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AMM transcript
APNIC 25
Member Meeting 09:00-10:30
Friday, 29 February 2008
Table of contents
Welcome
APNIC Secretariat reports - Introduction
APNIC Secretariat reports - Services Area
APNIC Secretariat reports - Communications Area
APNIC Secretariat reports - Technical Area
Election procedures and speeches from candidates
Election speeches from candidates - NRO NC
Election speeches from candidates - APNIC EC
Financial Reports
Workplan and budget 2008
APNIC EC report
NRO report
ASO AC report
IANA report
APNIC SIG reports - Policy SIG
APNIC SIG reports - NIR SIG
APNIC SIG reports - IPv6 technical SIG
APNIC SIG reports - Routing SIG
APNIC SIG reports - IX SIG
APNIC SIG reports - DNS operations SIG
MyAPNIC BoF report
RIR reports - ARIN
RIR reports - AfriNIC
RIR reports - LACNIC
RIR reports - RIPE NCC
APNIC 26 host presentation
Open discussion (open mic)
APNIC EC elections result
NRO NC elections result
Next meeting, thanks and closing
Welcome
PAUL WILSON:
Good morning everyone. We'll wait a few more minutes - because the registration is going on outside - for the people waiting outside to join us.
I think we should get started with the meeting today, the APNIC Member Meeting. So welcome, and if I can say this right, hello to everyone here today.
This is the APNIC Open Policy Meeting and it is the day for the member concerns; but as usual, everyone is welcome here.
I've got a few housekeeping announcements firstly, and that will also give the people outside a little more time to come in.
As usual, this session is being webcast, and I'd like to welcome those who are joining us on the webcast, and also to remind them and also anyone in the room that you can actually participate in this session using Jabber. So whether you're in the room or following it remotely, you can follow instructions on the website to be able to participate in Jabber. So if you have any questions or comments, then there will be APNIC staff who will monitor those and draw them to my attention during the day today.
We have an informal closing dinner happening tonight for everyone who would like to join, and that's happening at a nearby restaurant from 7:00. Transport to be provided and there is a cost of $600 Taiwanese for that which can be paid at the registration desk.
We've got a lot of surveys happening here and lucky prize draws which will be happening during the day today; so I'm sure you'll all want to be here to try your luck with those prize draws, and we'll be giving away a digital photo frame for those who fill in the online survey. Well, to one lucky person who fills in the online survey, so the closing time for that is afternoon tea today.
We're also announcing a winner of yesterday's SIG surveys later in the day. So, please stick around for those. Stick around for lunch as well which is in Ballroom 3 on this level, so it is not in the place where we've had lunch on other days, it is on this level in Ballroom 3.
I think that's all I've got for housekeeping. But, I would like to give a big thanks to KRNIC and JPNIC and NIDA for sponsoring today's meeting. So, thank you very much for your support. That's very important and very much appreciated that we had support from the sponsors. Thanks.
Now, what are we doing today? As I mentioned, today is largely for our member business for APNIC, but not exclusively member business. We'll be giving a series of reports during the morning, which are basically the content of the annual report, plus some more details. Everyone should have a copy of the APNIC Annual Report, printed report in your registration packs.
An important part of today is the election that we will have for the Executive Council of APNIC, so we've got three positions which are being filled by election today, and that will be explained before morning tea time.
There's a second election as well today, which is for the APNIC member to the Number Council, which sits on the ASO Address Council.
We'll be going through all of those procedures by morning tea time today, and I'll just remind candidates that there's an opportunity for you to address the meeting, to give a short speech of your own choosing.
If candidates aren't here, we'll also accept speeches, which might be delivered online, or via someone who might speak on behalf of them.
After morning tea, we have reports from the Executive Council from the NRO, IANA Address Council, and we've also got the reports back from the SIG and BoFs which have gone on during this week.
In the afternoon, we'll be hearing from our colleagues at the RIRs who have travelled across the world to be here and let us know what they've been doing.
We've got some time for open discussion, an announcement and an introduction to our next meeting. We've got election results, importantly, and closing by afternoon tea for that schedule; but it is a fairly busy schedule so we should move on with it.
We traditionally have an agenda bashing time; so if there's anything that anyone would like to raise now, or in fact, later or any time during the meeting, please feel free to do so. There are a lot of reports happening today, so it is a little bit uni-directional if you like; but comments and questions and contributions from the floor are always very welcome, so there will be some opportunities for that. Please feel free; it is greatly encouraged.
APNIC Secretariat reports - Introduction
That's it, and if there are no questions or other contributions, if I haven't forgotten anything, then we'll move on to the Secretariat reports.
Now, I've got, as the Director General, I've got a short introduction; but the reports have been given by representatives of the three areas of APNIC. Just letting you know what's been happening across the organisation. The APNIC structure is looking like this. From some time just over a year ago, there was an additional layer of structure put into the APNIC Secretariat structure and that involves these areas of activity, which are the Services Area, Communications Area and the Business Area.
Over to the right there, holding a beaker which is full of 32-bit ASNs, the executive team of APNIC. So that team of five people includes myself as DG, Geoff Huston the mad scientist; Sanjaya, the General Manager, I'm sure he's joining on. The Communications Manager; and German, I would ask you to stand up. He's just joined us in the last month as the new manager for Communications. And likewise, the Business Manager Richard Brown is also not here.
With those five people at the Senior Executive Team level, that completes that level of the APNIC structure. Just to tell you what happens more inside: Under Sanjaya, we have George Kuo, Terry Manderson; Under German - this in a little bit of flux at the moment - Sam Dickinson is looking after the documentation. External Relations is Lou Flynn. Policy and training is Srinivas Chendi and in Business we have Irene who looks after the finances; Connie, who is looking after the office, and HR, which is managed by Louise.
I've had questions this week about what the APNIC staffing is looking like. We have just over 50 staff. It's been quite flat over the last year. I think it was reported last year that for financial reasons we basically aren't recruiting or expanding any new positions last year and it was pretty well flat through 2007, but the growth of the Secretariat staff is certainly slowing down these days; while at the same time membership growth and allocations growth continue to accelerate. So, I think there's a fair bit of efficiency being shown there.
The turnover of staff has also been a matter of interest, particularly since in 2006, I reported the turnover had increased somewhat, and as a result of that, we did review and put in place a formal salary and remuneration structure, and since then, the turnover has slowed down a little bit, so that's a good sign.
I'd like to mention now the planning process that we go through at APNIC, but that's been subject to a bit of work over the last year, particularly in preparation for the budget and plan for 2008. Richard Brown as the Business Area Manager is helping a lot with that.
The primary input into our planning process is the member survey, which as you know is conducted on a regular basis every two years now, conducted by KPMG and commissioned by the EC. The last results were released at the beginning of last year, which means that we're due to complete another survey two years later, which is by this time next year.
Towards the end of this year, we'll be launching the next survey. We use the results of those surveys in activity planning, along with the results of these open policy meetings.
So, we have inputs to the process which come from the need for policy implementations and other requests which are passed to us from special interest groups and from this meeting; and together with the member survey result, we go through a process which produces an activity plan and a budget which is then reviewed by the APNIC EC and is then approved. You'll be hearing more about the budget for next year later on.
I won't go through all of the details of the member survey, but just by way of reminder, these are the results of the survey that was announced a year ago.
The survey produced a long list of rated items to do with APNIC's performance generally, and the top 10 on that list; these are the items which are most highly rated by the survey listed here. So we have strong support for the DNS root server operations, for the statistics, for supporting Internet development generally throughout the region, and so on and so forth.
That is one set of inputs. We also looked at, particularly the bottom end of that list, which is the areas in which we apparently need to perform somewhat better, so there's another set of issues here which do figure in and come from the survey in the activity planning, and the third list is the Top Ten resource priorities, which also come from the survey and hope to guide us in terms of how much resources should be spent in different areas.
So, I've mentioned those things, because in these Secretariat reports to follow from the different APNIC Secretariat areas, you'll find that there are references to the results of the member survey, which are used as a guide for those activities.
The first of those area reports is due now. It's going to be presented by Guangliang.
Due to a technical configuration issue, we have to do some cabling shuffling here with the switch, I'm sorry about that.
This report of the Services Area, the highlights and priorities from the last year, it's being presented by Guangliang who is the Resource Services Manager; and it is presented on behalf of the Services Area. German, would you like to say a few words from the Services Area?
GERMAN VALDEZ:
I was expecting to do this later. Even though I am a very new staff member for APNIC I'm not new in the RIR. I've been involved for nine years and started in the LACNIC community. My position there was policy and relationship manager. As a whole, I did that for the last five years, so it is quite similar to the job I am in now and I think it is going to bring a lot of experience in that area. So it's great to be part of this new region and I can not wait to be involved with you and be part of this community. So, thank you.
PAUL WILSON:
I can see why German is confused because I called him up at the wrong time, so my apologies. Over to Guangliang.
APNIC Secretariat reports - Services Area
GUANGLIANG PAN:
Good morning everyone my name is Guangliang. I'm here to present this service report on behalf of Sanjaya as he couldn't make it to the meeting.
In 2007, the service area included a few number of service, like resource service, member services, training services and key projects, which were internal and external.
Let's look at the Resource Services Unit. The Resource Services Unit is responsible for Internet resource allocation in the Asia Pacific region. You may not know, APNIC region actually covers 60% of the world population. It's a large number of customers or potential customers. Along with the Internet, going fast, the demand of the Internet resource is high. In 2007, we allocated 4.2 /8s in IPv4 and 57 IPv6 allocations, and we also allocated 656 AS numbers.
Looking at these three graphs, from IPv4, IPv6 and AS numbers, they are all higher than previous years. In 2007, we actually simplified the second opinion procedures. In the past, we reviewed members assignment window, it was up to 5 second opinon requests and increased one bit each time; but in 2007, we changed the procedure, we reviewed members assignment window every three second-opinon requests, and we also increased the assignment window - it's based on the assignment size, in the second opinion request.
From IPv4, IPv6 and AS numbers, they are all higher than previous years. In 2007, we actually simplified second opinion procedure. In the past, we reviewed members assignments and first resource request and increased one each time; but in 2007, we changed the assignment and reviewed assignments with the requests, based on the assignment size, the second opinion request.
So it's making our members' lives easier in getting customers - so it won't delay their business in getting customers. We also simplified the resource request. For the new member, they can combine one single form with membership applications, and they don't need to complete the database, whois database, before they submit the resource requests.
So, in getting customer, we also simplified the resource request. For the new member, they can combine one single form with membership and allocation, and they need to complete the database, whois database with the resource requests.
Looking to 2008, we're planning to improve the resource service, the resource request form, and make it clear and easier for members to complete.
We also would like to publish and commit to the new service level standard.
Moving to Member Services Unit, it is including Member Services and Helpdesk service. We have increased it to 222 members in 2007. Actually, it is a large number increase. We had 1,584 members at the end of 2007. We also streamlined the new member application. In the past, the new member who wanted to join APNIC, they had to submit a membership application and then we have to post them a paper to sign, and then later they can come back to submit the resource request, and before that, we would also have to complete the Whois template and actually in 2007, it is very simple now. Only one form. The new member only completes one form and also electronic agreement. The application complete resource request in a simple, single form.
We've shortened response time for reverse DNS and the approval of digital certifcates to one working day turnaround.
Looking to training services, you can see this graph. We went to 30 locations and conducted 70 trainings, see the numbers compared to a year ago from 2006, it's nearly doubled. The training team worked very hard in 2007.
Let's look at the highlights: Actually they completed the 'train the trainers' course. This means that they provide training to the hostmasters and allow the hostmaster to participate in the training, so they can deliver more training to the members; and then the host- masters have a chance to go out meeting with the members. It is a two-way communication.
Also, the training lab to support the workshops and more new courses. New courses as well, and also community building. In 2007, there was a training survey conducted in November and December. 92 members responded from 24 economies. The feed back is good. Here are some observations and highlights. Basically, the training is still very strong demand and also the member looking for more new course and more frequent training, and training will happen more this year to provide more training.
We have a senior project manager, Frank, in the APNIC Services area. He's looking at the software and all the support externally and internally.
For external, it is MyAPNIC member uses it to access APNIC data and information. Internally, APNIC staff in the Secretariat use the APNIC resource management system.
In 2007, all these features have been improved and also the management system. In 2008, they continue to look into improving MyAPNIC version 2. And also the finance report system and looking into ticketing and workflow systems as well.
Thank you very much.
PAUL WILSON:
Thank you, Guangliang. I expect there may be some questions, so if there are, we'll take some questions at the end of these reports and go straight on to the next one.
You may have noticed in the slides shown here that there is a little smiley face, a little blue fellow who is known to us as the APNIC man! Or woman, possibly! It looks more like a man to me, but he's got a smiley face and that indicates the elements of our activities which have come directly from the member survey, so presumably, that's why that particular member is happy. And we'll move on now to Sunny and the Comms area report.
APNIC Secretariat reports - Communications Area
SRINIVAS CHENDI:
Good morning all, I hope you enjoyed the dinner last night sponsored by Cisco. It was very well done.
I'm doing this report on behalf of our new communications manager German, who introduced himself just before the services area report.
Paul presented all of the managers in the communications area, but we also have other staff working in the communications area, especially if you see on the right side on the publications unit, we have Tina who is editor, Jen who is our resource developer and a team leader. Chiaki, our graphic designer, and most of communications staff you would have met; if not, please meet them to exchange information.
This report covers the top priorities that our members actually expressed in the member survey in 2006 and 2007. These are four points here on the screen are directly related to the communications area, which we're working towards them and some we are in progress and some we achieved.
If you need more information on the survey, you can go to the URL there. It is actually a long document and you can have a look at it and if you have any questions, please send it to us.
So, I start with the policy unit. The implementations that we did in 2007. There's a few proposals there. We were quite busy in implementing those proposals. I'm not going to read them through, but you can have a look at it, the proposals for 2007.
Moving on, we also had a meeting with the SIG chairs in APNIC 24, formalising guidelines for them to help them in processing the SIGs. We have procedures now for election and electing Chairs and Co-chairs, we have procedures for dissolving SIGs which we believe, will help our SIG chairs in chairing the SIGs.
We also redesigned the Policy Development Process documentation. The figure that you see on the right there is the new policy development process flow chart, which we believe helps our members to understand clearly what the APNIC policy development process is in this region.
Also, the previous policy managers Son Tran visited a few economies along with the training staff, including policy amendments, we presented policy development process and he encouraged a lot of participants to join the mailing list, and we had a significant increase in the number of mailing list subscriptions.
We're also looking at revamping the policy website to make it more clear for our members to understand or any user to understand what's going on and what are the policies being implemented or discussed. So, there's something for you to look forward in the policy website.
External Relations Unit, we had a meeting in India in APNIC 24. That was the first time that we did the meeting in collaboration with SANOG and also, it was the first meeting in India in South Asia. It was hosted by ISPAI, and we thank SANOG for being a partner for that meeting.
Right now, we're here in APNIC 25 in collaboration with APRICOT 2008 hosted by TWNIC. I don't have to say much about this meeting, you've been here and you've been in the sessions and events. I hope that you enjoyed the meeting.
We would like to thank all of the sponsors that supported our meetings, we very much appreciated your sponsorship and we look forward to working with you in the future.
So, what's coming up? The next APNIC 26 meeting is going to be in Christchurch. I'm not going to say much about this, because we have a speaker from our host Internet NZ, he will be giving a presentation later in the afternoon. But, the sponsorship packages are still available if your organisation is looking forward to supporting APNIC meetings, APNIC open policy meetings, please send your expression of interest to our website, and our external relations manager Louise Flynn will be in touch with you.
