 11 years of no price hikes, that's a very, very small increase.

RANDY BUSH:

The answer from the financial folk in the Secretariat was yes.

ROB SEASTROM:

That's impressive.

RANDY BUSH:

I would - excuse me for picking on some of our guests, but I would note, I believe historically, that when the European region, RIPE, was found it had financial issues, excuse me for speaking Californian, that the fee raise at RIPE was 60%. Is that not correct? Approximately?

AXEL PAWLIK:

About 50%. Only.

RANDY BUSH:

Only. Only 50%!

But, as Vinh said, you know, I think I get the prize this week for the discussion of the role of NIRs that I had with the judge lady from CNNIC in the NIR session, so you amateurs give up.

And, um, I do think it was very good that the members are starting to speak. I think this is wonderful. And Che-Hoo, would you make the last talk from the membership and then we can see if we can fatten up Sanjaya to look like a real engineer.

CHE-HOO CHENG:

OK, I'm Che-Hoo. I'm also one of the EC members. I'm from Hong Kong. Hong Kong is - was the second largest membership until maybe two or three years ago when India took over. And right now, Hong Kong is still the third largest membership in the APNIC region.

I'm from non-NIR. But I would say I am more objective. I'm not really representing the non-NIR members because I also have, I am also having a close relationship with, you know, all the NIR members.

And I always hear NIRs saying that the fees are not fair to them and then non-NIR members are saying that the fees are not fair to them. And so we see the problem of the current fee structure and we know we have to, you know, have a total revamp of the system in order to solve all of the issues that we have been mentioning for those two or three years or so.

And, OK, in order to do that, that's why we get KPMG into the picture and we hope to have someone independent to help us to establish a proposal, or maybe one or two. And hopefully we can have the proposal by next meeting or, at the latest, two meetings later. And then those proposals can accommodate all the comments that we have been gathering and hopefully, you know, it would be accepted by the members and we can have, you know, less argument on this topic for several years. Thank you.

RANDY BUSH:

The discussion of whose fees should go and whose should go down, to me, is like QoS. QoS is sold about who gets better service but it's not really. It's about whose packets get dropped. And it should always be the other person's. Well, all of us think our fees should go down and theirs should go up.

So that's not going to be overall constructive. And so, um...

But I think this has been a productive discussion. I think the process we've gone through in the last six to eight months to try to solve the immediate financial problem as responsible members of a business is good and has been reasonable and responsible, and we now move into the phase where we, as a society, culture and business, have to understand how to accommodate fairly all views and all citizens. And this will be a bit of a challenge, but I certainly have a good feeling that we're up to it.

And thank you very much. And now we can try to take these too-thin people and make them into engineers.

PAUL WILSON:

Well, the best way to make too-thin people not so thin is to eat. And it's lunchtime now so we'll take a break for an hour and come back in 60 minutes' time, which I believe is 2:15.

KUSUMBA SRIDHAR:

1:15. We'll come back to 2:15.

PAUL WILSON:

So I would like to say thanks. Randy's moved off the stage, but I'd like to say thanks to Randy as one of the co-chairs and there a couple of small -

RANDY BUSH:

I received mine. I didn't need it. I gave mine to the transcribers who do such a wonderful job.

PAUL WILSON:

They'll get theirs later.

Thank you and see you all after lunch.

Thanks.

(End of session)

Back to top

AMM - Session Three

Friday 7 September 2007
1430-1600

PAUL WILSON:

We should get started again, so if I could ask you to please take your seats.

The first thing we need to do is, since the voting in the current ballot has closed, I need to ask for some scrutineers who can count those ballots and deliver us a result by the time this afternoon. I see Ray Plzak, Susan and Kenny, German.

I think with our hopefully simplified counting system, I think four should be sufficient. But could I ask you, the four who have volunteered, to get together and decide how you're going to go about the counting process?

German, you're up next reporting so if you can join them later.

The scrutineers we have, are you happy with the numbers that you've got? That's four volunteers. German will join us as a fourth after his presentation. If anyone else would like to volunteer, this is to help to count and oversee the counting of the ballots for the fee structure ballot.

OK, well, I'll leave it to you guys. Alright.

We have a couple of reports, which have been deferred from the morning. Two of the RIR reports were deferred and the first of those is German from LACNIC, who is presenting their report. After that, Axel will join us for the RIPE NCC report. So I'd like to get started. German, thanks.

When we have this display problem sorted out, we'll have the two RIR reports and then we'll get back into the agenda for the rest of the afternoon as planned.

That will include the report from the APNIC EC, followed by the reports from the SIGs, the NIR SIG, the Policy SIG and we'll also have a report from APOPS.

Then looking into the APNIC member survey update, reports from IANA and the NRO and the Address Council.

Now, Ray Plzak has suggested that the NRO report was largely covered by myself this morning in my remarks about the NRO, so he's offered to withdraw that report and I think, in view of the timing, I think we'll accept that. So thanks, Ray.

And any moment now...

(Pause)

Axel, would you like to come and try your Mac on our projector here?

These things are so easy to use, aren't they? They just work. So I keep hearing.

RIPE NCC

AXEL PAWLIK:

Alright. Good afternoon, everybody. I am here to give you some update from the Singel. The Singel is the canal that you see there in the picture. No, this is not my company car. We not only don't have company cars, we don't have old company cars either. We have company bikes. I still have dried and haven't landed in the canals myself.

Alright, now, obviously, bad things can happen and, as was mentioned earlier, RIPE NCC has looked at various bad things that could happen. Of course, everybody more or less has an emergency plan. The fire breaks out and people evacuate the building and go to the next bridge and stuff, but we thought that is not very good service to our members and we wanted to improve on that so we now have a fully fledged business continuation plan. In the event of an earthquake in Amsterdam or maybe flooding - somewhat more likely with global warming and all that. So we have done that ourselves and we have had consultants in to double check that and make sure we didn't forget that. It's only 180 pages. These days, I don't even have to read all them. In the case of fire and stuff. We have a workshop in September to look through this and see what we would actually do, for those scenarios. Hopefully theoretical membership benefit.

I have reported in Bali that we were rebuilding RIPE NCC. Internally we have some new key staff, three of whom are actually here and I think you have seen them, Andrew, Flor and then Ischa.

We have focused internally. I detect some parallel between the RIPE NCC and APNIC there as well. We have focused internally for a while and now we're looking outward again. We have a number of exciting projects ongoing. Certification, obviously, RIPE database stuff needs to be polished and updated. TTM, RIS and host count, we will repackage a bit and make look proper and more easily acceptable. I've seen a member of CMS here someone. We do the same as well just to make our webpage easier, manageable and that's also good for our members of course.

Right, these are interesting days. Obviously, with the exhaustion of IPv4, soon coming up certification somewhere in the corners. So we thought that we should rethink what we are seeing the RIPE NCC as. What is this place? And what should it be doing? We went away, our senior management team, to look at the vision for the coming years and see what strategies there will be. That's something we'll continue next week already. Basically to ensure our day-to-day operations are aligned with what we think the big vision is.

That is all fine and good but we shouldn't forget our members and our members obviously elect the executive board, our joint bosses, so we called them in as well for a 1.5-day retreat to confirm what we were thinking is what they are thinking and that's actually the case.

After all this round of policy fora has passed, we will look at where we are and what we should do.

Two major points I see has come already there, is that our board has reconfirmed that the RIPE NCC is a network coordination centre and, as Randy said earlier, the RIPE NCC does a lot of expert things from the registry, routing information system, host count, ENUM, K-Root server and stuff like that. We think this is a legitimate field of activities for our members, for the wider community. That's something our board also reconfirmed. I'm happy to report that.

And, of course, a lot of agreement with our board is that we better prepare for the trading of resources, of IP numbers. We don't know exactly how that will happen. We've seen a policy proposal here. We'll see one at the RIPE meeting as well. We'd better be prepared for that.

Alright. Speaking of certification, we know that the RIPE NCC is very much activity plan-driven. That is our members tell us what to do, so we have to look at this and we can't just run out and do things on our own. So we have set up this task force with some members about certification to look at prototypes and possible integration of business processes. Currently they're thinking, "It looks quite good but how do I deal with this? What are the implications really?"

So we're looking at this. We'll have various certification task force meetings and we're currently looking at deployment of the system in 2008, of course, if that is supported by the members.

However, currently I cannot imagine that it shouldn't be, exhaustion, trading and all that is certainly in need of having certification.

Membership and regional outreach, I'm currently happy to say at 5,000 members with surprising growth in Russia. They are our biggest membership country for quite some time already and it just isn't stopping.

So it's just natural that we go to Moscow with our RIPE NCC regional meeting. We basically update our members on the developments within the RIPE region. We also go to Qatar again in November this year to cover the people of the Middle East. We are preparing carefully a membership survey to do early next year and one thing that we were successful with is a regional operators group in the Middle East, MENOG, the first meeting was quite a success and the next one will happen in Qatar and, as it happens, we'll also have our regional meeting.

Right, governments and enhanced cooperation. You know we do these round-tables for governments and regulators. The last one in Amsterdam was taking place in February. It was seen as a success. As I said, these are very exciting days and the developments might be happening quickly, typically in regard to new policy proposals that we see all the time. So we thought it might be useful to do another one in September on the 17th and we'll basically look at the world in the light of IPv4 exhaustion, policy proposals and basically the message will be that we are looking at things the communities are aware, they are discussing many different policy proposals and some of them might transition to IPv6. We don't know. But this is what we can tell you.

I think it's for the best.

We have indicated last time already, that the external relations group is now properly staffed. Basically we want to throw some more resources at the interaction with governments field. I think that is very useful these days and of course preparation for the IGF and that was covered here before also. Within the NRO, we prepare for that and we need to be prepared with a good story about that.

Slowly moving on. Maybe.

Alright, very quick report from the Tallinn RIPE meeting. It was well attended. Tallinn, the old country, Estonia, was DDoSed at the time. Connection was OK, though. We did a lot of corporate governance there. The financial report of last year was adopted. Same with the annual report. Re-elections of the board members, similar things will happen next time, hopefully.

We felt the urgent need of more time for address policy. Of course, that's difficult to say. Sometimes we need more time and sometimes we need less and we have had previous years of meetings, two slots reserved, only needed one. That's a bit awkward. But we said this, again, interesting times, we want to reserve a whole plenary session for exhaustion on a Tuesday afternoon and that will be, of course, at the next meeting in Amsterdam. The hotel had way too many nightclubs. We were all somewhat tired.

The next RIPE meetings are in Amsterdam in October, rather quickly, then we have one in Cologne in May of next year and after some thinking back and forth, looking at costs and the like, we thought it is very reasonable to bring a whole big RIPE meeting to the Middle East and to our colleagues there. So we go to Dubai in November next year.

So, of course, you are quite welcome to attend all of those.

And that's me for now. Questions, I'm happy to answer. And I'll be around for a little while as well.

PAUL WILSON:

Thank you very much, Axel. Are there any questions about the RIPE NCC report? I'd like to present Axel with a small gift.

APPLAUSE

I'd also like to express thanks to RIPE NCC also for some collaborative activities that we've undertaken together recently. We had Paul Rendek, one of the senior RIPE NCC managers at APNIC recently for a couple of extended periods, about four weeks in total, and we worked together very intensively on a lot of cross-departmental comparisons, developing discussions and so on to compare the operations of NCC and APNIC. It's fair to say that Paul spent time with everyone on the APNIC staff and really helped us to learn a lot about how things are done at NCC and get a lot of useful advice and I certainly hope we can reciprocate because it was a very valuable experience. And I'd like to say thanks very much to Axel and also to Paul for his personal efforts. Thanks.

The next report is from LACNIC.

LACNIC

GERMAN VALDEZ:

Good afternoon. I'm German Valdez from LACNIC. I'm the policy and external relations manager. It's always a pleasure to be present in APNIC and share with you a little bit what is going on in Latin America and in the Nick Caribbean region.

First of all, I would like to show you a few slides that reflects the growing nature of LACNIC. You might see that our membership has grown this year. We finally formed a relationship with the NIC-Brazil, the Brazilian NIR. They are acting now as full members of LACNIC, just like NIC-Mexico did in 2005.

This graphic shows that we are - it shows how the membership is distributed in Latin America and Caribbean region. You might see here that the most important markets are Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina and Chile. Those countries represent about 70% of the total of our membership. At this moment, we have 652 members, through various economies, which are in the regional service of LACNIC.

Also, our family has been growing. At this moment, we have three different areas, plus our CEO. We are divided in a administrative, technical, policy and external relations members. We are 16 people. We started operations in October 2002.

We have not lost any staff so far but we have constantly grown our staff according to our services.

Growing is one of the most important messages I bring to you today about LACNIC. As many other organisations, we have felt the pain of the inevitable process of growing up.

So during 2006, we started many changes. The first one was the restructure in the three areas I mentioned before. And secondly the LACNIC board of directors authorised to buy new facilities that could be developed to respond to the future activities of LACNIC. In this sense, we are in January 2006, we are - the LACNIC invest in buying a very well located whole house in Montevideo. You might see here how are the conditions of this old house. Actually, it's a lot of bushes and trees have been removed before this picture was taken. Before this, this looked like a jungle.

Finally, after some months of work, we finished the preparation of the renovation of the old building for new facilities. We are very happy to share it with you. We had a grand open in last December. The Vice-President officially opened the doors of our offices. So this is your house, this is your home in Latin America. We are very proud for this achievement. It's a big motivation for us to continue improving our services to our community. This two-level building is ready for expansion to receive more staff and build additional office if it's necessary.

And, of course, the best view of the office is the CEO office. The building is on one of the most important streets in Montevideo, just in front of the beach. If you notice, our CEO doesn't travel in summer, you know why. It's a very stressful working environment.

As part of this process to formalise the organisation, it's not enough to have a new building, it's important to develop a process to say who we are and what we want. As a consequence, we started a planning process, which will define our vision, mission, objectives and allow us to plan new projects for the region.

We are adapting our internal and external activities to provide the best service possible to our region.

So let me share with you very quickly what our vision is right now. So the vision is to be a leader in the construction and articulation of collaborative efforts for Internet development and stability in Latin America and the Caribbean.

But our mission is to administrate Internet numbering resources, contributing to the creation of collaboration and cooperation opportunities for the region. The first mission is to continue the excellence of our services. We want to constantly perfect an impartial self-regulation model. Also the adoption and promotion of technological advancements and at the same time strengthen the relationships with the main stakeholders of the region and finally to help and support the most important regional capabilities and processes of Internet technology.

Well, regarding the last meeting, this was in Margarita in Venezuela. We had a very busy week. There were almost 350 participants that we had from 29 different countries, in a total of 11 different proposals that were submitted for discussion. Additionally, as many other RIRs That clement the Open Policy Forum, we have other activities for stakeholders in the region like ccTLD, IXP and security working groups and we shared the region with the Latin American ISOC chapter. We are very pleased to realise that the LACNIC meeting is becoming every year one of the most important meeting points in our region.

These are the policies that reach consensus in the Open Policy Forum. The policies are available in the record of the meeting on the LACNIC Website. These proposals are right now going through the staff and the board, we are defining the impacts of the operational services.

Once this process is done, the appropriate action will be done in the LACNIC mailing list.

Another outcome of the meeting was the realisation of an editorial working group, which has the responsibility to review the policy texts and try to unify concepts and avoid ambiguity. And also there was a revision of the current LACNIC policy process in order to adapt it to a new times in LACNIC.

As part of the results of the planning process, we are increasing activities in the region. This includes two important projects. The first one is what we call +Roots. This year, we deployed two new versions in Panama and Ecuador and the others are in Chile, Argentina and Venezuela. According to this agreement, we have room for two more root servers. We want at least one of these to be deployed in the Caribbean.

Also we have a partnership with the IDRC and ISOC. This program is called FRIDA and this is small grants for funding ICT research projects. This is the second version of this program and the first one was started in 2005 and due to the success of the original program, we started a new one and right now, these three organisations have been able to have a fund of $650,000. At this moment, we are just finished the first call for projects and we are evaluating the different proposals.

We are also supporting and participating in different activities through our region. We're always looking for new agreements with different sectors, the public, the economic, the private one. We continue our effort to be part of the most important activities or initiative for establishing the Internet in the region. We had the first IXP workshop organised by LACNIC together with the Salvador Government and the support of Cisco, PCH, ISOC and ICANN and there was an agreement signed by ARIN, LACNIC and the Caribbean Telecommunication Union, on cooperation. They will now increase collaborative efforts in the Caribbean.