All of our meetings have remote participants as well, so if anyone is not able to attend our meetings physically, they can participate through Jabber chat or by webcast or also listen to the audience sessions. So if you need any more details of the remote participation, there's a URL on the screen and that will explain how to join in the remote participation.
External Relations also looks after the liaison and outreach activities. The four staff who are our liaison officers working on a part time basis, the first one is from South Asia, Kapil Chawla. He's the training offer as well.
Anna looks after south-east Asia. If you visited our Helpdesk, you would have met her. Ellie, is she here? She's sitting over there. Anna is over there. Ellie looks after the Australian/NZ Internet as well as the Pacific nations. She's also a senior hostmaster who works with Anna in the Resource Services Unit.
Guangliang Pan, I don't have to introduce him, he did a presentation just before me. He is a manager and also a liaison for China, so what do all of the liaison officers do? They work along with the NOGs in the region and we exchange information, we attend and support their meetings and we present the latest policy development activities that are happening in the Asia-Pacific region, and also we provide trainings over there, so, their members and our members can benefit from it. We also sponsor these NOGs.
The latest one in the list is the AUSNOG, which just started last year. They just had their first NOG meeting and our staff were there supporting it, and we had some training sessions and the policy development reports being presented over there. We also with our National Internet Registries. You can see the list there, you know how many we have. Basically, we have host masters from the NIR to come over to APNIC Secretariat for some training with our host masters. We had two host masters, two staff members from CNNIC visited us in 2007, and we're expecting staff from KRNIC to visit 2008.
This is a good opportunity for us to know what they're doing in their region and continue sharing information. We hope will continue in the future. The External Relations unit is looking to expand the liaison work to reach other economies that so far we haven't gone to. If you're interested in our trainings or anything, please contact Louise Flynn, whe's here, or just send an email to helpdesk@apnic.net.
Publications Unit: If you received a copy of the Apster report, you can see how much work goes into those reports. We used to publish Apster quarterly, but from this year onwards, we'll be publishing twice a year and release the Apsters for the meetings. And these new Apster newsletters will have more content, more topics, so you can benefit from the twice yearly publication.
The first one is coming in August 2008. Please look forward to it. You can download this from our website. We provide electronic copies, and if you would like a hard copy, you can request one and post it to you.
Internal documentation, our publications unit is looking to streamlining some precedures, it so it will help internally to be consistent with what we are doing across all of the areas of the Secretariat. I think this is quite important, because we can all deliver a consistent message to our members.
NRO Secretariat, last year for 2007, it was APNIC who handled the Secretariat functions. Part of that was we produced a continuing co-operation brochure for IGF in Rio. If you would like a copy, we have them outside on the stand, please grab one.
For this year, we handed over to AfriNIC for their turn at being the secretariat for the NRO and ASO, and we have documented all of the procedures and handed over to AfriNIC.
Publication unit is also responsible for the website development, website redesigning. We had a member survey and also we did a survey at the Bali meeting at APNIC 23. We received quite good comments, quite useful feedback, and now we're looking, now, Jen is looking at redesigning the website focussing more no visual content and performance. We will go to the website to see the requirements and if you have any questions, please contact the APNIC staff here or go to the website. We thank all of the participants who participated in the survey, both face-to-face and online. We appreciate your feedback and we we're looking forward to receiving any feed back that you have.
The publications unit also designs the APNIC meetings. If you visited our APNIC 25 website, you can see it is a totally different look. They put a lot of effort into making it and giving it more visibility and the content related to the meeting, which can be accessed quite easily no matter where you are.
Even materials, we produce materials like brochures and banners. There is a banner over there. It is all internally designed by our graphic designer Chiaki Kanno. If you have any questions, please e-mail to german@apnic.net. I'm sure he'll take them!
PAUL WILSON:
The next report is being submitted by George who is coming on the stage. Since we started about half an hour late, I'm going to be shifting the financial and budget reports to after the morning tea so that we have enough time before morning tea to cover the election speeches.
APNIC Secretariat reports - Technical Area
GEORGE MICHAELSON:
That's more like it. I'm giving this one on behalf of Sanjaya like everyone. You all know that Sanjaya is a Tai Chi master from the meeting in Taipei, but he's also an architect, and what he's doing at the moment is constructing his own house. So, I'm presenting for the following four units. The order is not the same as the overview slide. Software engineering in 2007, we actually managed to get quite a lot of work done which was relating to the member survey and strategic directions to improve member outcome, so there's a lovely smiley APNIC man.
There was MyAPNIC performance announcement, and these were particularly significant for people on slower or longer delay lengths. You should see a marked improvement in response. The reverse DNS management system has gone into the web services release. We've been approving the new application forms and new members forms on the website, and we did quite a lot of work on resource certification. You're going to see it all the way through the slides - it's my project. We did work on the search engine. So the priorities in 2008 are the MyAPNIC version 2, and we're looking to improve resource management for IPv6. One of the policy outcomes in global v6 policy is that we do sparse allocation, which isn't a straight-forward linear map, and we need to be subtle in how we give it out. We need to have an engine to help us with that and we're trying to improve certification by getting some tools deployed to help improve the system.
So, the research and Development Unit in 2007: We deployed some 4-byte AS test systems in Japan and Brisbane. I would like to acknowledge WIDE and also KDDI and NTT who collaborated with us in that deployment. At the same time, we deployed a DNS monitoring system in Japan, and this is feeding into OARC, which is a worldwide public repository of statistical information relating to DNS. It is a really precious resource that anyone can participate in. I certainly encourage you to get involved in that initiative, and in resource certification, we did a lot of design test and standard work.
In 2008, we've added new monitoring systems. I actually just deployed the Hong Kong node before coming to this one and we've had two days of data collection. It is wonderful the things that you find out when you put good monitoring systems in place. We've often thought that Hong Kong wasn't actually doing a high service load, and when we deployed this system, we found that we're handling about 4,000 queries a second from our DNS server there. So it's a lot more significant that we thought.
I'd like to recognise Che-Hoo for helping us. We're also looking at taking part in an activity called 'A day in the life of the Internet', which is a 48-hour data capture, world wide of root name server, ccTLD name server. We are the first of the RIRs to get reverse DNS data into this collection. I think other RIRs are going to be engaging in this activity, so we'll have quite a good data set.
The Network Operations Unit in 2007, we deployed the new reverse DNS system and we also deployed the new support platform using Nominum.
We've got a lot more resilience in the back end service now that we have a database mirror. We've got a spam appliance in place, which has helped to improve mail-based services. We replaced the monitoring system, it was getting quite old, it was time to reengineer that, and we've also gone with ITIL, which is an industry recognised framework for information systems management, and deployed a JAVA-based system to help us with asset and service management.
The 2008 priority is to do more resource certification work. Increasing trust in certificates means we have to run high-trust certification engines and it means deploying extra firewalls and a level of physical security over some of our systems so that the signatures that we give out are protected. We've also been improving, we're hoping to improve the redundancy of the public-facing services.
So, the security unit in 2007, we deployed a host base intrusion detection system and we've also been working on the CA, the Certification Authority that we're using to issue out certificates for MyAPNIC.
We now have a newsletter we run internally to keep people up-to-date about security issues in the office.
In 2008, we'll be deploying a new CA system, and we hope there will be radical improvements in the certificate application process. This is something that should have the smiley man because it is fairly directly a result of feedback from the community about issues with using certificates. We are aware that it is more complicated to get these things, but we're working to improve that service, and we're going to have a much more consistent authentication model inside all our services. That's all, thank you very much.
PAUL WILSON:
Thank you very much, George. Those are three area reports that cover the three. We have on the agenda now, the financial reports and budget, but we're going to leave that until after morning tea now in order to provide space for the election procedures, because the election needs to be opened and started by morning tea time so there's a voting period through until lunch.
Election procedures and speeches from candidates
So, I'll just, with that reshuffle of the agenda, what I will do is start with the number council election which is the first one that we will look at. So, the number council is the structure within the Number Resource Organization. So, the address council within ICANN: What we have in the Asia-Pacific community is an election for a 2-year term every second year and that is what is going to be happening now.
For reasons of timing, this is an unusual election. We normally hold the elections at the September meeting, but that didn't happen, so, this instead of being a 2-year term will be slightly shorter serving until the end of September 2009, otherwise the election procedure is just as we have done it before.
So there has been a call for nominations for this number council position. We have online or onsite voting available. The online voting in accordance with by-laws has ended, and onsite voting is what we're doing Now.
The number council election is something which happens on a regional basis, and it is up to each region, each RIR community, to decide how it is to be handled. In this case, through the EC process, we have the following system of voting entitlements.
Using the online system using MyAPNIC, each APNIC member can issue a single vote according to the size of the tier of the member. That started on the 13th of February for a 2-week period.
What we're doing now is the onsite paper-based voting and that's available to every member who is, every individual who is in this room, regardless of whether you're a member or not, if you're attending this meeting, then you're able to participate in this election. With a single vote, you can cast by using the ballot paper, which is available at the registration desk if you don't have it already. That's opening now after this section or period of speeches and so forth and will be closing at 2pm sharp today. That is after the lunch break.
It's the pink ballot, which applies to the number council election, and as you can see, there are six candidates on the ballot. What the instructions on the paper say is that you need to park just one of the candidates with your choice for this election. All of these ballot papers have a validity stamp on them which has been applied manually, by hand, this morning before the papers are issued; that's to ensure that the ballot is a valid paper.
You, as I mentioned, you mark one box and one box only with an X, and please be careful on the pink ballot paper that it is one mark only. It is different from the EC election, which is coming up. Just do it clearly and simply so that the scrutineers can count the vote.
Now, I'm going to be calling before lunchtime for election scrutineers to help with the voting. You will be able to cast your ballots at lunchtime, which will be at the registration desk, and the result will be announced at 3pm today.
Election speeches from candidates - NRO NC
So, the candidates are listed here. There are six candidates for the election and I would like to give those candidates now the opportunity to stand up and say a few words about their nomination. I will proceed in the order of this list. As I mentioned earlier, if the candidate is available and would like to speak, then they can do so. If the candidate is not available and hasn't for instance made arrangements online, then if there's someone else who would like to speak on their behalf, that's possible as well. The first is David Woodgate. Would you like to say a few words.
DAVID WOODGATE:
Good morning, David Woodgate from Telstra. Speak up? OK.
Good morning, I'm David Woodgate from Telstra. I would like you to consider me for the NRO position because I've had a very long association now with the Internet in this region. I've been working on the Internet since its introduction in Australia in 1990, and during that time, I had the privilege to work on the national internet backbone frlom it being a 2mbit/s system to it being a multi-10 gigabit per second system. I work for Telstra, as I said which, has given me the opportunity to understand both the technology aspects of the business and also the practical business requirements that are driven in this area. I've also worked in working groups in the IETF during the 1990s.
I worked particularly on the routing policy specification language during that time.
As a result of this, I believe I'm in a very good position to represent the requirements of the Asia-Pacific region very strongly within the NRO and also provide impartial consultancy on the addressing requirements as we go into this very difficult time of the IPv4 run out and the transition to IPv6.
That's really all I have to say at this time, but I hope that you've seen how passionate I am about the proposals, which have been put up during the Policy SIG this week. I hope that you will consider me for this position. Thank you.
APPLAUSE
PAUL WILSON:
Next on the list is Kenny Huang. Is Kenny here? If you would like to plug in, that's fine.
We had a few cabling issues this week, so it is not switching as I would like it to do. For any other candidates who are in the room, please be ready to speak as soon as it is your turn so that we can move on and not be too late for morning tea.
KENNY HUANG:
Thank you, Paul. Good morning everyone, my name is Kenny Huang. I'm very honoured to be here, especially with all of the qualified candidates. Regarding the Internet community, I've been participating in this kind of community for quite some time, including the ICANN registry implementation committee and I was a member of a public internet registry, and also participated in some IETF. I was on the initial advisory council in Asia, and in some other communities as well.
So, how about address community? I was a Policy SIG chair and also on the existing number council. I'm happy to try to run for re-election, and also, I definitely need your support. I was running the Policy SIG Chair since APNIC 14 since Kitakyushu in 2002.
So what? 117 proposals were conducted during my tenure, and 25 APNIC policies were implemented during this period. In the proposal, we have one global policy was ratified by ICANN for allocation of IPv6 space. OK, thank you for your support. Thank you.
APPLAUSE.
PAUL WILSON:
There are four other candidates on the list. Mohammed Hanif. Mohsin Farhan. Nitin Walia. Vish? It seems that these candidates aren't in the room. Is there anyone here who would like to speak on behalf of any of them? OK, it seems not.
OK, we will move on then unless there are any questions about the NRO election. We have, as I mentioned, a second election being conducted for the APNIC EC. Please don't get the two elections mixed up. What we've been talking about here so far is the number council with the pink ballot paper. The EC election has a different ballot paper and a different system of voting.
For the EC, there are three positions, which are being appointed by election today. The three positions are currently held by existing standing EC members. Che-Hoo Cheng, Akinori Maemura and Vinh Ngo. They served a 2-year term, which ends with this election. Through the normal standard process, we've had a call for nominations, which is over. Now, this voting is open to APNIC members only.
In order to comply with the by-laws, requirements for authorisation of voting contacts, we are trying to implement a systematic means by which individuals are authorised to vote for APNIC members. We have asked that anyone who wishes to vote today should be a registered voting contact for the APNIC member and that is something that can be done through MyAPNIC.
There is also proxy voting available, which is something that can be submitted by fax or e-mail, or through MyAPNIC. And now, here today, we have onsite voting. So, if you have either been recognised as a authorised voting contact, or if you have been nominated as a proxy, you will have a set of ballot papers which are available to you for voting and I'll explain the system now in terms of how that works.
This voting is conducted according to the membership tier. If you're in the associate membership tier, you have one vote, very small has 2 votes, small has 4 and so on. Large has 64 votes.
Ballot papers are the Green Papers and each paper represents the indicated number of votes, the example on the screen here is worth 16 votes, but all you need to do regardless of the value of the ballot paper is to mark your preference for three candidates. That is to indic ate with three crosses the candidates who you wish to elect.
As I said, there are different ballot papers for different tiers of voting. We have adopted a system where large members will receive a ballot paper for 16. Very large will receive 2 papers of 16 votes and extra large will receive four. It is completely up to you to use them. You can vote the same way on each paper or vote differently on each paper.
If you want to split your ballot and if you're in any of these classes, then you can trade in your ballot paper for a number of smaller denominations if you like. That's to enable the vote to be split as you like. If you want to do that, you should see the Secretariat staff at the registration desk.
So, the procedure for the EC election is that again the ballot papers are stamped to mark their validity. Please mark up to 3. You don't have to mark 3, but up to 3 boxes with an X, and the paper will be invalid if you don't mark anything, or if you mark more than 3 or if it is not clear. Again, I'll be calling for scrutineers to count the votes and supervise the ballot box and count the results.
Again, sorry, the voting is open and will close at 2pm. The result announcement will be at 3pm.
Election speeches from candidates - APNIC EC
So, this year, we have 10 candidates. We have the opportunity now for candidates to make a short speech in favour of their nominations, and I'll take it in this order. So, is the candidate Azhar Muhammad here?
I will call the candidate's name. Please, if the candidate is not here and someone wants to speak on their behalf, please just say so, otherwise I'll take it that there is not a representative here. Azhar Muhammad. OK, Che-hoo?
CHE-HOO CHENG:
I'm Che-hoo Cheng from Hong Kong and I've been serving on the APNIC EC for 10 years and I'm one of the oldest among the existing EC members so I have very much experience in running the EC together with the APNIC Secretariat support.
The last two years were the toughest among my five terms with the EC because of the financial situation and the Australian dollar's fluctuation and now the Australian dollar is at a very high level, so it affects APNIC a lot. So, the EC decided to change the membership fee to Australian dollars and it helped, it helped the financial situation a lot for the years going forward. But still, there is work to be done. I think the membership fee structure has a lot of room for improvement and I think my experience will help APNIC to find a better solution. Of course, there's no perfect solution, but I hope that there will be a fairer system for NIR members or RIR members so that we can all contribute to APNIC and help us to continue to grow.
I hope you support me. Thank you.
APPLAUSE
PAUL WILSON:
The next candidate is David Hughes. Do we have a speaker for David Hughes.
JAMES SPENCELEY:
David sends his apologies, he's got work commitments this week, actually customer commitments, so they're the important commitments.
I'd like to say that I've known David for a number of years and have had the pleasure of working with him, within the Internet and within Australia and certainly closely in the last year as we both put together the AUSNOG group in Australia and had the first meeting. Never having been involved with David in business, it was a real pleasure to work with him at AUSNOG. I found him to be a very stable individual and very organised, and I think he was really the backbone of the AUSNOG conference.
I can tell you that David has been involved in the Internet industry for more than 10 years. He's very well liked and supported within the Australian Interent industry, and I believe he would be an absolutely excellent candidate for the EC. He certainly has very gentle hand, a very considered thought, and I think this is certainly something that would be beneficial to the EC.
Back in Australia, we have something like 700 members of APNIC, and I think it is something that we've all come to the conclusion that we would like representation, being the largest group of members in the APNIC organisation, and yes, I would very strongly encourage you to consider David for the position, and I would personally recommend him. Thank you.
PAUL WILSON:
Thanks.
APPLAUSE
PAUL WILSON:
The next on the list is Ma Yan.
MA YAN:
Thank you, Paul. It is my pleasure to have the opportunity to present myself here. I've been working with the APNIC for six years, so I really encourage myself to doing better. I've been on the EC for two terms, so my background is working in university and serving as one of technical members and adding sufficient experience with dealing with the IP address assignment and policy-making and also very good friends with all of the members in the APNIC community. So I would like to try my best to serve for our region for the future and great development.
There is a very important moment with the current IPv4 infrastructure between the next generation to IPv6 and the next phase. So it is very important and it would be my pleasure to be involved in this activity. So I would like to do my best to serve as the EC and I am seeking all of your support. Thank you.
APPLAUSE.
PAUL WILSON:
The next on this list is Akinori Maemura who is coming in on a video link. And we are ready, I think, to switch over to Akinori Maemura.
Good morning Akinori, you're on the big screen.
AKINORI MAEMURA:
Good morning everyone. This is Akinori Maemura from JPNIC, and I am sorry I cannot attend the APNIC 25 this time due to family reasons.
This is my really first chance to make remote participation and I found the remote participation that APNIC offers is quite excellent to join, so I'm just enjoying it. Some of you might recognise me from JPNIC as well as also France Telecom Group but I left FTG one year ago and juoined JPNIC secretariat as the general manager. I worked with the working group since one year ago.
I was first elected in October 2000 in Brisbane, which was the very first standalone APNIC meeting, and I have been in the EC for 7 years. I am happy to run for the EC again, and more happy that I was nominated from JPNIC as usual, and also in this time from Malaysian nominators. This is my very first time to have these two nominations.
I am now in the EC and the chair of the EC and I understand that the APNIC situation is quite tough because we have been discussing about fee structure change, and we need to have some progress and also we are now encountering approaching to IPv4 address depletion. And mainly, if I am elected to the EC again, the 2 years that, the next two years which is where I would stand will be tough for APNIC, not only for the Secretariat but also the Executive Council and membership. I believe that I can contribute to the APNIC community by my experience for almost 10 years in this industry, and also being responsible for the JPNIC IP department which involves running the same business as APNIC. Thank you very much and I hope to have your gracious support. Thank you very much.
APPLAUSE
PAUL WILSON:
Thank you, Akinori. You'll be glad to know that you came through loud and clear. It works! OK, the next one then is Billy. Is Billy in the room? You're plugging in.
BILLY CHEON:
Nice to meet you, my name is Billy from Korea. In 2001, I attended APNIC meeting for the first time right here in Taipei. In a different hotel. Ever since then I worked in the IP field my major is computer science, so it was a bit difficult to learn the IP policy making process and operational stuff. As you know, I think we are in a very critical area. Like.. IPv4, is it running out? Maybe we need to do something for that, you know.. promote IPv6. At this critical moment, I think policy making is really important, and I believe the EC position, the position of the EC is such a place to make a decision. So, I think considering my experience, with this community over 10 years, and my knowledge, I apply for the position. So, hopefully, I can get your support for the position. So, I would like to contribute to APNIC community with my experience.
Thank you.
APPLAUSE.
PAUL WILSON:
The next candidate is RS Perhar.
RS PERHAR:
Good evening everyone. This is the third APNIC meeting I'm attending. The last one was Bali, I was in India last year and before that Bali. I was giving a presentation to the EC council of APNIC on hosting the event in India for the first time. I could see a lot of scepticism at that time. Fortunately, I was able to convince them to come down to India and I'm sure that we stood up to all of the promises we made and made the event a great one.
I am the chief operations officer of a company called Tulip IT Services LTD in India, I am also the secretary of the Internet service providers association of India. I joined Tulip 4 years back when it was a 250-man strong company. Basically into box selling. When I joined, the decision was made to turn it into a service provider. We wanted to set up an MPLS VPN network. Two months after joining, I started up my first connectivity in two different cities. Thereafter, I pushed the company to a stage today, and in less than two and a half years, we are in 1100 places across India. This was achieved, but I understand what human beings are. I understand that if you have your heart in the right place, if you provide the right kind of leadership and provide the right kind of maturity and focus, anything can be achieved. A company that was turing over of 25 hundred million, is now today turning over three times as much today, which is 8 thousand hundred million.
Within three months of joining the ISP's assoc, I was elected to one of the biggest associations in the country. Eight months later, I was elected unanimously the secretary of the Internet providers association of the country, and again last year. When I get elected to APNIC, if I get elected to APNIC EC, I will bring a sense of purpose, a sense of focus, a sense of responsibility, that I will also provide strength to APNIC to be self-reliant. Provide services to all communities, irrespective of how big or small they are. Have justifiable distribution. That is what I wish to do. I am also on the Next Generation's Networks committee of the Telecom Regulatory Authority in India. That's the think tank specialising on the regulatory affairs on that. I am with the ASPEN institute of the US in their round table, we recently about a month back completed their White Paper on the future of mobile in India.
I am also on the national spectrum allocation board of India. The industry Government body, which decides the spectrum management in the country. I carry 30 years of experience behind me. I carry a sense of purpose behdind me, and I'm sure that if elected to the APNIC EC, I will be a positive member of the team.
What happened when I was coming, someone asking me, they said, you are chartering in new territory - will you win?. I said, the point is not that. I reminded him of a saying that says, glory is not in folly, but glory lies in getting up every time you fall. But, I added to this - I said, glory lies not in folly, but in getting up every time you fall and asking the barman to give me one more!
APPLAUSE.
PAUL WILSON:
Thank you, the next candidate is Scott Bartlett.
PAUL WILSON:
After Scott Bartlett, the next one is Vinh Ngo who is unable to be here for medical reasons. Would anyone like to speak for Vinh?
Finally, Vish Yelsangikar. OK, there's one last opportunity. If there is anyone who would like to speak for any of the candidates who haven't been represented so far? If not, are there any questions or clarifications required for the voting process for the EC?
OK, just to be clear, we've finished the procedural explanation and the candidate speeches to both of those elections. The election won't be - the voting period won't be open until the beginning of the lunch break. Before that time, I will also call for volunteer scrutineers - these are the people on whom we rely as volunteers to count these votes independently from any candidates or from the APNIC Secretariat or EC. I will be calling for scrutineers before the lunch break. We will need two sets, so I would like you to think about volunteering to help with that task from the end of the voting period, well, from the beginning of the voting period actually, because the scrutineers are expected to oversee the ballot boxes as well and this time, I think we're into the morning tea break, so we'll come back to the remaining EC reports and the rest of the agenda.
Thank you.
(End of Session)
APNIC 25
Member Meeting 1100-1230
Friday, 29 February 2008
PAUL WILSON:
The voting has opened now, there were number of requests to open it immediately so that some people could catch planes. So the ballot boxes are being supervised by APNIC staff and if you would like to drop your ballot papers, not that it is inclusive, but encouraging anyone to vote and run, two more matters from prior to the break, the budget. So Kuo-Wei Wu is presenting the report from 2007.
Financial Reports
KUO-WEI WU:
Good morning, everyone. First of all, I am going to do the financial report for the 2007, before that, I believe in your box, we have a hard copy of the financial report outside. And at the same time, if you want to download the form, it is also available on the website.
Before I present this financial report, in the very first page for this hardcopy, we have a treasury report. I would like to give you some briefing for this treasury report.
As the candidates for the EC presented just before the tea break, we mentioned 2007 is a very big challenge for APNIC. Basically, the major reasons because of the exchange rate between Australia and the US dollars. In the past, actually, we know in 1998, the exchange rate of the US dollar and Australia was around 0.79. In 2001, it was 0.49, the Australian dollars to US dollars. But recently, we know the Australian dollar rising in the end of 2007 to 0.94 and it is making major differences and also impacting to the financial stability of APNIC because our membership fees is based on US dollars, with just changed the payment from US dollars to Australian recently. So, that is a big challenge for 2007 for APNIC financial status.
So now I'm going to do the presentation for the financial report for 2007. I think first of all, we are very glad to see the membership keeps growing. Right now, we have 1,584 members and a net growth of 222 members. You can see we have really a wonderful privilege for the members to join the APNIC communities.
Second of all, a complete audit of the annual accounts with an operating loss of $199,467. The major component from foreign exchange fluctuations, we have a change of fluctuations notes, with US $270,000. If we do not have such an exchange loss actually for 2007, the financials should be positive instead of negative. So basically, we have, the approach for last year is a very conservative approach for the budget and maintaining the required levels of reserves.
This is some of the membership status. I just mention we have very good growth, for 2007. Based on the economy, our membership actually, you can see, we have 25% from Australia and 12% from India and 9% from Hong Kong, 6% from New Zealand and 5% from the Philippines.
For the profit and loss statement for the expenses, we can see actually, we have a total expense of 6% more, but if you look at the first row, January is 7%, so you can see it is a major difference because we spent, our expenses is in Australia but our income is in US dollars so it makes a difference.
And for the revenue, you can see actually, from the US dollars we our revenue is 11% increase. But because exchange rate, we have a 7% loss so you can see if we resolve this issue, the revenue would be much healthier.
The operation situation, you can see then, original, if you remember in the Bali meeting, we actually, the EC made a very hard decision to allow the negative, the loss budget, we originally supposed it was very close to $500,000 US loss, but by the end of 2007, through the efforts of the APNIC office, they worked very hard to control the loss. So actually, the loss is less than $200,000 US. And if you look at the exchange rate that you can see what the impact was. So for the balance sheet for 2007, we actually have an exchange rate of 12% change from the year of 2000 to 2007. And currently, the assets we have, you can see the assets, we still, assets in the APNIC more than $12 million US by the end of 2007.
If you look at the historical records of APNIC since 1998, this is the first time we have a loss in the budget and actually the performance is that we have a loss for 2007, because if you look at the historical records we only for two years have such a loss of financial statements, 1998 and also the 2007.
So, what we did, we tried to implement the Australian dollar fee schedule, as you already know. We also tried to develop the budget management system and implement new payroll systems. Payroll, we tried to improve the fee collection procedures and improve credit management performance. At the same time, improve integration of accounts and membership data and continue with the review of all internal policies and procedures and tried to bring APNIC back to the normal with stable and healthy financial status.
And I think this is the end of my presentation and if you have any questions, I would like to ask you a question, particularly for the financial statements for APNIC for 2007, thank you.
Workplan and budget 2008
PAUL WILSON:
Of course, the financial statement is audited each year by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, it is an optional audit every year and they received the audit to verify and ensure the level of governance is maintained. I will move on into the budget, you may, the treasurer, if you could stay with me, we might have some questions at the end of that.
I mentioned earlier, APNIC activity planning process, which is gradually being developed and new business area manager at APNIC is certainly helping with that. So the activity plan that we make each year internally comes very much from the inputs of the member survey, also from the outputs of these meetings. The activities plan is then used as the basis for the budget. So let me describe how the budget process goes because, of course, in forming a budget we have got many other things to consider as well. This slide shows that on the expenses side we are looking at those inputs from the survey and the activities plan. We also, of course, have to look at the historical financial data and the trends we have seen in the past and we are expecting in the future.
Foreign exchange has been a big issue in the past as the US dollar has been declining, meaning that in terms of local currency, the income of APNIC is reduced. It also, on the expense side, it means that the expenses in US dollars do reduce, but the, that is only a small portion of the APNIC expenses. We look at inflation, of course, we look at taxation expectations and the strategy towards taxation as advised by the APNIC accountants.
As you may know, the APNIC membership fees are treated within the Australian financial system as mutual funds and that means that those funds are not taxable, they are collected by APNIC and in the mutual interests of the members; however, there are income sources which are taxable and on which we pay normal company tax and that is any interest on capital that is obtained from capital reserve investment and also non-member income. Basically, any other non-member fee sources of income are taxable. We need to have strategies to deal with that.
Of course, the other level of expenses has to do with staffing levels and, of course, not only in the organisational structure but also on the activities plans, the recruiting plans and the wages, salary environment. On the other side, the revenue, we look at membership trends and forecasts. We generally project those, excuse me, quite conservatively, traditionally. Because we need to take a quite careful approach to that, to the risks associated with forecasts. We look at our per-address-fee estimates, which are difficult to predict with any certainty. This year in particular, are looking at the, on the revenue side, the effects of the restructure of APNIC fees in Australian dollars, which Kuo-Wei Wu has described and the effects on the accrual accounting system.
We accrue, in a financial sense, accrue the income that is derived from membership fees following the payment of the fees and that is a principle that is required by the auditors, quite some years ago, the effect of that, particularly during the period of changing fee structure, the revenue, I'm sorry, the currency has been, has required a fair amount of calculation.
Cash flow looks at the analysis of data performance and, of course, we really do have very good record, the auditors are always very surprised at the debtor performance, that is the ability of APNIC and the ability of our members to collect and pay fees on time. And we look at projected revenues and expenses, of course, and the capital expenditure.
So moving into the actual details, we have got an expense budget here, which is provided at the local level of detail that is traditionally given in these meetings. Needless to say, the APNIC EC does look at this and look at the budget based on the activities and so forth over quite a period of time, in fact, this budget was reviewed and discussed extensively over the last, during the last few months of 2007. So it is well in place now, of course, we have had nearly two months experience of operating with this budget.
Total budget for 2008 is around $10.5 million Australian. Our fee payments, converting into Australian dollars, also for the sake of clarity of the reporting, we are also moving to Australian dollars for the sake of annual reporting. So the 2007 annual report is the last one that you'll see in US dollars from this point on. I would say, we will all be more familiar with the relationship between membership fees and expenses and revenues in Australian dollars and hence we will be reporting in Australian dollars.
Around 51% of the total expense budget is salaries and personal expenses. That is a fairly common, possibly slightly low level of expenses on that particular area of expenditure. The other large expense item, of course, is travel, followed by the general operating expenses, rental and depreciation on our capital assets.