We started also a new IPv6 campaign. The purpose of this campaign is to promote the adoption of IPv6 in the region and raise awareness about IPv4 depletion. We started a new IPv6 transition portal. This is, like many others' websites, LACNIC is supporting this in three language - English, Spanish and Portuguese.

I want to leave a warm invitation for next LACNIC meeting, which will be the 11th one. This is going to be in Salvador de Bahia in Brazil, a fantastic city, famous for the carnival and its African roots. And in May 2008, it will be famous for the distribution of Internet resources in Latin America. It's a kind invitation.

So thank you, all.

And any question?

Thank you.

PAUL WILSON:

Thank you, German.

APPLAUSE

PAUL WILSON:

The next on the podium according to the schedule. We're resuming the agenda as it's been slightly deferred. The next is Akinori Maemura, who is the chair of the APNIC Executive Council and he will present the reports of the council's activities over the last six months.

EC report

AKINORI MAEMURA:

OK. Good afternoon, everyone. Can you hear me?

Alright.

My name is Akinori Maemura, the chair of the APNIC Executive Council.

I am reporting to you about the activities from the APNIC EC. This slide shows the members of the Executive Council and EC members please stand up to show your face to the membership.

This time already some of the EC members already speak something in front of the mic, but I'd like to introduce you. I am Akinori Maemura and Che-Hoo Cheng from Hong Kong, Kuo-Wei Wu - he is out right now - from Taiwan, and Ming-Cheng Liang - maybe they have some business temporarily - sorry - and Mao Wei from China, Vinh Ngo from Australia, and Kusumba Sridhar from India.

And, in this chart, the surname, last name, is underlined for your information.

Main functions of APNIC EC is listed in this slide. They make interim decisions between the member meetings, oversee the activities of the APNIC Secretariat, to consider broad Internet policy issues for the APNIC strategy, to establish the basis of the budget for membership approval and then to endorse the policy consensus towards implementation, representing the membership.

For the recent six months after the previous meeting, we had eight meetings until now, which contains the teleconference for each month and a face-to-face meeting here in New Delhi this week and then we had the extraordinary meeting in Singapore in July. This is especially for the fee structure considerations.

And, if you have interest in what we are discussing about, you can refer to the EC minutes, which is published in APNIC website.

Financial status for 2007, it is already reported in earlier Treasurer's reports, but our budget for year 2007, it has a negative budget of around 500 K in US dollars, but the exchange rate is going worse and may have more deficit than budgeted, so we need to work on to reduce the loss for the remaining - for the rest of the year.

Then, because we are now considering about the fee schedule, fee structure change, we are so curious about - to establish the very good budget for the year 2008. So usually I don't report about the next year's budget for this EC report, but this plan, we are already started to talk about the next year's budget for the year 2008.

So we will discuss about that in this month in the teleconference.

And membership fee revision. So we - the EC - have been working on for years but this time we have already - APNIC already discussed about a short-term fix consisting - which consists of the 7% fee raise and the currency change for the short-term fix. But that is not only the - not only solution we are talking about. We are talking about the long-term fix, long-term better-fit solution which will realise the fairness and the NIR fees and fix for financial stability and also we are now running out of the IPv4 address, so we need to adapt to this circumstances change.

So this is, it is already - as it is already pointed out from community members, this is a very, very big issue, so the Executive Council need to work more for this discussion and to establish quite sound fee schedule, the fee structure for the mid-term.

And this time, usually we - I introduce about the policy consensus endorsed by the APNIC for the recent six months. But this time, we didn't have any policy consensus to be endorsed. But, instead of that, we had one decision in this six months regarding the proposal 033, which is the end-site Assignment Policy for the IPv6.

This is already reached consensus in the past APNIC meeting in the Policy SIG to have the new HD-ratio value of 0.94 as the criteria for the subsequent allocations.

But then, this actually had affected the per-address fee calculation for IPv6 address allocations to NIRs. And we decided to have this issue returned to the membership for the discussion. The fee implication was not well advised on the proposal presentation. And I'm afraid this discussion did not happen this time in APNIC OPM and it will be the discussed in the next APNIC OPM.

We have a new appointed executive secretary and, as you can suppose, it is Geoff Huston. And Geoff Huston has been adviser to the EC for years, but this time he was appointed as the executive secretary officially and the Executive Secretary role is support to the EC in the facilitation and also the advice from his experience to assist the EC's job.

ICANN/NRO situation, it is already introduced to you by Paul's presentation. But additionally, I would like to report to you that the three EC members met with the other board members in Puerto Rico during the ICANN meeting that was held.

I think that's the very first chance to meet, that the RIRs Boards get together to discuss about something, then the discussion at the time is mainly for the IPv4 depletion issues. And we had - I think this meeting, this retreat, will benefit the better communication among the RIR boards.

Address Council and Number Council. We have three NC members from the Asia Pacific region, and the APNIC EC and the NC has a communication through the joint mailing list and also having the face-to-face meeting.

And usually in the summer APNIC meeting, we have the election for the next EC term. But this time I need to report you that we didn't make election this time. So the election will be held in next APNIC meeting in Taipei in February 2008. Accordingly, Kenny Huang, who is expiring his office term in the end of this year, will extend, will have the some extended term until the March, end of March, year 2008.

Online voting has opened this time for this fee decision, but actually there is not so many people to do the electronic votes. So APNIC EC and also Secretariat encourage APNIC members to use the online voting.

This time, the APNIC meeting is held in New Delhi. This is our first ever APNIC meeting in the South Asian region. Thank you very much for the host, ISPAI and also all the sponsors.

Next meeting in Taipei in conjunction with APRICOT 2008 and APNIC 26 is already - we decided the host for the APNIC 26 and it is to be announced later.

And thank you very much for the applicants for the APNIC 26.

Actually, we had two applicants and one succeeded and one failed and we appreciate the both applicants.

That's all from my slides about the EC report. And, again, if you have some - if you're interested in what the EC is discussing about, then please refer to that website, www.apnic.net/ec.

Thank you very much.

Any questions?

PHILIP SMITH:

Philip Smith, Cisco. Can you rewind it the IPv6/HD-ratio slide.

EC decided to suspend the implementation of the new IPv6 per-address fees'. So is this for NIRs or everybody? And, if so, what's happening? Is IPv6 free?

AKINORI MAEMURA:

I beg your pardon, Sir?

GEOFF HUSTON:

With an Executive Secretary hat on here - Geoff Huston here - can I give you some more details on that answer? The decision was based around the fact that the Secretariat believe that the adoption of the 0.94 HD-ratio applied to all aspects of IPv6, including the effective calculation of the per-address fee. There was some level of misunderstanding as to precisely what the policy decision was in terms of which HD-ratio would apply in the terms of those per-address fees.

The EC decision does not abolish the fee or suspend it or make it zero. The EC decision restores what used to be the case, which was the previous table based on the 0.8 ratio and what they've asked is the Open Policy Meeting to reconsider that part of the decision to move the HD-ratio and either affirm that it applies in the reduction of the per-address fee or calculate some other way of the per-address fee as it relates. It wasn't a zero, it was a restoring of the previous table.

PHILIP SMITH:

So presumably APNIC have budgeted on the 0.94 HD-ratio, so with the 0.8, what's the impact on the APNIC budget, given we've had a big fee discussion this morning?

PAUL WILSON:

The - I can answer that. The per-address fees for IPv6 are already quite heavily discounted in that any large allocations which are made to existing IPv4 infrastructure are discounted by 90%.

So that, with that discount applying to the per-address fee for any large allocations, the small allocations, that is the minimum allocation, is - accrues a fee or attracts a one-off fee of about $200 US. And that is not enough to have any particular impact in terms of forward projections.

Likewise, if we had accepted a situation where the new HD-ratio was being used to calculate those fees, then that fee would have gone up from $200 to $600 or so for a /32 allocation as a once-off fee. And, again, as a once-off fee, that's a pretty small fee and it really doesn't have an impact.

PHILIP SMITH:

I'm just trying to compare what regular APNIC members have to pay for IPv6 versus what the NIRs seem to have managed to convince the EC that they don't have to pay.

I'm just curious why the EC has made this suspension without really any notification to the community at all. And then the discussion is now being delayed until the next OPM meeting, when, in fact, it seems to be quite a radical thing. Should it be discussed at this meeting? As I was saying this morning, and as other people have said as well, please give me some evidence that this whole show is not being controlled and run by the NIRs.

Why was this decision made without any reference to the community whatsoever? The policy proposal was passed. Do the EC just make up things on the fly?

PAUL WILSON:

I'd like to clarify one actual thing before Akinori responds. We have been posting announcements regarding updates and these changes to the fee schedule as they have been, as they have happened.

IZUMI OKUTANI:

Can I also just clarify that it wasn't that we got the fee reduced, but that the impact on fees to NIRs, which would have been the fee raise if the policy was implemented, this was never discussed at the time of the policy proposal. And this EC decision doesn't reduce the fee. It just maintains the fee continuous maintaining the same fee. Is that clear with you?

PAUL WILSON:

It might also help if I explain what that confusion was. Because the change to the HD-ratio was adopted by the EC and it was specifically said on adoption by the EC as part of the policy process, that it was adopted on the understanding that there was no change to the APNIC fee structure.

The APNIC fee structure actually says that the NIR per-address fees are calculated according to the current HD-ratio, so the Secretariat assumed - and I have to admit possibly without clarifying here - but we assumed that 'no change to the APNIC fee structure' meant that we would then from that point onward charge the fees according to the 0.94 HD-ratio instead of the 0.8 HD-ratio. The difference in interpretation seemed to be that it was understood 'no change to the APNIC fee structure' which meant no change to the fee applicable, which is an understandably way of looking at things.

IZUMI OKUTANI:

Does that make sense to you?

PHILIP SMITH:

Yes, that makes sense. I'm just completely bemused by the way this has been handled. I think this is inappropriate the way this has been done by the EC. You're meant to be responsible for the APNIC Secretariat and the membership. Doing this because one NIR, I don't know which, came along and said, "We don't think this is fair because we didn't understand what was going on," I'm sorry, it seemed pretty clear to he me. It doesn't help the case to say that the EC is independent of particular interests within the region.

CHE-HOO CHENG:

It's Che-Hoo, one of the EC members. I want to clarify about, you know, how EC makes the decision on this.

In fact, we had heated discussion about this, and, as you may understand, there are different opinions and we cannot come up with the conclusion whether to go ahead with either way.

So, this is kind of like, OK, maybe let the members to decide what to do. Because the EC cannot make a decision. It doesn't mean, you know, all the EC prefers one way or the other. Individually, we have different opinions. But, as a group, we have, you know, this conclusion.

PHILIP SMITH:

Yeah, I mean, I understand it can be a difficult situation that you face. I still think that, you know, the APNIC membership had a right to discuss this. This was a fairly heated discussion anyway and I think, if there was ambiguity within the EC, then bringing it here to discuss properly here -

CHE-HOO CHENG:

This is exactly what we want to do.

PHILIP SMITH:

It says next APNIC OPM. Not this one! What's gone wrong?

CHE-HOO CHENG:

If you look at the minutes, it says this meeting but somehow it didn't happen.

PHILIP SMITH:

Well, that's not good enough.

AKINORI MAEMURA:

That's actually our shame. We should have this discussion this time, but that's - just, we couldn't do that. And also, yes, you pointed out a right thing, that we should - the EC should communicate this decision when we decide on this suspension. So that's a very valid discussion. Thank you very much. We need to be careful about that. Any other questions or comments?

PAUL WILSON:

Thank you very much, Akinori.

OK, for the remainder of the session before lunch, we've got a couple of different styles of session. We've got - we still have two more reports and I'd like to go ahead with those, if Leo is ready and also if Toshi is ready with the Address Council. If we could go on into a slightly different format, which is a panel of APNIC staff talking about the response that we have made to the member survey, the results of which were announced in March of this year.

IANA report

LEO VEGODA:

Hello, everyone. My name's Leo Vegoda. I'm here from IANA. I've got a combination of my little update on addressing and DNS from the IANA perspective and also I've combined in a report that I was going to present yesterday but moved to today on reclaiming 14.0.0.0/8.

So, this is a quick overview. I'm going to quickly show you our new website, talk about recent number allocations, some DNS work that we're doing, talk about the new IPv4 registry format and then get on to the 14.0.0.0/8 stuff.

So that is what our new website will look like. You can go and see it now as beta.iana.org. It looks quite nice. It's definitely a little bit more 21st century than the old one.

So, this is the IPv4 status so far this year. We've had two /8s come back from the US DoD. They were previously returned but not recorded as IANA-reserved so really what we did was just change the status. One back from BBN. And one almost back from Tim Korb, that's the gentleman's picture there, that's the 14.0.0.0/8. There's a little more I'll tell you about that later on.

Leaving home, five to APNIC and four to RIPE NCC. And that's why these scales are balanced more out than in.

So, DNS services. We're going to be actually running some real DNS services now. We haven't been running much in the way of DNS services in the past.

We're going to take administrative and technical control of in-addr.arpa. And also there's work going on to create an M-cast.arpa zone. This will be managed in house and the plan is to sign everything with DNSSEC. On the next slide, DNSSEC, we're working on deployment. Richard Lamb, has been working with us to develop our systems and, if you want details of how we're doing the DNSSEC, there is a URL there. This presentation is on the APNIC website. I've checked. So you can go there, grab the URL and look at Richard's presentation, which gives details of how we're doing the DNSSEC. But the plan is that all zones that IANA operates will be signed.

So, new IPv4 registry format. This is something that we've been working on with the RIRs and I know I reported on work we've been doing with the RIRs last time. We're sort of almost there. I think it's a bit like software development where 90% of the work takes half the time and then the other 10% of the work takes half the time as well. So what we've been doing is work being the RIRs on improving the quality of the data in the IPv4 registry. We've also been working with the IETF in particular on improving the registries in general, so there is more standardised format. We've been working on converting the back end to XML so that we can provide the registries to you in a number of formats - XML, HTML, plain text, maybe some other formats if that's the sort of thing that you like. We're almost ready with this and I'm working with the RIRs on making sure that we get all our announcements together. So we're at the planning announcement stage so watch this space.

And now - that is an X-25 gyrocopter and that's because I'm talking about 14.0.0.0/8 now. And the next slide. 14.0.0.0/8 was a /8, a Class A address at the time, reserved for X-25 packet data gateways.

The X.121 addresses that were the addresses for X.25, they corresponded with an I IP four address. There weren't very many of them. Mostly, an organisation had one or two of these IPv4 addresses and they mostly weren't in use because X.25 isn't the most popular protocol any more.

It is still in use, though. There are people that are still using it. And there wasn't much value in these addresses. So how much work was there in reclaiming these 900 odd addresses? It was just under 1,000. 984.

So this looks weird. I told you that there were just a couple of addresses per registry and there were, but there was one registrant, one organisation, a Swedish National Labour Market Board, who had over 800, because they had an X.121 address, I think, for each of their little labour market board shops and then they had a corresponding IPv4 address. And so they were sorted out really, really quickly. Patrik F�lstrom put me in touch with the right person and he said, "Oh, yeah, we don't do that any more," and, whoosh, 800 addresses out of the registry. The others weren't quite as easy. I'm still working on one. 19 of them had e-mail addresses. Some of them were weird, like USMP to SMTP gateways and that sort of thing. But with a little bit of Google-love and a little bit of look ping through RFCs and that sort of thing, I tracked down most of them, and there's one left. I've got one person still out there working on reclaiming it. And we totally intend to go and update RFC 3330 later on this year and go and mark this as returned and available for allocation to an RIR.

So how long did it take? Well, it took me about 100 hours, maybe a little bit more, maybe a little bit less, with research, e-mail, Instant Messaging, calling people on the telephone and a few face-to-face meetings and operator group meetings.

How long did it take other people?

The registrants. It varied from network to network. Now, there was one network that actually renumbered because they had an X.25 network still in place and they have an IPv4 address from 14.0.0.0/8 on the IPv4 side of their gateway. They renumbered.

Other people wept and did an audit of their network to make sure they weren't still using it in some hidden corner where it was plugged in and that was the machine that you mustn't touch. And there were some people who said, "Oh, God, no. We turned that off 15 years ago. Please take it back." So it was from five minutes to about five days.

And there were also third parties, people who introduced me to other people, or people who said, "Well, he's not here any more and he used to run it but I know that this other person took over," and all the rest of it. Some of them five minutes. Some of them put some realtime and effort into it for me and they have been tremendously helpful. A few days.