The projected revenues is just slightly higher, just under $11 million Australian. And I think, as I described, the projection of membership fees is based on quite a number of projections and calculations which are done, not only membership growth but also the fact that membership fees are accrued and so, much of the income we are actually counting this year has actually already been paid into APNIC. Per allocation fees are, again, something that needs to be projected based on past performance and on expectations of the Internet climate; as I say, we take a very conservative approach projecting forward with anything to do with the Internet industry or climatic conditions. That provides us this year with an operating surplus of just under $500,000.
Last year we had an operating deficit that was smaller in the end than actually budgeted. So through careful management and so forth in the last year, we were able to reduce the projected deficit. In this year, we may be able to adjust this as time goes on.
And the cash flow is provided here, showing projected receipts and disbursements and how those affect the beginning-cash position to the end-cash position. One reason to look at this, the APNIC EC principle for management of APNIC finances is that we should have 100% of a full year's operating expenses in cash reserve at any time. There has been some discussion about increasing that progressively, but suffice to say, that would be a process of accruing some services in each year for a number of years in order to increase that capital reserve. It is slightly under 100% this year, again because of course, as APNIC grows, that requirement for a capital reserve grows and in order to grow the capital reserve we need to have something of a surplus.
In the last year, of course, we didn't have the surplus, we had a deficit, which ate into the capital reserve, but, of course, this is what it is for. We discussed the need for this capital reserve over many years and the only point of having such a reserve is if, in fact, we can spend a little bit of it ask we need to touch the last year was exactly the sort of circumstances that were predicted or anticipated that due to economic climatic conditions and in this case, namely the US dollar position, that APNIC might find itself in a difficult position and I suppose, when we have a $10 million capital reserve and we lost about $300,000 last year, we have a lot of room to move in those kinds of circumstance in the future. What we do in projecting forward for the following year is look at an average increment from this year's budget to what we expect for 2009.
It is some time away and we are trying to look what our cash reserve would be at the end of 2008. It is projected to be 91%. It is a little below target but healthy for the reserve.
Just final remarks here to explain the overall budget policy. To ensure financial stability and security of services to the APNIC membership and wider community. Maintaining around 100% of the following year's expenses in reserve and there is some discussion about the possible need to increase that.
We need to ensure that we have a very high level of visible financial governance and controlling all APNIC activities. The APNIC EC does receive financial reports on a monthly basis, those reports being included in the monthly record of the EC meetings.
And of course, as well, we have the regular annual audit, which is a full audit conducted independently by PWC, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, in order to, again, demonstrate this high level of financial governance that is necessary in our area.
So we do have quite a conservative approach to risk management and compliance. The capital reserve is maintained, nearly entirely in secure term deposits and in that sort of financial, again, under the supervision of the APNIC EC. That is the budget for 2008.
So I expect there might be some questions on either the 2007 report or 2008 budget. So if there are, please fire away.
The documents for both of these reports, 2007 annual report, 2008 budget are available in printed form and you, if you don't have a copy and you would like to receive one, they are outside. You'll also find in the report, a fairly detailed treasurer's note, as Kuo-Wei Wu mentioned about the situation over the last year with the fee structures and the fee structure change and so on. Also, I mention that in the current edition of Apster, there is yet another analysis of the fee structure change, where there is a whole collection of graphs, which actually show, for the most popular, but unfortunately, not all currencies in the region. Show what the total cost in each local currency on APNIC membership, at the small level; what that cost has been throughout the last several years. And the object of that analysis is to show that the individual effect of the APNIC fee structure in each different economy has been markedly different.
We find under that, through that analysis, there are a few currencies, which have been receiving, over the last several years, a real decline in the cost of APNIC membership cost. And under the new APNIC fee structure currency, the fees are substantially below, say, what they were in 2001. It is not the same for all currencies but the object is to show that by adopting the AUD fee structure, which represents the majority of costs for APNIC, that there is a rebalancing that has happened in terms of the fees, which are being paid by members of different kinds. That again, is in the latest edition of Apster, which is also available.
I think that having been through quite a lot of extended analysis, discussion, explanation, and reporting, about the AUD fee structure that we won't be continuing to pore over this issue forever more, so if there are questions that relate to that decision or set of changes, then please ask. But if not, and it appears not, then woops, I'm sorry, I skipped. What we will do is move on through the agenda and move to the next set of reports, so thank you, Kuo-Wei Wu.
APPLAUSE
The next report we have is from the APNIC EC. Now, on the agenda here it says Che-Hoo Cheng will report but since we had such a great connection earlier, we are going to try it again and Akinori Maemura will be delivering that report. And so I hope Akinori Maemura is listening and made himself ready, and we are going to need to switch a cable down at the front here to bring him back on to the big screen.
AKINORI MAEMURA:
You ready?
PAUL WILSON:
What I need to do is bring up your slides here, Akinori. I'll display them from here and I'll ask you to give me a clear indication of when you want me to switch the slides. Everyone can see you right now but we are just about to switch you off so we will only be able to hear you. I'll do that now and you can get started.
AKINORI MAEMURA:
OK. So,
PAUL WILSON:
We need to go back to the presentation.
APNIC EC report
AKINORI MAEMURA:
So, this is not just for the nomination statement, of course, this is also for my EC duty. I like to give you the EC report here. I'm Akinori Maemura the chair of the EC of APNIC and OK, let's press first page. Here, you see the members of the Executive Council right now. Please, EC members stand up so you can show your faces to the members.
We have the eight members in the EC and I'm Akinori Maemura, on the screen, and Che-Hoo Cheng from Hong Kong, secretary, and Kuo-Wei Wu from Taiwan, the treasurer, who has just given you the treasurer report, and Ming-Chen Liang from Taiwan - TWNIC, and Mao Wei from China, and Vinh Ngo and Kusumba Sridhar from India, and I think someone already heard about that, but Vinh apologises for not being at this APNIC meeting because he is right now hospitalised in Australia. And usually, I have been introducing the EC members as seven, but right now, the Paul Wilson, director general, is recognised as an ex officio member of the EC. We have eight members in APNIC EC. Turn the page, please.
The role of APNIC EC is as shown. The activities of APNIC and to consider Internet policy issues for APNIC strategy and to establish the basis of the annual budget for membership approval, which is already presented, and to set a membership dues and to endorse the outcomes of open-policy process.
And endorsing the policy proposal, which is to reach consensus in policy SIGs or other relevant SIGs. And if you have interest in EC duties, you can refer to the web page. Turn the page, please.
PAUL WILSON:
For your information, Akinori, you are now being displayed on the screen here in addition to your presentation slides.
AKINORI MAEMURA:
Hi, everyone! Thank you! OK. The next page, the EC meetings, we have usually, the regular monthly conference calls, and if in the case we have the APNIC meeting, then we have the onsite meeting. This week, we have the onsite meeting for the three 90-minute sessions, so it is very long. Usually, we have a two-hour telephone conference. The minutes for the meeting is also on the web page. So please, look at it if you are interested in it. Turn the page, please.
Right now, the EC is reviewing the process. In the recent six months, we have had a comprehensive review of the, in terms of the legal and procedure matters for the APNIC corporate documents, bylaws, and as I just mentioned, the DG, Paul Wilson, is now recognised as an ex officio member of the EC. Also, we review the legal review of the responsibilities and liabilities of the EC members and adoption of a set of procedures for the conduct of the EC business. So, this kind of review is reflected to the EC member handbook, which is recently published. You can also look at the EC handbook, which is published in the format of a PDF on the APNIC web page. Turn the page, please.
And the major point of the review by the EC was the fee. As you remember, we had a membership fee vote in APNIC 24, the previous meeting. And after the membership fee vote was to reject the proposal but after that, we reviewed the financial situation and the EC decided to make a change in the currency of the APNIC membership fee from US dollars, which has been adopted for the year to Australian dollars in future. APNIC's expenses, almost all of APNIC's expenses will be paid. And also, we have reviewed the procedure for the setting the membership fees, according to the bylaws, the EC has the responsibility and power to set the membership fees. So the currency change of the membership fee is supporting to this provision.
So also, this is the thing that you already know, APNIC is doing the change of the fee structure over the years and we will continue in 2008. Whether there will be an adjustment to the fees, as appropriate and also determine the criteria for the assessment of the fee structure. Turn the page, please.
The year 2008 budget, also, we have discussed about that. As I have already mentioned, the single currency financial system is adopted. The year 2008 budget objective has a modest operational surplus of around 5% of the operating costs. And as the Paul mentioned, overall financial objective of maintaining the capital reserves for the 100% of the annual operations costs. Turn the page, please.
For the ICANN, sorry, Address Council and Number Council, the APNIC EC has responsibility to select one person for the EC appointment. For the year 2008, Toshiyuki Hosaka, who is also known as the chair of the policy SIG of the EC appointment and number council for 2008.
Regarding ICANN issues, the RIRs and ICANN exchanged the letters for the mutual recognition of the respective roles and responsibilities and APNIC EC has to look at the draft of the letters and to exchange and have some comments for that. And also, the ICANN is now in a period of reviewing its joint project agreement with US department of commerce, and the APNIC EC had a discussion for this and have some comments for the input to this joint project agreement amendment. And also, we look at financial contribution of NRO to ICANN and it has been agreed for 2008. Turn the page, this is the last page.
Thank you very much, and if you have any questions, we are happy to answer.
PAUL WILSON:
Are there any questions relating to the EC report?
AKINORI MAEMURA:
No?
PAUL WILSON:
It seems not.
AKINORI MAEMURA:
OK, thank you very much.
PAUL WILSON:
Thank you, Akinori-san, thank you for making the effort to be with us.
AKINORI MAEMURA:
Thank you for your assistance, thank you very much.
NRO report
PAUL WILSON:
OK, the next item on the agenda is a report from the, about the NRO. Now, I'm going to deliver that report in my role as the chair of the NRO EC. The Executive Council of the NRO: That is a committee of five members, representing each of the RIRs. So each of the RIR CEOs is a member of the NRO Executive Council. We have three office-holder positions, the traditional chair, treasurer and secretary, which are rotated within the NRO EC. This year I am the chair of the NRO, and the treasurer of the NRO is Axil Pawlik of RIPE NCC. And with that, position, is also the appointment of Adiel Akplogan of AfriNIC as Secretariat of the NRO this year.
The NRO is really quite a lightweight body, it is not an incorporated entity, it exists as a memorandum of understanding amongst the RIRs and it exists for a fairly defined purpose, which results in a fairly lean set of activities for the year. This is therefore a fairly short report. And, in fact, if aspects of this report have already been covered, thanks to Akinori.
The NRO is the interface between the RIRs and various other international bodies, including ICANN. What we have been discussing with ICANN for many years now is a contractual relationship of some kind or a formal relationship of some kind between the NRO represents the RIRs and ICANN. Finally, this year, we agreed to move forward with an exchange of letters rather than a formal contract. A formal contract, obviously, has got many details, which have been the subject of negotiations, and those negotiations have been a little difficult over the years due to the changing circumstances in which we are operating. It has been a sort of two steps forward and two steps back process of the contract.
In order to at least demonstrate something by way of a formal and a mutually supportive agreement, you mustn't assume there is animosity in here or anything of that kind, we do have a mutually supportive agreement and in order to demonstrate that, the exchange of letters was formally agreed. Those letters are one from the ICANN to NRO and one from NRO to ICANN. Those letters are available via the NRO website. In that exchange of letters we specify that the NRO is going to make an annual contribution to ICANN, a voluntary contribution in support of ICANN, but not contractually required at this time. And the amount of that contribution for the entire NRO is $823,000, US, per annum.
Within the NRO we share the cost as we share other NRO operational costs within the RIRs, we share them on a cost-sharing formula, which apportions different percentages of the NRO costs to the different RIRs. That formula uses the size of the RIRs in terms of annual budget and the number of address allocations to produce a share, so in APNIC's case, the share is approximately 25% of the overall budget, the smaller and newer RIRs obviously have a smaller share of the RIRs costs and the NRO budget, so to speak, not that there is a formal budget.
The voluntary contribution under the exchange of letters is to be renegotiated or discussed on an annual basis. The most recent discussion on the topic was at the last ICANN meeting. So that agreement for the current $823,000 was made and it will apply for the coming year and we will have another meeting in approximately one year's time.
We also, of course, haven't ruled out any prospect of further contractual discussions or discussions about a formal relationship. In fact, the letters we exchange do say we will continue to work towards a more detailed formal arrangement, and that is something that needs to be discussed collectively by the RIRs represented by their respective boards and ECs, and it is something that is a discussion that will keep going on in future.
Again, I suppose with the changing environment of ICANN, we can't say that that conclusion, or that agreement will be brought to conclusion at any time soon, but I think it is OK. I think what we need is a continual review and a continual awareness of the nature of our changing relationship with ICANN as time goes on. It will be the subject, as I say, of ongoing discussions.
At the latest ICANN meeting in New Delhi where we had the most recent discussion about the voluntary annual contribution, there were numerous other NRO activities, which were carried out. So we were invited, and we have a standing invitation from the ICANN government committee, to address them on any questions that are relevant. We attended the GAC meeting for a session, and a fairly detailed discussion, on addressing matters.
That today incorporates discussions on consumption of IPv4 and activities under way to address that and the ongoing transition to IPv6. That is an ongoing discussion with the GAC and they have invited us back with an extended two-hour session at the next ICANN meeting, which will be important. It is hard to get time on their agenda at all, let alone a two-hour time slot. It indicates we are seeing a lot of interest amongst the GAC on the topic and they are willing to spend time on it, which is a very good sign.
There was an IANA workshop, thanks to David and Barbara who are in the room, on IPv6 and it is a, more or less, educational session on IPv6. There were speakers including myself for the NRO, Steve Crocker for the security and stability advisory, Barbara and Steve, to talk about other aspects of IPv6 and it will be an ongoing requirement, I expect.
We had a staff-to-staff meeting with ICANN staff about the possible need for more coordination on miscellaneous, particularly IPv6, activities which are going on at different RIRs. It is just an indication of the sorts of discussions we have about, the discussions we need to have on information sharing.
So it is not any new program of activities that was agreed there. I think RIRs individually and ICANN has got a need to decide what its responsibilities are and what needs to happen. Once we decide on that, coordination is always a good thing.
As Akinori mentioned, the NRO responded to a response to the US government's midterm interim review, submitted on 15 February of this month. We made a statement which indicated, as we have said before, we are supportive of the ICANN model and to that end, we believe ICANN should be independent, that its agreement with the US government, under which it operates, including the joint project agreement, should end as soon as we all ready for those to end. We believe that that can happen within the term of this JPA, which is between now and 2009 but, of course, there are still details to be worked out.
There is a list of 10 details being discussed and proposed for discussion and response during the review. But the NRO, rather than responding individually to 10 separate points and expecting the points should be given to US government for their review, we believe it is more appropriate the important points should simply be discussed between the NRO and ICANN and between ICANN and its membership community, after all, ICANN is to be independent and it needs to be able to review and discuss the matters openly without the existing authority looking on.
The other major activity area within the NRO for some years has been, as you know, the WSIS, the World Summit on the Information Society, the working group on Internet governance that was held within that and now the Internet governance forum is the result of the entire WSIS process, it is one of the major results of that process.
We have been contributing actively through that. Most recently, it has a multi stakeholder advisory group, MAG, which comprised several dozen representatives from different stakeholder groups. The NROs happen to have two representatives on that group, Raul from LACNIC and one from AfriNIC and they have done a, performed very strongly on that group in terms of helping to guide how Internet governance and technical coordination and, in particular, IP address matters, are being treated within the Internet governance forum. We don't believe the Internet governance forum is appropriate for discussion of times and details we see here, about the policies of IP address management or technical and operational matters. These matters are very well covered by those in the RIR forums in the different parts of the world, by the people in this room and the other RIR meetings who are the operators of networks, who use IP addresses, who need IP addresses, who have the technical and operational expertise.
But we recognise the interest in the area and the need for some mutual information sharing, education and understanding. We contribute to the IGF in that spirit.
The last meeting of the IGF was in Brazil last December and the NROs, as we have done previously, ran a small stand, information stand, staffed with RIR staff who were able to distribute materials and answer questions. One of the things that we distributed in that, at that meeting, was this thing called the continuing cooperation report, which is an NRO report, which is being distributed widely. Miwa has a stack of these here. We have been through a lot of these at the meeting. We may not have enough to hand out but if people would like to have a look at the report, it is a very nice publication. It is designed for the IGF audience. Please hand them out. I think they are of interest and we don't necessarily want to take them home.
The background to that report is that the Tunis agenda called for all the stakeholders in Internet governance to issue regular reports in their efforts towards enhanced cooperation, which is a fairly broad term describing the need for groups such as communities such as ours to be cooperating in an enhanced manner, whatever it means, with each other and good governance.
This continuing report from the NRO is one of the only, if not the only, such report that is being produced. If any, there are few reports from the other actors in this area, in spite of the call back in 2005. We have produced that exactly to provide the information to the community, which apparently has an interest. We will continue to do it at the next meeting of the IGF in India, not in New Delhi as previously announced. It has been moved to Hyderabad in December 2008. Details are available on the IGF website, on the various RIR web sites as well. That is all I want to say on behalf of the NRO.
The next report, however, is related. It is a report on the address supporting organisation report from the chair of the - from a representative of the address council and so, I think we will move on to that. Toshi will come and talk about the sorts of possibilities and discussions that have been under way and how the address council has fulfilled its other responsibilities under the ASO agreement with ICANN.
ASO AC report
TOSHIYUKI HOSAKA:
Hello, everyone. I'm one of the members of ASOC Asia Pacific region of APNIC. So ICANN ASOAC, what is it? Who is it? We are the NRO number council. What is it? Number resource policy advisory body. How is it organised? We are 15, we have 15 members, three from each region. Two elected at large and one appointed by RIR board. Also, we have RIR and ICANN observers in each teleconference, face-to-face meeting and so on. Terms of office, two years for elected members and one year for appointed member.
What does it do? We advise ICANN board, regarding IP address matters. We select ICANN board members, two board members. We select ICANN ComCon member, one member. So when does it meet? We are conducting teleconference monthly and also we are meeting physically once a year. Recently, we met in LA, ICANN, Los Angeles meeting in November 2007. So these are members of address council.
In APNIC, we have Kenny Huang, Hyun- joon Kwon and myself. This is the activity of the last six months: We have conducted four teleconferences. We met face-to-face meeting in ICANN Los Angeles. We have had a chair election for the year of 2008. Louie Lee was elected. I believe he is sitting there. Yes. OK. So we have organised ASO public workshop in ICANN meeting as an outreach activity at the Los Angeles meeting. And currently, we are currently working on global policy templates since we have a variety of templates, region by region.
We have noted and acknowledged two proposals are on track to become global policy proposal. One is global policy for the allocation of remaining IPv4 address space and IANA policy for allocation of ASN blocks to RIRs. We also created a global policy facilitation team to have the proposal discussions in each region.
So the next six months: We have ICANN meeting in Paris, probably; we are meeting each other and some, have some discussion regarding the global policies. And, we are standing by for the global policy proposal development and we also continue to work on the common global policy proposal template. So that is all from me, for now. Other activities of ASO can be referred to this URL.
PAUL WILSON:
Questions from the floor?
LOUIE LEE:
Would you mind going back to the slide near the beginning with the terms, there we go. The term of office, for every member is a slight correction, three-year term for each person; it is the elections are held staggered. So this year, there will be one in ICANN, next year, I believe another election and the appointment the following year.
PAUL WILSON:
We do it differently in these parts. It is correct for here in the APNIC region. Two years for the elected, and one year for the appointed. So we have an election every year, for two-year term it is elected.
LOUIE LEE:
Thank you, a bit more education for me, I would like to talk to you about that later.
PAUL WILSON:
Sure, are there other questions about NRO or ASO matters? Don't go away, Toshi, because you'll be on immediately after Barbara with the Address Council report. Thank you.
RANDY BUSH:
Serving on the AS.
PAUL WILSON:
Barbara, thank you for being ready. We have a report now from the IANA about IANA activities, which of course, are of great interest to APNIC.
IANA report
BARBARA ROSEMAN:
OK. Thank you very much. I'm going to stay seated if that is OK with everyone.
We have had a few activities since the last time Leo presented to you. The most interesting one from this community is we have added IPv6 for the root servers to the root zone and I have given a little history about how we got to this point. You can see that in 2001, IPv6 ARPA was delegated. In 2004 we began adding IPv6 glue for TLDs. In 2006, IP6.INT delegation was removed and it allowed things to go to ARPA. In 2008, we added quad A root nameservers. There were five but they collectively managed six of them. They reported a small increase on load on their IPv6 addresses, many of these operators already had v6 addresses for the root servers but it is the first time they were added to the root and so far there are no reported problems. So basically, it was business as usual which is exactly how we hoped it would be.
We have a new website. I have been promising a new website for quite some time. It is finally in place. As you can see, it is a little cleaner than what we had before and we hope it is easier to find things. The changes to the website for a number of resources is there is a new number resources page, we have updated the IPv4 address space registry, the, it is meant to make it easier for people to figure out where to get information for specific address allocations. So we have created four categories of address: reserves, unallocated, allocated and legacy. It cleans up some of the confusing nomenclature that was there before. The workers for the RIRs to distribute, that has aided us so we have shown those blocks as being managed by whenever registry has taken control of them.
We have added Whois information for the blocks that are managed by the different registries. And the ASN registry, I noticed yesterday was not yet linked on this page, so I have included the URL for it here. You can find it in our matrix protocol registries but I will get it added later this week, or next week for you guys.
Other automation work we are doing, we have been working on the DNS side with an automated change request system for updating TLD records. This has been under way for quite some time but we are in beta with it now and expect to be in production by the end of the year. One of the elements we are implementing an EPP element with VeriSign and it will clarify the type of change request. Right now there is a two-step manual process, IANA has to make changes, VeriSign has to make manual changes and it should eliminate confusion.
We are developing with the RIRs in-addr.arpa update process and we are working on a transition plan for moving arpa and in-addr.arpa to IANA's management directly. Thank you, any questions?
PAUL WILSON:
Thank you, Barbara. I would like to say on behalf of APNIC, how much we appreciate the work of IANA on these developments, the support you have been giving us lately. I think we have got a really productive working relationship these days. Your efforts are highly appreciated. As are those of David Conrad and Leo. It is nice to have someone up in IANA these days because David Conrad is at APNIC and he spent a lot of time in meetings with RIPE NCC.
BARBARA ROSEMAN:
It is nice to have the ability to actually address issues.
PAUL WILSON:
I hope as chair of the NIR to express on behalf of all the RIRs as well. So thank you. Thanks.
APPLAUSE
We are heading towards the lunch break in a little while but we will carry on with these into the next part of the agenda, which is the report back from the SIG and the BoFs, and the stenos are just switching over. This will be a series of reports. We will just go through until lunch time and anything remaining will continue afterwards.
APNIC SIG reports - Policy SIG
TOSHIYUKI HOSAKA:
Toshi again. We're developing policy procedures to APNIC NIRs and use Internet address resources within the Asia-Pacific region.
So, this is the APNIC policy development process. We had face-to-face discussions in SIG sessions this week. Actually, that was yesterday.
We have some remaining portion of APNIC policy development process, so, we are reporting the SIG result here to the AMM and we have to make some decision and so you're here and we are here.
The content of the Policy SIG includes setting the scene session on Wednesday. This was a proposal briefing to the participants and we also had two informational presentations.
We had a discussion session on Thursday. We had seven policy proposals but one of those proposals of withdrawn, the Soft Landing proposal and modified and presented as an informational item. And we had also one informational presentation on the Thursday. So, going to each proposals. Proposal prop-050 IPv4 resource transfers, proposed to remove APNIC policy restrictions on the transfer of registration of IPv4 address allocation and IPv4 portable address assignments between current APNIC account holders.
The proposal didn't reach consensus at the OPM. The proposal author to work to draft a simplified version of this proposal that also adds consideration of the non-permanent transfers and they are coming back.
Prop-052: Co-operative distribution of the end of the IPv4 free pool. Proposed to establish a process for RIR-to-RIR redistribution of the tail-end of the IPv4 pool taking effect after the IANA Reserve is exhausted.
The proposal didn't reach consensus at the OPM. There was no committee support so this proposal is abandoned.
Prop-053: Changing minimum IPv4 allocation size to /22. Proposed to change the minimum IPv4 allocation size from /21 to /22 and to create a new Tiny membership tier for members with a /22 allocation. But, the author withdrew the part, "to and to create a new Tiny membership tier for members with a /22 allocation". So, the proposal to change the minimum IPv4 allocation size to /22 reached consensus at the OPM.
Prop-055: Global policy for the allocation of the remaining IPv4 address space proposed IANA to reserve 5 /8s separate from the standard IANA allocation blocks to RIRs.
Continue allocations based on the current procedure until IANA's allocation blocks to RIRs hits zero. And then proceed to allocate 1 /8 to each RIR from the reserved block.
The proposal didn't reach consensus at the OPM. There was actually majority support to this proposal, but not consensus. So the chairs to return this to the mailing list for further discussion.
Prop-056: IPv4 soft landing. Proposed at pre-determined points as the free pool development groups, to tighten the criteria for receiving subsequent IPv4 allocations from APNIC. The author of this proposal withdrew the original version and modified to simple criteria.
We didn't seek consensus for the version since the author withdrew the original version, so the author is to consider creating a proposal based on prop-056, IPv4 soft landing that incorporates feed back from the APNIC 25 Policy SIG presentation.
Prop-057: Proposal to change IPv6 initial allocation criteria.
Proposed to change IPv6 initial allocation criteria like this. Being an existing LIR with IPv4 allocations from an RIR/NIR, which makes IPv6 assignments, and/or sub-allocations to other organisations and to announces the allocation in the inter-domain routing system within two years, or have a plan for making it at least 200 assignments to the other organisations. The proposal reached consensus at the OPM.
So, prop-058, proposal to create IPv4 shared use address space at LIRs, proposed to create IPv4 shared use address space among LIRs in Asia-Pacific region to help rate more effective use of the IPv4 address space. The proposal didn't reach consensus at the OPM and there was a suggestion to move this proposal to the IETF process. So, this proposal is abandoned.
So, that's all from me. But, we still have to seek some consensus on the floor for some proposals.
PAUL WILSON:
Will you take it back to the process slide?
TOSHIYUKI HOSAKA:
OK.
PAUL WILSON:
As Toshi explained, the policy proposals have been through the SIG process. We have two of them which have reached consensus in the SIG. They've been reported now and we need to check the consensus in this meeting to accept those two Policy SIG results which have been there, the two proposals that were, that had consensus in the SIG. Before I do that, it looks like there's a question.
DAVID WOODGATE:
David Woodgate, just before we talk about the consensus regarding prop-053, can I just check that because it is changed, when it is put out to last call, will they finalise the version of the proposal reflecting the changes that were discussed yesterday and the removal of that part on the tier has been brought to the mailing list. Just to confirm that that will be the case?
PAUL WILSON:
We should certainly have a final version, revised version of that document on the website in the very near future, yes.
DAVID WOODGATE:
Thank you.
PAUL WILSON:
OK, we'll go straight to the first policy that was approved by the Policy SIG. This is the component of the policy prop-053, which involved the reduction of the minimum allocation. It was asked by consensus. So, I would invite any comments or questions. As there are none, I will ask, what I aim to do is address a consensus at this meeting on this proposal, and therefore the result of the SIG. So, would you please raise your hand if you support this proposal? Randy is growling at me but this is the way we've done it in the past. Do you have a process?
Raise your hand nice and high so that the hands can be seen. There is an informal count that is going on at the front of the room here, which is for informational purposes, but this is not a vote.
So you are voting now in support of the policy prop-053, part of the proposal which reduces the minimum allocation from a /22. I think we have that now, so those who oppose this proposal. Please raise your hands. Nice and high so it can be seen.
I would have to say that that appears to be a rough consensus.
The next stage in this policy process is, well certainly to have the final, the actual proposal documented clearly so it is unambiguous as to what is being discussed, but there is a final call for comments on the SIG mailing list, but after that time, the EC will, in their capacity, they will review the entire situation. The results of this meeting and any comments that have been made through that comment period and decide whether that consensus is maintained and if it is, then the policy gets the stamp of approval from the EC and becomes an official policy.
OK, next then is the IPv6 initial allocation criteria, prop-057. So, are there any questions or comments about this policy?
As there are not, would you please raise your hand if you are in favour of this policy?
Thank you very much, and if you are not in favour of this policy, then please raise your hand. That appears to be a rough consensus.
Thank you very much. That again, that policy will go to last call and after that period will be endorsed by the EC if the EC believes the consensus is going to take.
So thank you very much. If there are no comments or questions on any of the other policy proposals or policy results with the Policy SIG from Toshi, I will say thank you very much to Toshi. He's had his gift I think!
APPLAUSE.
OK, the next report on this agenda is from the NIR SIG. So, Izumi as chair of the SIG is going to give us a report of what happened in the NIR SIG.
APNIC SIG reports - NIR SIG
IZUMI OKUTANI:
Sorry to keep you waiting. Well, I might just start speaking without the slides. My name is Izumi Okutani, I'm the chair of NIR SIG. Just for those of you who are not familiar with what NIR SIG is about... I'll give it a try again.
For those of you who are not familiar with what this SIG is about, as you can tell from the name, we discuss about what activities or operations that NIRs do, and then we just share information or discuss how we can collaborate with APNIC in our operations.
Although the main topic of discussions about NIR-related issues, those who are interested in NIRs are also very welcome to attend the session. And for this meeting, we held the session on Wednesday from 11:00 to 12:30 and had about 20 attendees. A nice small and cosy number. The agenda at this time was a co-chair election. We currently have a Chair, a Co-chair. But we thought that we wanted to add one more Co-chair, so we had an election and we had three presentations. One of which was a policy proposal. So, now I'll welcome you to your new Co-chair, Billy Cheon from KRNIC, who was elected and I think this photo is not very representative of how Billy looks like, so Billy, would you like to stand up! So, that's Billy.
So the current chairs are, myself, David Chen from TWNIC, who is sitting over there, and Billy, the new chair.
Regarding the policy proposal, we had in NIR SIG, there was a proposal from the APNIC Secretariat on revising a document which describes NIR operations. I think it is a bit detailed so I wouldn't go too much into the details, but one issue that was raised was that there was some description on operational policy in the document, and the Secretariat felt that it is a bit too detailed to put it as a policy document, so the agreement at the meeting was that instead of removing it as a webpage, that would be too casual and you can't version control it, so we are planning to discuss with the Secretariat about having a different type of document that's based on technical descriptions and that's not policy, and maybe the revision process that's not as heavy, but it should be properly defined.
So, that was what was discussed and agreed in the NIR SIG.
For informational presentations, we had updates from KRNIC and TWNIC. And KRNIC introduced the activity on how they tried to raise customer satisfaction through trainings, face-to-face visits to individual members, surveys, and they also provide an interesting service which is to provide the KRNIC server to provide a secondary server for those ISPs who don't have secondary servers, so we thought it was quite an interesting service and we shared what other activities that other NIRs do to raise customer satisfaction for their members.