I don't think this really scales as a piece of work. It took about six minutes per address and 3.5 hours per registration. These were easy to get back. There wasn't a great deal of value to having one or two IPv4 addresses because generally you can't route one or two addresses. It doesn't travel very far in BGP. So there wasn't a great problem in renumbering to other addresses and it was easy to get back.

I think, if you try this with other networks where the addresses are still in use, perhaps internally, or they're more valuable-sized networks they're /24s or /16s, you might find it's a lot more work than I needed to put in.

So, we're at the questions section. If anyone has any questions, then - Ed.

ED LEWIS:

How long did it take on the calendar?

LEO VEGODA:

Sorry. I didn't hear you.

ED LEWIS:

How long did it take on the calendar? I'm sure your effort time is spread over a bunch of days. But how long did it take?

LEO VEGODA:

OK. I started this just before the last RIPE meeting, RIPE 54 and I haven't quite finished yet because there's one address that I'm still waiting for back. So we're looking at about three or four months on a calendar.

ED LEWIS:

Thanks.

LEO VEGODA:

OK.

OK, well if there are any other questions, then please feel free to send me e-mails, leo.vegoda@icann.org.

APPLAUSE

PAUL WILSON:

Thanks very much, Leo.

I've just been told that there's one more gift that should be given right now because the recipient is about to head off to the airport and I'd just like to recognise. We're about to move into the SIG reports and I'd like to recognise the contribution of one of the outgoing SIG chairs, Kazu-san, who has stepped down from the IPv6 SIG after working very hard on that SIG for a number of years. So Kazu, if I can just present you with an elephant of thanks.

APPLAUSE

OK, the first speaker we have in this session is Toshi, who is going to be talking about the first of the SIG reports, the Policy SIG.

Thanks.

Policy SIG

TOSHIYUKI HOSAKA:

So good afternoon, everyone. I'm Toshiyuki Hosaka the policy SIG chair. Today, I will bring you the policy SIG report held yesterday.

So the policy SIG's charter is to develop policies and procedures which relate to the way APNIC, NIRs and ISPs manage and use Internet address resources within the Asia Pacific region.

So why am I reporting this SIG, policy SIG report to you is, the reason is that is the part of APNIC policy development process. As you can see, this chart is a part of APNIC policy development process. After we get consensus, at the face-to-face discussion, we have a report of SIG decision to the meeting and a decision should be made in this meeting.

So you can see the full flow chart is shown at the bottom of this slide.

So what was the content of Policy SIG? We had elections of policy SIG co-chairs and IPv6 technical SIG chair.

And we had two vacant seats for the policy SIG co-chairs and Randy Bush and Jian Zhang were the nominees. So they are the new policy SIG co-chairs.

For IPv6 technical SIG, we had election and Yoshinobu Matsuzaki, Matsu-san, is now the new IPv6 technical SIG chair.

Other than this, we had one community resolution, four policy proposals and five informational presentations. Actually, five informational presentations were to be made but we had no time to present them unfortunately, so sorry for all those presenters but still you can find those presentations at the URL shown here.

So community resolution. You can see the full text of this resolution on the website. The URL is shown here. This is very important resolution for the communities and this is definitely worth reading.

And at the beginning of policy SIG, we present this resolution-to-draft and it was written without any objections.

So the proposals. Proposal number 046 was for countdown policy version two which proposed distribute a single /8 to each RIR at the point when new IANA free pool hits five /8s. It should be completely left up to each RIR communities to define a regional policy on how to distribute the remaining RIR free pool to LIRs within their respective regions after IANA exhaustion date.

RIRs should provide an official projection on IANA exhaustion date do the community through their website, at their policy meetings and through any other effective means.

And we had a similar proposal. The number is 0 51, global policy for the allocation of the remaining IPv4 address space, which proposed an identical number, which is N, of IPv4 allocation units, that is /8, will be reserved by IANA for each RIR. So N number of five was initially proposed, but the proposal changed the number to two.

IANA will automatically allocate two /8s to each RIR from the reserved space when IANA have no address to fulfil the request from any RIRs.

For those proposals, both of the proposals didn't reach consensus at the OPM, Open Policy Meeting. There was feeling for the proposal 0 46, but definitely not consensus. There was consensus that, if, if proposal were to pass, it should be one, not two, /8s.

And there was consensus to start discussing the policy under which the last /8 would be allocated in the APNIC region.

So proposal 50, APNIC transfer policy for IPv4 address holders, which proposed APNIC to recognise the transfer of IPv4 addresses between current APNIC accountholders, and record these IPv4 address transfers in the APNIC IPv4 address registry. The proposal didn't reach consensus at the OPM. However, many of the participants in the Open Policy Meeting support to discuss further on this policy proposal.

Regarding proposal 049, IANA policy for allocation of ASN blocks to Regional Internet Registries, which proposed to allocate from IANA to RIRs in blocks of 1024 AS numbers. The RIR receives new blocks if assigned or allocated 80% of the previously received AS number block, or the number of free AS numbers held by the RIR is less than two months' need.

So the proposal reached the consensus at the OPM.

So that's all from me. But, as you can see in the previous slide, we need AMM decision for this particular proposal, 049.

PAUL WILSON:

Thank you very much, Toshi.

So, according to the APNIC address policy development process, we have a policy proposal here that has been passed by the consensus of the SIG. It is now also a responsibility of the APNIC Member Meeting to also endorse that policy.

After this, there will be a final call for comments and after a period of six weeks it will be then passed on to the APNIC EC for adoption as an adopted APNIC policy.

What I'd like to do now is ask if there are any comments on the proposal? Questions?

And if there is no question, we'll ask if there is a consensus outcome. If there are no objections it will be recorded as having been passed by the consensus of this meeting and it will then go to the policy SIG mailing list for any last, any final discussions.

OK, in the absence of any objection, I'll declare this policy as being adopted by the meeting. Thank you very much.

NIR SIG

TOSHIYUKI HOSAKA:

Thank you very much.

Paul, taking this opportunity, I would like to also announce the new NIR chairs because you know, they had the election at the NIR SIG but there is no NIR SIG report here.

We had NIR election at the NIR SIG, but - and there was one vacant seat for the NIR new chair, but only one nomination was received, which is from Izumi Okutani from JPNIC. And she is current NIR SIG chair. And she is reappointed as NIR new SIG chair.

PAUL WILSON:

Thank you very much, Toshi.

Thank you for your report and for your service as the SIG policy chair. Thanks.

APPLAUSE

So I'm to understand that there won't be a separate report from the NIR SIG? Is that correct?

In that case, do we have any other reports from any of the SIG sessions or meeting sessions?

APOPS

Philip would you like to give a report, either a verbal report or a report - Philip is reporting, I assume, as the chair of the APOPS.

PHILIP SMITH:

Something. Just a quick summary. We had APOPS plenary session on Wednesday, or SANOG plenary session on Wednesday and then three APOPS sessions. So we had quite a big range of presentations. I thought all of them were pretty excellent, pretty much all of them were excellent presentations. So those of you who did actually make it to the APOPS plenary, I would encourage you to go over the presentations. They will be on the SANOG website pretty shortly as well as the APNIC website, if they're not already there.

Last night we had the Lightning Talks and BoF sessions. The only reason I bring this up is it's kind of a last-minute opportunity for people to present subjects of current interest and we had great interest in that as well, lots of presentations offered and woe had six of those for the allotted hour. We filled the room downstairs. It was, again, a pretty good event and again, I'd encourage people to have a look at those presentations. So that's really the side from the operational aspect of the meeting this week.

PAUL WILSON:

Thank you very much, Philip.

Are there any questions or any other reports from BoFs or SIGs are other meeting sessions?

If not, then we'll move on.

We do have the session, the planned session on the APNIC member survey. That's a lengthy session, so I think I see people drinking coffee, so I think we'll take a coffee break now for a maximum of half an hour and come back at quarter past the hour and get straight into the member survey panel session. I must apologise for the somewhat chaotic management of this program today, but I hope you will understand and forgive me. So please enjoy your coffee and come back by quarter past the hour at the very latest please.

Thanks.

(End of session)

Back to top

AMM - Session Four

Friday 7 September 2007
1615-1700

PAUL WILSON:

OK, let's get started.

I'd like to hand over to a panel of APNIC staff to discuss the results of the member survey conducted in Bali.

Member survey update

CECIL GOLDSTEIN:

APNIC conducted a survey at the last APNIC meeting in Bali. As part of the analysis, a number of areas were identified and presented to us in order of importance.