We also had an update from TWNIC and introduced about IPv6 promotion activities that KRNIC is very interested in and also an update about the open policy meeting. There was around update that they also have their own NOG, TWNIC-NOG and how we as NIRs encourage the community members to speak up, make presentations, and raise awareness in IPv6 deployment to prepare for the v4 exhaustion. So in summary, we thought we had quite positive information sharing on the activities and how to raise customer satisfaction and encourage participation in the OPM and raise awareness on deployment of IPv6. Thank you.
APPLAUSE
PAUL WILSON:
Thank you Izumi. Next we have Yoshinobu Matsuzaki.
APNIC SIG reports - IPv6 technical SIG
YOSHINOBU MATSUZAKI:
This is Yoshinobu Matsuzaki from the IPv6 technical SIG. So, we were sharing information on IPv6 deployment around the region and also reviewing the technical and engineering issues related to IPv6 in this SIG. So, I'd like to report IPv6 technical SIG report held on the 27th of February. So this time, we had around 30 attendees, and there were five information presentations at the SIG.
Tomohiro Fujisaki and someone from CNNIC will step down from being co-chairs at the next meeting, so please note that we will have a SIG chair election at the next meeting. Anna Mulingbayan from APNIC presented an IPv6 report from APNIC. There was a question about allocation and assignments. And Tomohiro Fujisaki and I presented about the IPv6 glue on the route and the IPv6 PI brokerage ability.
Dr Ching-Heng Ku presented about IPv6 deployment and the development program in Taiwan. Nao Fukushima from IPv6 Promotion Council of Japan and Mitsubishi Research Institute had an update on IPv6 deployment status in Japan.
And the last one, Young-Tai Lin introduced the APRICOT network architecture we are using. That was very interesting. OK, that's it. Any questions?
PAUL WILSON:
Any questions? OK, thank you. You were hoping for lunch, first. You'll make it quick then, won't you!
PHILIP SMITH:
Yes!
PAUL WILSON:
Since Philip is hungry and everyone else is hungry, we'll leave the next two SIG reports until after lunch. But before lunch, all right, Gaurab is flying so we need to hear from Gaurab sooner than later. So, if you're ready after Philip.
APNIC SIG reports - Routing SIG
PHILIP SMITH:
OK, good afternoon everybody. This is the report from the Routing SIG, which was held on the 27th of February, 2:00 to 3:30. I'll just step through my report here.
The venue for the Routing SIG was part of the APRICOT Routing Stream, so we had a full day of Routing content, but the Routing SIG was actually held in this room here. We had around about 100 attendees and it kind of varied during the whole 90 minutes.
The agenda had a list of action items to review, as well as three presentations for the SIG.
First action item ended up being a mistake by me. I completely forgot to announce it! Basically, we had a SIG chair election, or at least my position as SIG chair came to the end of its term at this Routing SIG meeting, so I stepped down. There was a call for nominations that went out a couple of months ago. There was only one nomination received, so therefore, I was elected unopposed. The problem is, that I didn't actually mention this at the Routing SIG meeting, even though there wasn't any need for election, I forgot to mention it. So, for those who came to the Routing SIG and didn't come to this meeting, I apologise for that.
So, that was my oversight.
Next item, well the administration, the Chairs, basically myself, Randy Bush and Tomoya Yoshida. The mailing list is there on the website if anybody wishes to subscribe.
The action items we had to look at - basically, the first one was an action item from the last APNIC meeting where the IRR working group identified something that was sort of hanging in mid-air. It was an informal group. There was a mailing list with zero traffic for a rather long time, and nobody owned up to being Chair. So, I introduced this to the Routing SIG and basically, the suggestion was that this becomes a part of the Routing SIG, a work item on the Routing SIG.
As for the Routing SIG future, one of the things that the three of us as chairs had been discussing was the fact that the Routing SIG hasn't really met in its own right for quite some time. Hasn't really had content that's appeared in its own piece.
Most of the Routing SIG content has been contributed to APOPS and the Routing SIG has basically appeared as part of the Routing Operations Stream for APRICOT.
So, I was thinking of maybe proposing that the Routing SIG should not carry on, but then we had the issue of the IRR Working Group looking for a home, and with one of the presentations at the SIG discussing issues with IRR and so forth, I think that between the three of us, we reckoned there was probably still a good future for the Routing SIG, even though the mailing list was quiet and we haven't had separate meetings. So the summary is that the Routing SIG will co-operate the activities of the IRR Working Group. There was a suggestion from the Floor that we should probably revisit the Routing SIG charter and tap it up a bit, so I've undertaken to work on that and we will repost this to the SIG mailing list.
Then we had three presentations. The first one was on the 240/4 address block by Vince Fuller, basically looking at possibilities and opportunities for that address space, what could be done with it.
Yasuyuki Hamada from NTT reported on the messy IRR. Again, I think that was kind of an update on previous presentations on a similar topic that we had, and it is probably quite a clear work area that we can look at.
Then, I finished off the session with taking a look at aggregation in general and my deaggregation report in particular. And that's the report of the Routing SIG.
PAUL WILSON:
Thank you, Philip.
APPLAUSE
PAUL WILSON:
Gaurab. He's en route to the airport, so we'll squeeze this one in. What I need to do before we break for lunch is to call for the volunteer scrutineers for the election, I hope there's a good number of you ready to put your hands up because there will be votes to count. We won't have thousands of ballot papers like we've had in the past. Rest assured, with two votes to count, there will be some work to do, so your volunteering in advance is helpful.
APNIC SIG reports - IX SIG
GAURAB RAJ UPADHAYA:
I'm Gaurab. This year and last year onwards, the IX SIG is now part of the inter-service provider routing stream at APRICOT, so we had it in the same room as the rest of the peering and IXP update systems. We had a co-chair election this year. Our long-term serving co-chair Che-hoo Cheng has stepped down and we elected a new co-chair, Raphael Ho. We would like to thank Che-hoo for being there for a long time.
We had four informational presentations in the same session. We had an update on Indonesian ISPs done mainly by Andy about the bit APJII run and exchange point with three different locations in Jakarta and their plans for new exchange points around Indonesia followed by a JPIX update by Takejiro Takabayashi and then a JPNAP update. Because the IX SIG was part of the ISP relationship stream, we had quite a few other related presentations before and after the IX SIG. We had four papers on high speed ethernet standardizing status at IEEE, we had peering analysis, also route analysis on effects of fibre cut last year in Taiwan. Followed by a report of an exploit in London.
On top of that, we had 14 different IXPs, and the other side, which presented at the stream. In terms of people, we had quite a good presentation, almost 80-90 people in the room at all times.
So we have a mailing list which has zero traffic at this point. If you are remotely interested in exchange point operations and/or peering, take a look at the mailing list and join it and we'll fill you in on traffic in the coming years. Any questions?
PAUL WILSON:
Thank you, Gaurab.
APPLAUSE.
PAUL WILSON:
I'll leave, with the permission at least of the SIG Chairs involved and Edward Lewis is one of them, I'll leave the rest of the agenda until after lunch. That is so that we have enough time for lunch and also for scrutineers to assemble and start to work out how they're going to do their jobs. So, could I have those raise their hands from those who are prepared to volunteer as scrutineers. I'm looking for people who are not candidates in the election, who are not APNIC staff, who otherwise have no interest. There are two elections to count.
So, we have five. OK, well is that six or is that still five?
SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR:
How many do you need?
PAUL WILSON:
Could you all please assemble and appoint someone as a kind of a lead scrutineer or coordinator, and APNIC will talk to you to talk about the specific requirements and so on and we'll ask you to start your work now at least with the supervision of the ballot box and after lunch we can count it.
The voting is open now and will be closed at 2 pm sharp when we come back from lunch, so please do not be late if you are not posting your ballot papers yet. We'll break for lunch and it is in Room 3 on this level which is that way.
(End of Session)
APNIC 25
Member Meeting 1400-1530
Friday, 29 February 2008
PAUL WILSON:
I'll just repeat the last call for ballot papers to be submitted because the ballot box is about the close. I'm sorry for the repetition but we have cases where late ballots have arrived, just to avoid disappointment.
We will kick off shortly, but the next session will have the reports from the remaining SIGs, the DNS SIG, and if someone wants to report from the my APNIC BoF they can. It will be followed from the RIR reports, AfriNIC, ARIN, LACNIC and RIPE, in that order, and I understand Ray Plzak is reporting for AfriNIC as well, thanks.
The ballot boxes are closing, the ballot boxes have closed. Thanks, John.
We'll get started once again and just to finish off the SIG and BoF reports, Edward Lewis will be presenting the reports.
APNIC SIG reports - DNS operations SIG
EDWARD LEWIS:
We had DNS SIG yesterday afternoon. We had 20 or so people there and this was our agenda. We had a small presentation about the charter.
We had four informational presentations, presentation about IPv6 DNS Operation in the SOI-Asia involving WIDE. We had a report on CNNIC's DNS Operation status. A presentation from Bill Manning on the continuity of Operations, looked some of the things that happened in the past and the future of DNS. And then Joao Damas from ISC, presented I guess items of interest behind the proposal to BIND 10. BIND 10 is still a ways off and we're looking for ideas, suggestions, what needs to be done this time around. BIND 10 will be a major rewrite from BIND 9.
We also had a co-chair election. We had an open call for co-chair for about a year. We finally had a volunteer, slash nomination. Sam Sargeant who was here earlier and stepped out, he was elected ten zero to two; two abstentions so he will have a two-year term from this meeting. We had no policy actions, that's an old type of report.
And we plan to have an on-list discussion about the charter. We could probably make better use of DNS SIG with some more disucssino. So I want to take a review, is this SIG form directly for the community? And we'll see what we come up with for that, come up with the discussion in the next couple of weeks and months. I believe that's about all I need to report from that. In terms of the URLs for the group, the presentation I gave at the start of the session, which is in the archive, the agenda archives, has all of the information about the mailing list URL and the charter URL. I think I'm done.
PAUL WILSON:
Thank you, Ed. Are there any questions about the DNS SIG? Thank you.
APPLAUSE
Unless I'm mistaken once again, the remaining report that we have that I'm aware of is the MyAPNIC BoF, which was convened by APNIC staff, and Sunny was going to report about that.
SRINIVAS CHENDI:
Thank you, this is Sunny again. I'm doing this report. They had in MyAPNIC BoF on 27th, they had about 10 participants on the 27th. Arth Paulite and George Kuo are the chair and co-chair of the MyAPNIC BoF. They did a presentation on MyAPNIC features and explained how the memebers can access those featers and what they can do using MyAPNIC. Specifically, there were some comments in regard to the DNS error messages they wanted those to be improved, which was noted. Some comments from the floor about making it more user friendly. We do understand that there are some issues with the layout of the IPv4 and IPv6 addresses in there, and we are actually working on it and improving that. If you notice, the performance of MyAPNIC has really increased. Now it can be accessed really quickly from anywhere in the Asia-Pacific region.
There was also a comment about making more user-friendly looking glass tool. A looking glass tool is already in MyAPNIC now, but there was a comment from the floor to make it more user friendly. I believe the result, when you search and get the result, it is probably a bit confusing and I understand that. I used it myself for some time and I did hear that feed back as well and that very valid feed back and we're going to look at that. If you have any feed back about MyAPNIC, please e-mail the Helpdesk at APNIC.Net. That's about it. Thank you.
APPLAUSE.
PAUL WILSON:
OK, thank you Sunny. Are there any other sessions that have been missed off this list? Any BoFs or SIGs that anyone would like to report from?
In the past there, have been a few miscellaneous sessions. The first reports are both by RIPE and firstly from AfriNIC and then from ARIN.
If Roque and Nick can be ready for their presentations immediately after Ray, I would appreciate that.
RIR reports - ARIN
RAY PLZAK:
I tell you what, I'll do the ARIN one first and then we'll come back and do the AfriNIC one. So, I'll be me.
So, we're going to be distributing as some of you may not know, I don't do Power Point presentations, so, we will be distributing a paper copy of a report, I'll be referring to it and talking about other things in the ARIN region, and as we also have copies available in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, so if you want one of those language copies, please raise your hand and we'll get it to you. Otherwise, they remain available at the registration desk afterwards. You have a choice of four languages, English, Japanese, Korean and Chinese, and all four versions are available on the APNIC website.
So, I'm Ray Plzak and I'm give you a brief update on what's going on in the ARIN region since the last meeting of APNIC and I guess the biggest, one of the bigger things is that we have a Board of Trustees approved the legacy agreement. As you know, most of the legacy address space is in the ARIN region. And the purpose of this legacy RSA which is strictly voluntary from the standpoint of the whole legacy address space is to give them the opportunity to enjoy the rights and privileges of being an ARIN member. There are some things in this which are different from the regular RSA, so there's a description of the whole activity in the document here. We do have the ARIN 20 meeting in Albuquerque in New Mexico and had 13 policy proposals on the agenda.
A lot of them went back to working with the author. Of interest to this group of folks, the two competing proposals for the end of days for the IANA free pool, the advisory council decided after the conclusion of the meeting to basically abandon one of them and merge it into the other proposal so that instead of having two competing proposals being discussed, there was going to be one proposal.
The authors of both proposals agreed to that, and since that time, there has now been a submission of a revised text for that particular proposal to be taken up at our next meeting in Denver.
There were a few proposals that were moved to last call. However, after the last call period, the ARIN Board of Trustees was not satisfied that the new process of the last call of the two proposals and so, remanded them back to the advisory council. The advisory Council has since sent one of them back out for last call and then has taken the other one and put it back into discussion in the policy process.
There's a note here about the election results, the election shown to the numbers council and the election of members to the ARIN Board of Trustees and to the advisory council.
Last year, if you recall, the ARIN Board made a couple of statements regarding the uptake of IPv6 and in the process, also directed ARIN staff to increase its outreach activities in the IPv6 area. Since that time, we've been quite active in doing that. We do have a report here also about the types of activities taking place over the last several months.
We'd like to invite you all to the ARIN 21 meeting in Denver, Colorado, which will take place during the week of April 7. This is a northern hemisphere spring meeting, we will be having our annual Foosball tournament, so you're all welcome to attend the meeting and participate in the Foosball tournament and we will have another good social on Monday night as well. We have eight policy proposals up for discussion, and so, it is not going to be nearly as busy from a policy proposal perspective as last time.
One of the policy proposals was mentioned earlier this week in the Policy SIG here, has to do with the modification to the transfer procedure. I won't go into that. There has been some active discussion about it on the mailing list. Some one of the things that could be considered to be unusual about this particular one is that this is a proposal, which was authored by the advisory council. Under the policy development process in the ARIN region, the advisory council has the capability to propose the policy and submit it to the community. This doesn't pre-cook the policy proposals and the ACs being adopted, I can tell you that you can witness watching the AC advisory group who conducted this proposal, there is some dissent amongst various members of the council about what should be in the policy and whether there should be one or not.
So, the council is basically just an author of a proposal that's going into the community for discussion and we'll go through the normal prac, and of course, the Board of Trustees, if it doesn't believe that the process has been followed in the correct manner can remand it back just as they did with the two proposals I mentioned earlier.
The other proposal that's probably of interest to this group, I mentioned earlier which is the End of Days proposal for the IPv4 IANA free pool.
We've done some search improvements and I won't go into the detail of them. There are three areas. One has to do with some templates. Second is, we've changed our invoicing method, and the third one is that we've added an additional service over IPv6.
And also in the back, I would invite you to look at the update of the ARIN consultation and suggestion program. It has been quite an active program and it has actually been quite successful and very well accepted.