PAUL WILSON:

Could I please ask you to cease the conversations and come back to the meeting?

Thank you.

CECIL GOLDSTEIN:

As I was saying, at the last meeting, the results of the APNIC member survey were presented and, as part of the analysis, a list of areas that were received by members, perceived by members to be of the greatest importance was compiled.

We've looked at this and taken it to heart and applied efforts to try and achieve results and progress in those areas that were seen by you, the members, to be of value and importance to them.

The list of things that we have are listed over there. They're numbered from one to ten in order of importance, in other words, based on the scoring given in the members' survey. We're interested to showcase the efforts that we've been making to achieve results in those areas.

But we also want, at the same time, to think about your perceived awareness, or your awareness, of any work that you have seen us doing in those particular areas.

The way we're going to present the showcase is that Sunny and George will talk to each one of these points in order, and give you some detail of what's been happening in those areas and what our plans are to achieve progress.

At the end of the presentations, we want to open it up to you for discussion, for feedback, to help us - a - understand if you are seeing the results, and to understand whether we are, in fact, on target, and, doing those things which you see as important and achieving results in these areas.

Without any further, I'd like to look at the list, take the points one by one and ask George and Sunny to address them.

The first point, seen as great importance to the members is seen as technical research and development activities.

GEORGE MICHAELSON:

It can be thought of as an operational reporting and sophistics report. There is the work that Geoff does on consumption rates and timelines and that's underpinned by a body of statistical collecting and collation work that we put online on our website and make available for other researchers to look at as well. We've also been doing BGP analysis and 4-byte AS space. That's been up to five years. It's the projection space that gives us an opportunity to think about long-term behaviours. The operational reporting and statistics - we've been doing a body of work in the DNS and Whois web servers reporting. The collaborations - they've been very interesting and quite wide-ranging but they've included bodies like WIDE and we want to recognise this. And some collaborative work that we've been hosting measurement machines looking at the global DNS behaviour. We work with CAIDA. We've worked with OARC which was made available to that community and with Autonomica measurement in root behaviour. The deliverables are essentially about the quality of information that we're making available to people for strategic planning. I'd like to think these are fundamental inputs that will overlook things like the IGF. And we're also looking at improved services in the feedback in to the ongoing activities that we do and standards and things in general.

So, for 2008, we're looking at improving the DNS statistics collection with two deployments. We expect to put this in to Brisbane, which are the locations that have our other DNS servers.

The search for 4-byte ASes in Tokyo has been an interesting conversation today that may have helped us get activity happening there. I'd like to reiterate if there's anyone who has a presence in the NIXI exchange, we would like to speak to you. We hope to have public access to the information in terms of access statistics and data from our website and this is a very high priority for us to make this available to you. We're looking at presentations of meetings, research papers and participation in workshops and conferences.

CECIL GOLDSTEIN:

The second point which is streamlining resource requests and allocation processes seen in number two importance by members and I'll ask Sunny to address that.

SRINIVAS CHENDI:

As part of this project we're looking at procedures and processes and streamlining them. Part of this is the first one coming out of that project. We have membership application process and we streamlined, as you can see on the board there, we have streamlined it drastically. Once we do this, there is no need for any new member to have any of the Whois objective and they just have to complete the form. Fill out the details, as you can see there. And this will go to the host master. Once the member is qualified, then the host masters will create all those objects. From the information providers application form and notify the member. So we divided this into two sections. One is membership only. If someone is a member of APNIC, they can pass on their details there. For those who require resources, Internet resources, they have options. They can request all the resources at one time or they can choose their resources for IPv4, IPv6 and ASN number. And go to the next steps.

CECIL GOLDSTEIN:

Number three - increased accessibility of APNIC meetings and policy processes.

SRINIVAS CHENDI:

As you know, this meeting, we are trying to webcast this meeting, so that all remote members can participate. This has been going on for a while and we're improving the procedures and technicalities to this. We have video screening which is happening right now and audio streaming and we have stenos doing the live transcripts and we have questions on the Jabber chat, that everyone can easily access it. And we have our staff managing the Jabber chat. We also have pod casts. You can see all the transcripts for the past meetings as well on the meeting websites.

We did a lot in promoting voting through MyAPNIC. We're targeting emails at the meeting time to the participants of the meeting, specifically giving information to them, what's happening every day and what's coming up so they're aware of it and can follow through the sessions. We have participated in other community events. There are a lot happening locally. And we have - we give more information about what's going on. The newsletter, it covers a lot of this information in there. So you can easily read through it if you can't access the Internet. Training sessions for policy analysis, we included some policy discussions in our training. The last training we conducted in Cambodia, we had great response from our audience and members. They really were like this. And we had an event in this meeting, a newcomers event and it was very successful. We had policy discussions as well, so the newcomers understand not only the process of the meeting but what policies will be discussed in this meeting so they can be prepared for them. And we updated policy process feature on our website. We have a policy section for policy processes. Sam is the one who is really coordinating that and a lot of information is from the past policies, current policies, what's implemented. So I really strongly suggest that you go and have a look at it and go through the policies and you can catch up with it all.

CECIL GOLDSTEIN:

Represent the needs of the ISP community to governments and regulators.

SRINIVAS CHENDI:

As part of NRO participation we have conferences, along with other RIR staff. And participate in IGF meetings. Paul mentioned this morning, he gave a report on that, as well as ISOC. Together in the meetings, we have responses to government agencies. There was meeting with the Indian government delegates during the meeting to engage in discussion and assist in whatever way we can.

We have to submit a number of clarifications to various reports. For example, reports that we thought we should respond and we did that and we'll be monitoring the reports that are publicly available and our staff goes through them and we make a note of those ones. We organise joint events with ISOC. We did one this Monday, as part of this APNIC 24 SANOG 10 meeting. Paul Wilson and Anne Lord joined in that. It was a successful event. Yes.

We are also planning more events with staff. We will be doing more of these kind of things if possible.

CECIL GOLDSTEIN:

Expand training activities in scope, geographical coverage and online options.

SRINIVAS CHENDI:

I'll talk about Scope. The number of courses - 70 training courses in 2007. So far 75% of them, which is 43 as of today. Cecil and his team conducted training programs at our office for other services staff. So we can increase the training and we can have our staff at a level to do more training in the region. And geographical coverage, we have delivered training in 30 locations. As of today we completed 17. And those include some economies that we never, ever visited, like Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Fiji, Bhutan. And we have options, online options that are in progress. Cecil and his team is working on putting more together for that, as well as some self-basic training sessions as well. Thank you.

CECIL GOLDSTEIN:

Improve the APNIC website.

GEORGE MICHAELSON:

Hi. The first item there improving the CMS - we've been using a publishing methodology that consists of scripts that I developed in-house a number of years ago and I have to hand it to the web development people that they put up with this technology for so long but we're going to be using a more appropriate publishing mechanism for the current state of web development and this will reflect a sense of web updates. So we can make much more timely changes to the state of the web. We've been doing some very vigorous site testing. You will have possibly participated in some of the activities at meetings and we've been doing feedback, and factoring it in to what we're doing and looking at things like the useability surveys. The focus on content is very important for us as a policy agency. It's really important we get information out there that's more relevant and up to date. We think this adoption of a CMS will help us get control of information back to the authors, under a more appropriate editorial control process. So I think it's going to improve the web process behind the scenes for us a lot. I do think this is going to be shown in terms of the quality of the web that you see as well.

The last two points I think I'll skip over, they're technical internal aspects of some of the process improvements.

CECIL GOLDSTEIN:

Number 7 is support ISP education in the Asia Pacific region.

SRINIVAS CHENDI:

More relevant courses - we have expanded our Internet research management. We have included hands-on exercises in there, which I just reported one of them is the policy process and some resource application processes also included, so they get - go to the website and fill out the form, instead of that, we let them do it right over there so we can address any issues that they face. We have simulated policy process so they understand the policy and they can propose policies of the discussions. The training department have initiated a course they look for issues and they'll be doing that training very soon.

That includes network analysis and other topics. IPv6 courses, we already have workshops in IPv6. We have workshops in some locations and are planning for more, as well as some tutorials and presentations in APNIC meetings and other sessions and events in the region.

The training team have set up a training lab and it can be accessed remotely. It has been a good advantage of being the training lab in APNIC office so we don't have to carry the equipment or request our local host for us to do of the hands-on workshops. This has been quite easy and we've had good responses so far and it was well taken. There's a lot of people still in the area - and we are going to provide more training facilities for this.