And lastly, we have just issued two editions of the comic book series. One having to deal with the IPv4 depletion issue, and the other one having to do with the uptake of IPv6. These are available as PDF files online. If you would like a hard cover copy in a slice slick format, please send a request to info@ARIN.Net and we will take care of that, and that basically concludes the ARIN presentation. Are there any questions? We have one, I think.
DAVID WOODGATE:
David Woodgate speaking. Just a question about the legacy RSA agreement. I must admit, I haven't been keeping up with the ARIN mailing list recently, so I hadn't actually seen this one. But give an interpretation of what that implies to the status of addresses as property or whatever?
RAY PLZAK:
It has nothing to do with that. It is the other thing to do with the relationship of the holder of the address space and ARIN.
PAUL WILSON:
OK, thank you very much. Next up, if you'll change hats and if you don't mind joining me here at the table because we don't have cabling over there. You can entertain us with the AfriNIC update.
RIR reports - AfriNIC
RAY PLZAK:
OK, I'll go through a metamorphosis here. I don't speak French, but I could attempt it. I could say bonjour, but that's the extent of it!
OK, the presentation will cover these topic areas and I will apologise in advance for not being as thorough at this as Adiel would be, but I hope that I do it justice and actually justify his trust in allowing me to do this. I will say that it is somewhat of an honour to be asked to do these proposals for presentations for other RIRs.
IPv6 training has been going on for some time, actually since AfriNIC was organised and recognised. They've done a considerable amount of training sessions and you can see by the map which countries in Africa that training has occurred and where it's planned to occur in 2008.
You can see that in the green portions, what's projected for this year. The orange is where at least one training session, either IPv6 or LIR training has been conducted in various places on the continent.
This is probably one of the better or more significant charts and that is the growth of membership in the AfriNIC region. Remember that AfriNIC was recognised as an independent RIR in April of 2005. And prior to it, Africa was administered by three RIRs. North of the equator by RIPE NCC, south of the equator by ARIN and then the Indian ocean Islands by APNIC. So, you see the relatively slow growth of members in the region, but beginning in 2005, you see a rather dramatic upswing.
I would point out, if you look at LACNIC, this is almost an identical curve in terms of the status of growth of membership in the region prior to the recognition of the RIR. So, again, it is again a very, very strong point for the regionalisation and how important it is to develop the Internet.
This is also a very interesting chart, which is the deployment of IPv6 in Africa. Notice that the curve is increasing.
Here's some changes to the v6 schedule. I won't go over them in detail, you can certainly read them on the presentation charts which are available on the website, but to note that they have been making some adjustments to their fee structure. AfriNIC has recently introduced the AfriNIC member portal, and this pretty much does the same thing as MyAPNIC does which allows easier interaction, with AfriNIC in this case. It was launched last year in September and it was actually demonstrated in the AfriNIC meeting in Durban last year, and it actually has quite a bit of use, over 50% of the active LIRs are using this website.
Online payments are available here, and they are already working on Version 2 of this portal.
This is the policy status in the region. You can see that two of them have been ratified. The policy development process, they made some adjustments to the policy development process. That's what that policy is about. This global policy of the allocation assignment of autonomous numbers has been ratified by AfriNIC. AfriNIC was the last RIR to do this. That was transmitted to the address council to make its way to the ICANN Board.
There is still active discussion on two proposals, one to do with ULA discussion and then the IPv4 space.
The next public policy meeting, you're all cordially invited to join the next meeting, which is in Morocco end of May, early June. This will be back to back with the Africa and INET Africa meetings, so it will be a full time, having attended the multiple sessions together, it is really a very exciting time and there's a lot of things that take place at once.
Then, towards the end of the year in November, you're all invited to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia for the last AfriNIC meeting of the year and this will be back to back with the 4th Africa IPv6 day. So, you're welcome to those.
And with that, I'll say thank you and I will attempt to answer your questions if you have any.
PAUL WILSON:
Thank you, Ray. Thank you for supervising this presentation. I mentioned earlier that the RIRs work very closely with the IGF, and this week, we had some IGF consultant meetings in Geneva, hence the unavailability of Raul who is on the advisory group and attending meetings. Axel was there as well. Ray was there but came here halfway through that meeting, so we appreciate that very much. Thank you.
APPLAUSE.
Next we have Roque representing LACNIC. We hope that the technology will work and we will see very shortly.
Technology nearly works. I think we're on. We had a brief interface crash but I think it is coming back.
RIR reports - LACNIC
ROQUE GAGLIANO:
OK, thank you, Paul. My name is Roque Gagliano from LACNIC and I am going to go through the report of the region.
First of all, we celebrated last year our fifth anniversary, so we're five years old right now and we had a little party last year.
So, let's see what we've been doing in the five years. As Ray mentioned, it was a big increase on the membership. You can see that last year, there was a jump from 423 members to 728. That's because Brazilian members, we have an NIR in Brazil and right now they also members of LACNIC, so that's the big increase. You can see that we have 20 members, new members already this year. Still a growing membership. We also have the growth of last year on staff and I'm the newest addition to the staff in LACNIC, so that's also another area that we are increasing.
So, if we show the allocation, we can see on the allocation review, especially in the v4 space, that a number of allocations did not change that much between 2007 and 2006. Again, that's the total number of allocations. But, if we come to how many addresses we are allocating, yes, we can see the growth and we can see that Mexico and Brazil, they take almost half of all of the allocations.
We checked the v6 allocation, which is growing, and here we have not only Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, which is also growing fast.
Our budget for every year has also been increasing. From $150,000 to $1.7 million this year, so that's something. And as we grow, we're also using new facilities, and last year, I believe German showed you a new tour in our new facility in Montevideo. This is the bosses office, the Engineering department office - so we're just four people. See that chair, you don't normally see, that's my desk!
This year was the first year of our strategic planning that started in 2007 and giving us a definition of the vision and mission up to 2009. In that sense, our vision was stated as to be a leader in the construction and articulation of efforts for Internet development and stability in Latin America and the Caribbean. As you can see, it is more than just allocating IP addresses and ASNs. In that sense, we have several projects going on. First of all, I can mention the FRIDA program, which is a partnership with IDRC and ISOC. And what it does is give small grants for funding for ICT research and development. And right now, we're in the 2nd phase and in total, the second phase has almost $1 million in four years.
Also, we've been working with eLAC project. Basically, the eLAC project is a set of goals in the region that the Government has established in order to increase the investment in ICT, and this year we have a new set of goals, and LACNIC has participated actively in this, in at least half of the total goals, and it is important in the Latin American and Caribbean countries that they sign an agreement that by the year 2010, there's gonna be a major promotion of IPv6 and the use of IPv6 on public and private infrastructure and procedures to buy, so that was very important.
We can talk about the root server in Ecuador. Another one with an IXP workshop in El Salvador. We are friends. Internet in Argentina, etc. Particularly in the Caribbean region, we got a co-operation agreement between the CTU and ARIN and LACNIC. This region is particular because it is served by both ARIN and LACNIC, and as a report for the last meeting, which was LACNIC 10 in La Isla Margarita in Venezuela, we had 354 participants - it was the largest number of participants ever in a LACNIC meeting. We had several events, not only, not just the policy discussion, but we had IXP meeting, IPv6, ISOC chapter etc. and in total, we had 11 different policy proposals where six of them reached consensus.
Talking about those policies that reached consensus, the first one is the change on the IPv6 allocation and assignment. Basically, what the policy says is that you can consider part of the internal infrastructure of the service provider in order to qualify for IPv6 allocations. Then, the second policy was the elimination of the interim statement of the IPv6 policy. And the third policy was allowing - basically the old policy was mentioning that each ISP would suballocate only one slash 48 to each customer, so that was eliminated frlom the policu.
There was a consensus from the global policy on the remaining IPv4 space on Version 1. Now, we have active the new version and that was what was presented here yesterday. Also about IANA-RIR, ISN allocation.
Also, there's a new policy in the LACNIC region and I think it is the only region that has it and it has to do with the second IPv6 allocation. This policy idea where many companies have an initial /32 IPv6 allocation, and that was basically for a first step, let's say initial allocation, where they were testing IPv6, but after they have a better plan allocation for their customer, they realise that they need a bigger address space so they can come back to LACNIC if they're willing to return the initial /32 and they would be treated as if it was the first allocation.
We have new activities, we have activities also on the policies for this year and that has to do with an editing group helping us to revise the policies. We find in our policies documents, we have some inconsistencies, so this policy group, editing group will go through the whole document and recommend some changes in order to make it more clear.
Also, we are revising our policy development process.
Talking about IPv6, we are campaigning that on the 1st of January 2011 as the day that IPv6 should be implemented everywhere. We do that through training, promotion, hosting and mailing list, etc. This year, we're going to see something that we call the IPv6 training and promotion activities. We do have IPv6 portal, where we have a lot of information on v6 in multi-language.
In the projects for this year, we have a new registry system that will be out this year and that is seen as a new MyAPNIC, and the interesting thing about the new system is that we're going to be, we're going to have EPP protocol running between the NIRs and LIRs with LACNIC. Up until now, the only way that you can register or do some suballocation in LACNIC was through the webpage, with the new system, you'll be able to use EPP to communicate with LACNIC.
We also have a new CRM, this is a toolbase on the open software and helps us to manage our members understand what kind of versions they have, their billing and questions and their call and who they call, etc.
We have a new business CA also and we are planning to settle this year with a new system. We are just finishing the details there.
New network infrastructure from Montevideo and Sao Paolo is going on this year and several projects related to the ECG that has to do with the signing of the reverse DNS tree, and also resource certification.
Our next meeting will be in Salvador de Bahia at the end of May. I invade everyone to Salvador. One of the main cultural capitals of Latin America, the birthplace of bassa nova and capoeira etc. And thank you very much.
PAUL WILSON:
Thank you Roque. I think you'll agree with me that that's a pretty impressive performance by LACNIC in a few short years. The number of participants at the LACNIC meetings these days has grown very rapidly and they're becoming a very important event in the Latin American community, thanks to the hard work of our friends at LACNIC.
Our next report will be presented from Nick Hyrka.
RIR reports - RIPE NCC
NICK HYRKA:
A very technical stand you have here. Hello, everyone, I'm Nick Hyrka of the RIPE NCC and here is our update. We have some seat shifting in the office, I'm heading the new database group now. And temporarily, we have Andrea acting as the customer services manager. Over the past few months the RIPE NCC manager has been working with the executive board and considering scenarios affecting the industry and as a result the direction of our organisation. We are doing it to meet the needs of our members.
I have four slides on current focus and activities so we will start with internal. Internal, work is in progress, including continued development of our content management system using the Internet as a test bed before focusing on our external website. Our common computing infrastructure is being overhauled and our network is being analysed accordingly.
And as noted this week, K-root is one of the servers supporting v6. We have tools known as dashboards. The RIPE database will have a NRTM stream available later this year as well and we have reclaimed almost 2 million unused IP addresses.
We have been supporting the front work being done for the RIPE enhanced focus taskforce. We are preparing for the ultimate evolution of a taskforce to a working group. We will have more information on this in a later slide. Training services continues to offer the standard LIR, training courses and a new training course, well, just added enhancements and adding a new v6 module.
Hot off the press, the science group has been busy with a variety of projects. Most recent have been investigations and reports on the cable cuts mentioned earlier this week and the enabling of v6 and the root server system. A few hours ago, Daniel's group finalised and posted a study on the YouTube hijacking. The study displayed some of the practical tools developed by the RIPE NCC. I have a video presentation on this later, you'll see if it works.
RIPE policies. Our PDP document has been updated at RIPE 55 and an appeals policy process has been added. Since July 2007, there has been a lot of activity regarding policy changes and there are active proposals being discussed presently not known here, I believe there are about ten in the mix right now. All the information can be found on the website or talk to us before we take off.
Certification of resources is an evolving activity. It is something our community has asked us to investigate. The RIPE taskforce has been working with input provided by the community and other stakeholders in developing a certification prototype, which is set to be discussed further at RIPE 56 in Berlin.
Membership, our membership continues to grow, with Russia standing out prominently in the mix. We will continue to make visits to Russia and the Middle East regions with our regional meetings and we will continue to support the further development of MENOG, it will be held in April, along with our regional meeting, and MENOG 4 will happen in conjunction with our RIPE 57 meeting, and we are in the process of developing the membership survey, to come out in coming months. We are supporting the enhanced cooperation taskforce through meeting, facilitation and documentation. The taskforce is scheduled to meet in May when it will likely become a RIPE working group. Along with this, our attention to work, we had meetings with the OECD. Paul Rendek had a meeting in Paris last year and we plan workshops in the coming months. We expect to be developing the relationship further and engaged a PR firm to help us out. We are continuing work supporting the IGF.
RIPE 55 seems so long ago now. But it was a hit and not just because of the song at the end. But the meeting attendance was the best we have ever had and it has been increasing steadily for the last couple of meetings, so it's making me a bit nervous as far as finding a suitable venue for us. At that meeting, the committee approved v6 deployment, now on our website. Upcoming meetings including Berlin in May, not Frankfurt and not Cologne, thank you. Followed by RIPE 57 in Dubai.
I would like to stress, if you would like to attend, please plan now, air prices will go up higher but we have secured accommodation rates at the hotel and surrounding hotels in the area so it might lighten the load for you financially. As you can see, it starts on Sunday because we are following the Islamic work week, so it will be Sunday to Thursday.
Before I end the presentation, I promise to show you a movie produced by our science group on a hijacking on YouTube.
VIDEO:
The RIPE NCC operators 14 route collectors worldwide, receiving information from almost 300 peers. Let us look at what the RIPE NCC routing information service saw of the recent unauthorised hijacking of YouTube. This is a tool developed in Italy in close cooperation with the RIPE NCC. The red circle at the bottom right represents Pakistan's telephone system and on the right, YouTube. On February 24 at 18:37, Pakistan Telecom received a /24 cover space for YouTube. Within roughly a minute, the route was visible at most of the autonomous systems shown on this animation and traffic starts to flow towards Pakistan. (Music plays). Seventeen minutes later, YouTube starts to announce the same route itself in order to route the traffic back to its own servers. Another 10 minutes later, around 2017, routing policy changes occur that move traffic for this route away from Pakistan's Telecom up stream PCCWAS 941. Another 20 minutes later, their autonomous system number is repeated in the routes announced by AS 491 to make them less preferable. Another 8 minutes later, the unauthorised announcements are no longer propagated and both routing and traffic revert to YouTube at around 2003. These animations and many tools are currently available at ris.ripe.net. There are also prototypes of new services such as the RIS dashboard shown here. Please pay us a visit on these pages; we are very interested to hear your comments.
That was Daniel, our chief scientist. I will switch back. I apologise for the resolution quality there but that was the best we have at the moment. That is, now available on your website. It has been posted. You are fast. That is it, and I just wanted to thank the warm hospitality of the APNIC staff. You have been great. Thank you.
APPLAUSE
PAUL WILSON:
Thanks, again, to all of our colleagues from the other RIPE NCC, the other RIRs, I'm sorry, who are involved with preparing and presenting those presentations, it is always interesting to hear what is going on in the other RIRs. Now we have only got a few matters to deal with before the end of the day.
We have a slot here for open discussions but we also have a host presentation from Internet for the APNIC 26 meeting. We have election results coming up and I don't think the scrutineers have returned yet. It might be interesting to hear how far they have to go. Jonny, if you are ready we will move straight on. If anyone would like to raise a question or comment, make any contribution, in an open discussion session there is certainly time for that. Please have a think what you might like to say.
We mustn't forget before the end of the day we have several lucky prize draws as well. I assume most of you are sitting on the edge of your seats waiting for those results as well. Coming right up.