The ISP operations course was planned and we had new technologies, emerging technologies in there, so it could be like a tutorial. In the emerging technologies we had that. BMS as well as VoIP, it covers. The training department is planning for a structure and ongoing education. They're looking at putting together a package so members can opt for a training package that interest them and the training team can do that.

Cecil is going after this APNIC 24. He's going to go back and do an online training server which I would strongly recommend everyone to participate in. Also, we have made - we want to extend our training events along and to extend our train the trainer programs so they can participate in connecting those trainings.

CECIL GOLDSTEIN:

Number eight. Deploy more DNS root servers in the Asia Pacific region.

GEORGE MICHAELSON:

If you want to skip over the slide with the text there, but if you go to the next image I can talk the points. Click again, please. Yep. As you can see from this, there are 35 or more possibly nodes deployed in our region. I say or more because there are others that take place independently of us. We supported 21 deployments and there's another 14 in the region. There's a lot of interest in broader root support. I think the earthquake offshore from the Taiwan area triggered in people's minds the risk of exposure to lack of access to this kind of critical technology and it's made people a lot more conscious of the CCLT issues and the outer zone issues for access with their own critical resource. So this is an initiative we've been doing for a number of years but in no sense has it gone away. It's a live issue for this region.

The focus on maintenance - we've been doing this for about four years and systems are starting to get on. We're more conscious that we have to allow for repeat visits to sites and fix-ups and extension of servers and it may mean location has to be considered. It makes different IXs or different attachments more interesting. The priorities in the year are basically going to be about the disaster recovery and maintenance cycle but we will continue to deploy on an as-need basis. We welcome expressions of interest and inquiries.

CECIL GOLDSTEIN:

Thank you. Resource certification to support better routing security? George?

GEORGE MICHAELSON:

The 2007-2008 activity plan got discussed by Sanjaya earlier today and the key note for us is the ongoing development of the resource PKI system and the immediate focus is the MyAPNIC prime integrated service. We're looking at other developments. We're looking at an openly available code base. We expect to make the code we're working on available to you. I'd like to recognise the work that was funded by ARIN in this area. It's a very, very large community development, a significant body of work that's going to benefit all of us for a long time. There's the ongoing standardisation work in the IETF, the certificate profile has gone in to the last call but there may be issues there. I'd like to remind people we think the resource protocol work is valid even without development of a final outcome in rooting, we still see a lot of value in having strong attestations and we want to do this work irrespective of progress in routing security aspect.

The service deliverables we're looking at in 2008, the one we would call you to do is press the button and we do the rest is a committed deliverable in 2008 adopted service. And the earlier development in some technical sense is where you run the stand alone and talk us too us using the up-down protocol will be an early 2008 deliverable.

CECIL GOLDSTEIN:

Number 10 - in terms of the top 10 priorities listed by members, is to expand external communication and outreach activities. I'll ask Sunny to address that.

SRINIVAS CHENDI:

We have quite a lot of liaison staff now. We used to only have two liaison staff but we extended that to four. Gpan is with us in China and Elly is with us for Australia. Kapil is the South Asia region and Anna is Vietnam, Cambodia. This staff participate in events that happen in that region and they contribute to those programs, and they participate in trainings workshops as well as they represent APNIC interest in these events. We have attended SANOG since it started and our liaison staff have been there to conduct, to provide any support that our members require, as well as we organise host master in these, so our members have an opportunity to speak to our host masters as well as any training requests.

The liaison staff also accompany the trainers when they go and conduct the training. So since then in this region they are more familiar with what's going on in these regions because they're from there. And they can assist our trainers and help with suitable things. We are putting in data focus. We have media material that we will release to the media as well as local events in the Asia Pacific region, which will have more emphasis on promoting meetings and policy discussions. Thank you.

CECIL GOLDSTEIN:

So that's it, everyone. You've seen the list of the top 10 priorities that were identified to the members' survey. You've seen the activities that we've initiated or we've intensified in order to actually try and achieve progress in the direction of those that top 10 list is pointing out. What I'd like to do now is go back to the list itself - there we are - go back to the list itself and invite feedback from you, as to whether you're aware of what we're doing and when where you think we might be missing, hitting, what more we could do, is our direction correct, are the activities focused appropriately? We would really appreciate your advice. It's only through knowing what you want that we're able to deliver what you want. I'd like to open it up for comment. Anybody who would like to make any remarks, offer any advice, please take the opportunity to do so. If you want to tell us we're doing well, we would also appreciate that. Seems like everybody's...

JONNY MARTIN:

I think the training program is very good. For one from the New Zealand NOG perspective, we always value the contributions and both the monetary and training staff. And plans for future planning. So, thank you.

CECIL GOLDSTEIN:

Thank you, Jonny. Would anyone else like to offer any comments? Contribute anything? If not, I hope you enjoyed the presentation and hopefully we provided you with some information, a background as to what APNIC staff are doing to address your needs. I'll pass back to Paul. Sanjaya, you wanted to do the APNIC prize draw? There was a collection of response forms at the BoF.

SANJAYA:

Alright, the winner of the digital multimedia frame is Shailesh Gupta

MILIND SONAWALE:

He's not here. But I will take it.

SANJAYA:

Oh. You promise to give this to him?

APPLAUSE

PAUL WILSON:

Thanks very much to Cecil, Sunny and George for that presentation.

I would like to ask Leo to come to the podium now to give the result of the fee structure voting.

APNIC fee vote result

LEO VEGODA:

Hello, everyone. This is the result of the fee structure vote.

The seated ballots are in this envelope, which I'll leave sealed with Paul so that, if anyone does need to examine them, then they can.

Here are the results.

The way I will read this is I will give the number of votes cast, both online and onsite in favour of the proposal and then against the proposal.

So the total number of votes cast in favour of the proposal, that's the yes votes, onsite was 242 and online was 278. So, when you add those together, the total number of votes cast in favour of the proposal was 520.

And them the 'no' votes - these are the votes cast against the proposal - the total number of votes cast onsite against the proposal was 512 and the total number of votes cast online against the proposal was 62. So the total of that, so all votes cast against the proposal was 574.

So, to recap, there were 520 votes in total in favour of the proposal and 574 votes in total against the proposal, so the proposal does not pass.

None of the paper onsite votes were invalid. All the votes cast onsite were valid votes.

PAUL WILSON:

Thank you very much, Leo.

LEO VEGODA:

I'll leave the results with you.

PAUL WILSON:

And thanks to the scrutineers and to everyone who voted.

I'd just like to open the microphone in case there are any comments or questions.

I will only comment that, after the financial results that you've seen at this - today, the discussions about the fee structure itself, and the implications that we've been speaking about this week, we have a very strong vote from the people in this room that APNIC should be reducing activities in the next year, because we will have no other alternative but to do that.

So we'll have a very interesting budget process between now and the end of the year.

OK, we still should be looking to the future and I would like to invite TWNIC to come and say a few words about the next meeting, APNIC 25, which will be held in Taipei.

APNIC 25 host presentation

MING-CHENG LIANG:

Paul, everyone, I am Ming-Cheng, representing TWNIC.

Next February, between 25th to 29th, APNIC will be, will have a meeting in Taipei in conjunction with APRICOT.

And this is the - I think people are familiar that last time we have a meeting in Kaohsiung and this time we have a meeting in Taipei.

I think that Taipei and Kaohsiung are two different cities and people should enjoy - I think you will like the convenience and the shopping and all the fun in Taipei, in addition to, of course, our meeting. And I think that, in the next meeting, there should be a lot of interesting stuff that is going on and I would like to invite everyone to attend and to have more discussion.

And I think that we will try to prepare now technically also in this maybe some selection tours also for others to enjoy the trip to Taiwan.

And one thing - I think that, since our last meeting that we have a high-speed train that is ready and operational in Taiwan, and so, in next February, you can easily go almost anywhere in Taiwan. So you will be able to see a lot of variety in the cultural differences and also I think you will be a lot of fun over it.

And so I think, welcome, everyone, to Taipei. Thank you.

APPLAUSE

PAUL WILSON:

The APNIC EC, this week, considered the proposals for the next meeting, that is in one year's time, APNIC 26.

The decision of the EC with regard to the location of APNIC 26 is to accept the proposal from InternetNZ for a meeting in Christchurch, New Zealand, next year.