APNIC 26 host presentation
JONNY MARTIN:
As many of you probably know now, I'm Jonny Martin from New Zealand, counsellor at Internet NZ, which is going to be the host for APNIC 26. So as you can see up here, it is going to be in Christchurch from 25 to 29 August. Why New Zealand? It's a lovely country. There is lot of lovely scenery, particularly down in the South Island. It is very stunning that time of year.
So a little bit about Christchurch, the X on the map on the left there, for those who don't know where it is. There is a little picture of the town square, which is quite small and central - the layout of everyhting there. The main hotel that we are running with is the Crown Plaza in the centre of town, a nice little covered walkway running through to the conference centre, or convention for, sorry, we will be running the meeting there. So obviously, Christchurch and the Sount island beautiful scenery in general. A lot of things to do nearby, particularly skiing if you're into skiing in Mt Hutt not too far away from Queenstown and Wanaka, a nice three- or four-hour drive or a 30-minute flight away. Also, the home of the 'Lord of the Rings' sites, still maintaining tours and that sort of thing run through them.
Climate, this is the big one. It is going to be the middle of winter. It is not too cold. But you look around 2 to 13 degrees Celsius during the day. A little bit harsher than the weather we have had here. A little bit of rain but not too much and a little bit of wind, but nothing like Wellington for any of you who have been there. In general, it is quite a pleasant time of year, but it will be cold! So make sure you bring some warm clothes. They do sometimes dress sheep like that.
Not too often. The opening ceremony, a quick look at that. We will having an organ demo, in the town hall ing Christchurch. A lovely photo of the large pipe organ that is the centre piece of the town hall, there will also be some more technical information on organdemo.com on the events. A bit of food, and drink, and organ demo. It is fantastic example of the Rieger pipe organ that's in there. You will see how the Rieger pipe operators and Martin Setchell, a world-known organist that is there. We will run a Maori culture night, a social event. It is obviously the indigenous population of New Zealand.
The other thing worth mentioning, several other events happening in August in the South Island in particular, the APAN meeting in particular, in Queenstown, the APAN meeting, maybe by a chance for a few weeks of holiday there. It's certainly a great part of the country, particularly for Queenstown driving up to Christchurch. Also, an Internet IPv6 hui. Anyone not from New Zealand know what that is? It is a Maori word for a gathering or a meeting. We will run a IPv6 hui, one in Christchurch and one in Wellington and Auckland later on. The one in Christchurch will be collocated with the actual APNIC event. We will run an IPv6 workshop, it has been run at several APRICOTs before. So, Gaurab will teach it along with another instructor.
So lastly, I'll just remind people about sponsorship. These APNIC meetings only run with the generous help of sponsors. We are after those for Christchurch, obviously. It is a great opportunity for exposure, if you are a vendor or a network provider or whatever. So welcome to talk to APNIC, I think Louise down there will be glad to have a chat, or myself, certainly would love to work through the sponsors to get a package that works well for them.
So I think we will see you at APNIC 26 in Christchurch, thanks a lot.
APPLAUSE
PAUL WILSON:
Thank you. Sorry, thank you very much, Jonny, we will really look forward to this meeting in Christ church. I have been there myself and I know it is a fantastic place, the countryside and scenery all around is really fantastic as well. Really, highly recommended. I was wondering if you could organise the guys there to do an IPv6 Haka to help the deployment effort? It might be time for some fear tactics. Get us moving on that. We will see you there, thanks again. There is some technical activity going on in the front here? These being... sure.
Just to explain, we are getting ready for filming and entertainment there in the interim before the ballots arrived, but the ballots have come. So thanks very much to the scrutineers, we will hear from you quite soon.
What we do have now, and I'll just open the mic as I mentioned for open microphone period. If there are any burning questions or contributions that anyone would like to make then we really do want to make time for those. Not that it is ever a very active part of the meeting.
But it is important to make the opportunity. Do I see something? Very nice to see.
JAMES SPENCELEY:
James Spenceley from Australia, the general comment to everyone in the room, I think this is probably one of the more hotly contested elections in terms of the EC, I'm not sure that it is hotly contested for the NRO, I haven't been approached but I wanted to make a little comment that we are all members of the same organisation and we are typically not a political organisation, and I suppose it is a call, if possible, during future meetings that we do keep the level of politics and involvement around elections to a minimum. We are part of the same organisation and working to the same goals. I would like to put a call out to that. Thank you.
PAUL WILSON:
We need microphones that stay on. Thanks, Ole.
OLE JACOBSEN:
No problem, I would like to maybe I missed this but the IPv6 test that we did the other day? Sort of outage or whatever we want to call it? The IPv6 hour? It would be nice to have written up some experiences and lessons learned from that. Actually, I think it is probably needs to be some sort of group effort. I knew I couldn't get Firefox to work but Safari did and things like that. It would be nice to have it summarised somehow, I'm sure we are not ready for the report yet but if there is a way to contribute the information - maybe a Wiki or something. Is that what you'll say.
RANDY BUSH:
The presentation did have a Wiki address. The default over v6 disabled and you have to go into config with Firefox and Thunderbird, they will fix it soon.
OLE JACOBSEN:
On a different matter, I am the person who is going to organise the pipe organ thing in Christchurch, there is no information yet on the page, there will be soon and you can certainly go to that web page and look at previous events we have done in various parts of the world, organdemo.com.
DAVID WOODGATE:
Just being here over the week, it is obvious that the next few years are going to have a lot of interesting times to go through and many changes, possibly more changes than we have had in the past 10 years within the Internet space and certainly, even within the regional areas of Asia Pacific in the way that addressing is handled. I was wondering whether APNIC as a company has considered what its long-term strategic plans and business positioning are likely to be over the coming years? Because it is going to be so chaotic, it is going to be quite.. anything that is likely to be said will need to be changed but I was wondering if there were five-year, 10-year plans around at this stage?
PAUL WILSON:
I think that we are all aware of numerous questions in the short, medium, and long term and areas that I think we need to be a little more, well a lot more prepared for in terms of changing the way things, the way we operate from in the interim between now and then. You noticed in the RIR reports that at least LACNIC, RIPE NCC mentioned strategic plans and scenario planning and so forth, which, in their, I believe, in those cases involved types of forward-thinking discussions you're talking about. Within the APNIC EC, there have been discussions along those lines as well. Not in terms of the formal process being embarked on yet, but I wouldn't say that is out of the question, what possibly, what the EC need to hear from APNIC members.
Some statements of - some indications as to expectations, directions, suggestions of particular, whether it is scenarios or specifically, or processes that we could follow. I agree with you, David, that this is the time to start embarking on that and to be getting more serious, possibly more transparent in the way these discussions happen. I would welcome any other comments, I can see Ray is ready at the mic.
RAY PLZAK:
I did not report on it in my report but the board has been engaged in it as well. Actually, we are working on several different views, one of which is actually what ARIN would look like in the year 2025 and how to get there as the landscape changes, depletion of v4, the uptake of v6, people are receiving resources from ARIN, not coming to ARIN so often, those kinds of things, there is obviously impacts in terms of the ability to collect revenues to provide the services that people are used to. That dynamic is present with all RIRs. We have had three sessions in the last nine months on that and we had another one scheduled to take place in a couple of weeks in Philadephia.
PAUL WILSON:
Yes, thank you, by acknowledging LACNIC and RIPE, I wasn't meaning to imply that I wasn't doing it. My point is we are all looking at these issues in our own way, according to board or EC structures or community structures. I'll repeat a comment I made around the time of the last meeting, which is that we all have limited time, we have limited time in these meetings, the APNIC board members, like others, have got limited time. We did have an APNIC retreat last year, but that retreat was entirely around the issue of APNIC fees, as have been many meetings that we have had so far, many discussions in the APNIC EC. We have made at least one inroad into the fee structure discussion, which was to address the old issue of sustainability of fee structure in the face of fluctuating US currency value.
There is still an APNIC fee structure discussion that needs to be had. But I think it is an important reminder that if we are unable to solve the administrative issues that face APNIC as a stable organisation, then it doesn't say too much for our ability to go on further than that with the issues that are arguably a lot more important. I guess it is fairly, bluntly, an appeal to everyone to try to broaden focus to the big issues that face up and get past the smaller and arguably more trivial short term matter.
DAVID WOODGATE:
What you are saying is you are appealing to, you are saying at the moment, the EC members don't appear to have enough time to develop strategic frameworks themselves. Is it possible that, what you might expect in a standard company environment, to develop whereby the company the company or Secretariat themselves might draft a strategic plan, perhaps under the directive guidance of the EC members but have the actual Secretariat draft the strategic plan for discussion and adjustment and approval by the EC.
PAUL WILSON:
I think it is realistically what may happen. The point I was making was more about where the guidance and inputs were coming from, either from this meeting or the EC. It is good to be able to allocate time for those issues rather than these other more internal administrative issues and I think we should be able to do that now. In terms of the APNIC budget, we are now able to look forward to a year of some modest surplus rather than possibly a serious deficit and the threat of resource cuts, which would, again, make that kind of planning exercise very difficult at the Secretariat. I think we are in a much better position to be optimistic here, I think we are in a much better position in 2008 to be able to move ahead in this way and I certainly hope we can do that.
OK, well, it is nice to have that important, if brief, discussion. Since the microphones are empty, now, I think we will move on. To a number of prize draws but the most important of those let's leave the iPods until later, let's look at issue of the elections and election results, I'm told the scrutineers are ready to announce. I'm not sure who is coming up, thanks, it is the task of the scrutineers to announce these results. So Joao, thanks.
APNIC EC elections result
JOAO DAMOS:
OK, so went away and counted the votes, there were a lot of them, it is good to see. With elections, we counted a total of 453 ballots. All of them valid. There was not a single one that was invalid.
SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR:
Louder please.
JOAO DAMOS:
We counted a total of 453 ballots, they were all valid, there were no invalid ballots. After the counting, we have three successful candidates, Akinori Maemura 1303 votes. The successful candidates are Akinori Maemura obtained 1303 votes, Che-Hoo Cheng obtained 1,051, and Ma Yan had 753 votes.
PAUL WILSON:
Congratulations.
APPLAUSE
NRO NC elections result
PAUL WILSON:
The other election going on at this time is the NRO number council. We counted a total of 140 ballots, there were 140 valid ballots and no invalid ballots. The successful candidate for the positions available is Kenny Huang who obtained 90 votes.
APPLAUSE
PAUL WILSON:
Thank you, thank you very much, Joao. Thank you too to the scrutineers for the hard work in counting the ballot papers. It is an important task and one that requires a lot of diligence and concentration. Thanks to all you who voted in the election as well. I will note here, we have had administrative questions arise regarding proxies and authorities to vote. It is under the APNIC bylaws, the rules are extremely clear. And yet, the implementation of those rules needs to be, and the meaning of those rules needs to be understood by all members. What we are doing in the coming year to implement those rules is to focus on MyAPNIC as the mechanism for all members to lodge proxies and to properly authorise their staff members to vote on behalf of the members. We have been attempting to do this for some time through quite widely announced e-mailouts to the APNIC members and so forth. We are not having quite the level of transition over into the new system as we need. In order to avoid administrative questions and complexity in future, we will continue and I urge all members to please take note of the requirements of the bylaws and the methods we are providing for you, through MyAPNIC, to authorise your members to vote on your behalf, and also if you wish to lodge proxies in the system. OK.
Again, we are coming closer and closer to the end of this meeting. What we have coming up now is a series of lucky draws. So we will ask APNIC staff to assist with this process. Are we ready? The first one I have here is a lucky draw for the, those who attended the newcomers session. Is that right? The lucky draw for the newcomer session: Tom Penh from MekongNet, KH, Cambodia. That is going to go in the post.
Using the ballot box.
RANDY BUSH:
What is the draw for?
PAUL WILSON:
I will tell you. The tension is mounting, I can tell. OK, that was the services draw, this is the newcomers. If I can shuffle these and ask you again, Lou, to pick a random one out and the winner is Banyani Benjamin Lara from ASTI-PH. If the winner has a proxy in the audience, or other delegated representative, they can collect the prize. And this one is my APNIC BoF. Hassan Zaheer from WORLD CALL-PK.
APPLAUSE
The policy SIG survey: Thank you. You are really keen, huh? Which one of you entered? This is the SIG survey, the winner being Nigel Titley from EasyNet.
APPLAUSE
Just hold that one until we have seen Nigel. To surprise Randy.
RANDY BUSH:
And this is?
PAUL WILSON:
And this is the prize draw for the AMM survey. And the winner is Kam Sze Yeung from PakNet.
Next meeting, thanks and closing
With that auspicious end to proceedings, that is the end of the program for the Open Policy meeting, so thanks very much to you all for sitting through today's activities. I have a few announcements and thanks to give. We have an informal closing dinner tonight at 7pm, so that is a Taiwanese meal at the Shiyah Table restaurant, transport from the lobby and a per head fee of $600 for that. Thank all the sponsors of APNIC 25, we had Google and Nominum as sponsors for events within the meeting week and that sponsorship is highly appreciated, very important for the success of these meetings and we do have some gifts of thanks for the sponsors, for Google and for Nominum if there are representatives here.
If not, we will find ways to deliver, no, here we are. Excellent, thank you.
So a certificate of appreciation for Google for the sponsorship this week.
APPLAUSE
OK, we also have a sponsors for today, KRNIC of NIDA and JPNIC of course, who I mentioned before, who have come to the party today to support the annual members meeting.
And if anyone would like to come and collect a certificate of appreciation, Izumi, thanks.
Billy, glad you could join us. OK. Verbal thanks to the SIG chairs and the BoF conveners, Toshi, Izumi, Matsuzaki-san, Ed, thank you for the effort you have put in, Philip, Ryan from Team Cymru as a guest trainer in our security session, Emer and Rebekah from Red Bee Media Australia who have been doing the stenocaptioning, thank you very much it is a hard job you have got to do and it is a great service, thank you. APNIC EC members, past, present and new, thanks for all your support. There is much to be listed. I would like to say thanks to the staff members in particular who have worked really hard this week to make the meeting a success and thanks to all of you as well who have been here and sat through the week and I hope enjoyed yourselves and not only that but learned a great deal and got a lot out of the networking opportunities here.
We do have special thanks also to TWNIC, and I realise far too late I'm not even displaying these logos here but last and not least is TWNIC as host of the meeting, they have helped out hugely, both APRICOT and the APNIC meeting as well. It is the fourth APNIC meeting we have actually had in Taiwan. The third in Taipei, and we had one in southern Taiwan. And TWNIC have been great every time. So thanks very much to TWNIC, if there is anyone from TWNIC here, I would like to shake your hand and say thanks.
APPLAUSE
Ming-Cheng, EC member, and representative of TWNIC, thank you. This is for last night, a small token of exchange for everything we all drank last night, which was far, far too much. Thank you. Finally, and I would not be displaying this but reminders of the next meeting, the 26th APNIC open policy meeting is in Christchurch. We heard about it from Jonny earlier, 25 to 29th August and of course, the details will be available on the APNIC website. So please do come along to Christchurch, you won't regret it and you won't regret it if you add a few extra days at the beginning and the end or preferably both is for a bit of a look around because it is a beautiful place. The 27th meeting will be for protocol in Philippines, as we heard last night, it is the last time we were in APRICOT in the Philippines for APRICOT, 1996, 1997 or something around there, 1998? 10 years ago. There was a bit of debate about that, in any case, for the first time in 10 years, back in the Philippines, stay tuned for that.
Stay tuned for announcements for future meetings as well, we try to get the announcements out as early as we can these days to help you get there. That is the end of the meeting, I will see you all in Christchurch and I hope to see you all tonight, in the meantime, if not, elsewhere. Thanks again, enjoy the rest of your stay in Taipei, please.
APPLAUSE
[End of session]