So Jonny is going to come and tell us a little bit about this.

APNIC 26 host presentation

JONNY MARTIN:

OK, as some of you might know, I'm Jonny Martin from New Zealand. Thanks to Paul and the APNIC EC for accepting this proposal. Just a very quick presentation. I get the easy job here. I just have to stick up a few pretty pictures of New Zealand. APNIC 26 is going to be in Christchurch New Zealand, 26th of August through to the 29th of August in New Zealand. Some pretty pictures there, those of you that have seen 'Lord of the Rings' will be perhaps used to some of these sights.

Now Christchurch is the biggest city in the South Island. It's there about the middle, X marks the spot, and we'll be meeting at the Christchurch Convention Centre.

So it's all - it's a pretty compact city, in the CBD there, it's all in nice walking distance, a very lovely place. We hope to see you there.

So, obviously, we've been asking for a while in New Zealand for a meeting venue, particularly those who ski. Kurtis has been very, very keen and Gaurab, who's not really a skier but he's keen. So he's certainly pushed things along. And, of course, there's a lot of other things nearby, Queenstown is just a little further south than Christchurch, a lovely place to go also.

The only thing worthy of note here is the climate. It's a lot more tolerable to people than me than India has been this week. So it's the middle of winter, looking at nice, crisp morning from maybe 2, 3 degrees in the morning up to about 13 or 14 degrees Celsius. So it's a very nice island.

And of course, if you come to New Zealand, you get to experience a little bit of Kiwiana, which has all sorts of wonderful things up there that you can see and partake in.

So that was it, pretty simple really. We hope to see you in Christchurch this time next year. Thanks.

APPLAUSE

PAUL WILSON:

Next meeting, thanks and closing

Thank you very much, Jonny. And congratulations on your selection to host the meeting and we look forward to seeing you in a year's time. Thanks.

We can look even further ahead than one year's time, in fact. That seems to be unusual for this community, but we can do it when it comes to having fun, and we can look forward to, also to APNIC 27 and Gaurab is going to tell us on behalf of the APIA board and APRICOT, where the meeting is going to be in round about March of 2009.

GAURAB RAJ UPADHAYA:

Thanks, Paul.

It gives me pleasure to announce that APRICOT 2009, which is the last week of February and first week of March is going to be in Manila, Philippines.

APPLAUSE

So the dates will be on the APRICOT website pretty soon, because we also decided only this week where the meeting was going to be. So, yeah, thanks, everyone.

PAUL WILSON:

Thanks, Gaurab. That's great.

And, no, I can't tell you anything about the meeting after that. But there'll be a call for proposals and those of you with an interest in hosting that following meeting, which is around this time in 2009, are encouraged to start thinking about it now and hopefully we'll have a nice selection of alternatives at the meeting that we will have two years from now.

Next on the agenda, as we come in to the close of the meeting, we do have an online meeting survey lucky draw and I've got a small number of survey slips here and I'll ask Connie to pick one out.

And the winner is Sadiq Ali Khan from Karachi University.

RAJESH CHHARIA:

He's left.

PAUL WILSON:

And is there someone who can pass on the gift, the prize, to him?

I cannot hear you, Randy.

RANDY BUSH:

The rule was they have to be here.

SRINIVAS CHENDI:

They have to be here.

PAUL WILSON:

OK. In that case, we'll try again. I should have read the rule book before I started.

And this one is Mohammad Mizanur Rahaman.

RAJESH CHHARIA:

He's not there.

PAUL WILSON:

Bijoy Kumar Das from the National Informatics Centre of India.

RAJESH CHHARIA:

He's not there.

PAUL WILSON:

We're going to run out soon.

PAUL WILSON:

Hanish Mittal from CSC? No.

RAJESH CHHARIA:

I present myself for the gift.

PAUL WILSON:

OK, the second-last possibility we have here is Suresh Katukam from Cisco.

And lucky last is Dhawal Sharma from HCL Technologies?

KUSUMBA SRIDHAR:

Probably, Paul, if that's possible, that we can represent for the -

PAUL WILSON:

I think we'll take the prize and put it on eBay and put the takings to the budget result for the next year.

APPLAUSE

We have another meeting announcement, actually. It's not an APNIC meeting, but we mustn't forget that this is a combined meeting between APNIC and SANOG, so we can talk about the next SANOG meeting, SANOG 11.

SUMON AHMED SABIR:

Well, I'm happy to announce that the SANOG 11 will be in Dhaka, January 10 to 18. And ISP Association of Bangladesh has organised that, to host that in Dhaka. I hope all of you will be there.

Just briefly about Dhaka, because to the people here, I think some people, it is unknown to everybody. I want to give a brief introduction to Dhaka. So it's the land of mangrove forest, largest mangrove forest and the royal Bengal tiger is popular. And this is the largest sandy beach in the world, more than 100 km long. There are nice places to see as well in Bangladesh.

And the venue is in Dhaka City. And there are some landmarks of Dhaka City, this is the National Parliament Building, a few landmarks of Dhaka City. Didn't bring slides for the weather. It's similar to this area. In January, the weather is pleasant, not 2 to 12 degrees, but it will be very pleasant for all of the people, maybe just like summer weather in Europe and some other places. So I hope all of you will be there.

And Dhaka is popular for rickshaw and traffic jams. So you might miss your flight if you don't mind your starting time, but fortunately the airport and the venue that is hosting, the Dhaka Sheraton Hotel - if there is a traffic jam, it's a 15- to 20-minute distance but in a traffic jam, it might take you 1 hour 30 minutes so be aware when you're departing from the hotel to the airport. Otherwise it's quite fine.

So, again, a warm welcome to all of you to Dhaka from January 10th to 18th for SANOG XI.

Thank you.

APPLAUSE

PAUL WILSON:

I think the example that we've seen from SANOG in terms of entertainment provided has been excellent, absolutely outstanding this week. And I think the experience of those who have been to SANOG meetings previously. I think that, if nothing else, but of course plenty of other things, will draw people to your meeting and I wish you all the best of success.

I would like to finally thank all of the sponsors of APNIC 24 and the sponsors who will be listed here are also sponsors of SANOG 10.

So I'd like, to in order, from the top down, ask NIXI as the diamond sponsor, to come and please receive a certificate of thanks for sponsorship this week.

While that's happening, Reliance Telecom, gold sponsor. Ruby sponsor, Afilias and Google. Do we have representatives?

KUSUMBA SRIDHAR:

For NIXI, yes, we have.

APPLAUSE

PAUL WILSON:

The Internet Society.

APPLAUSE

Cisco Systems, Juniper, Tulip, VSNL, silver sponsors.

Well, let's thank them anyway.

Bronze - F-Secure, Force 10 and Guavus. Thank you.

Bandwidth sponsors are Aircel and Spectranet Think Broad.

And our APNIC silver sponsors, JPNIC, CNNIC, KRNIC and TWNIC. Would anyone like to come forward.

APPLAUSE

More thanks to the SIG chairs, to Izumi-san, Toshi-san, to Philip-san and Ishii-san, to Randy-san, the stenocaptioners, Dean and Lorraine from the Australian Caption Centre, to the APNIC EC and to the staff who are here and to our RIR colleagues, who have come quite a long way as usual and also to everyone who's attended this meeting. Thanks very much for supporting yet another APNIC Open Policy Meeting and I look forward to seeing you next time.

Finally, special thanks to SANOG, so if Gaurab is still in the room, he can come back.

A very special thanks to SANOG and also to ISPAI.

And we have an impromptu speech, which is very nice, thanks.

RAJESH CHHARIA:

On behalf of ISPAI, we have tried our level best to give all types of facilities to our delegates, to our guests, but somehow, intentionally or non-intentionally, if we have done some mistake from our team or from any colleague, from their side, I'm saying sorry. Please accept my sincere apologies if you have faced any problems during this meeting.

Thank you.

APPLAUSE

PAUL WILSON:

That's very kind. The only problems I'm aware of are a few people seem to have gone down one sort of medical problem or the other, but, of course, ISPAI is not to be called it account for that. Thank you very much for such a successful meeting.

So finally, namaste, goodbye, and see you all in Taipei.

(End of session)

TERRY MANDERSON:

Ladies and gentlemen, you will have net connectivity for the next five minutes, so please grab your e-mail, check the websites, grab whatever you need to grab because the net will go.

Thank you very much.

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