Transcript - AMM

Sunny Chendi: Very good morning and welcome to APNIC 34 Member Meeting. This is the members meeting. As you can see, all our EC, Executive Council, members are up on the stage, including Paul Wilson, ex officio of EC.

So we will be going through the reports from our Executive Council, as well as from our Secretariat.

Yesterday, we found a mobile phone charger, if anyone is looking for it. It was on the first row towards my right. You can just fetch it from me, please.

So we'll begin with Akinori, as Chair of APNIC Member Meeting, with introduction, and he already mentioned that APNIC members sit in the middle of the room, with the Chairs with the golden covers, that's for APNIC members. It's an option for you to sit in the middle of where the members area is. We do have two microphones on either side, if you have to make a comment or questions, you can still do it.

As usual, please state your name before you begin with your question or comment, clearly, so our stenos can capture your name. If you are making a comment or question on behalf of your organization or company, please state your affiliation as well, otherwise you can do your individual comments and questions.

With that, I would like to pass on the microphone to Akinori, the Chair of Executive Council. Thank you.

Maemura Akinori: Thank you, Sunny.

Good morning, everyone. My name is Maemura Akinori.

I'm the Chair of the Executive Council of the APNIC.

I hope you have already enjoyed a lot your stay here in Phnom Penh and also a lot of meetings which were held in this week.

So on Friday, this is the APNIC Member Meeting, it is our job and your job to see how the APNIC have been operating and how APNIC will be operating.

In our morning session, we will have the survey report from Prof Ang, and after that we will have the Secretariat report.

Then after the morning tea break we'll have the reports from the Executive Council and also the SIG reports and some other reports from the meetings, which were held in this week.

I'd like to invite Prof Ang Peng Hwa to the stage to deliver his report on APNIC member and stakeholder survey 2012.

Thank you very much, Prof Ang.

Ang Peng Hwa: Good morning, everyone. Glad to be here.

This is the second time I've done this APNIC survey.

As you know, the survey is a biennial affair.

This is the seventh survey. The survey, the big thing is that we had a big increase in the number of responses. I attribute this to the fact it was launched at APRICOT, so we are hitting the right target audience there.

This is the focus group. We began by interviewing a group of you all. Some of you I met in the focus group interviews, a bunch of countries. John also assisted in this. Inputs, as many of you will know, is used to help the EC in strategies and I have seen the EC use this as inputs.

On the members part of it, we surveyed these three areas. In the main, the purpose is to give feedback to the EC regarding the Secretariat's work and the services.

On stakeholders, these were the items, the questions that were asked.

On APNIC satisfaction with services, this was the responses. In general, the members are satisfied with APNIC Services. I think this year was a little higher than last year. Strictly speaking, technically speaking, they are not quite comparable, because it's not truly random samples. But we had fewer less satisfied members and stakeholders, so I think overall, there was greater satisfaction with the services of APNIC this year.

In terms of priority, this is a long list. I know it's kind of small, so I tried to increase the font size a little bit.

Basically, the resource registration is number 1 in terms of what members feel should be APNIC's priority.

Then root server deployment, reverse DNS, Internet community support, training services and then the others. So the technical aspects are still important for members.

On registry and administration, there's quite satisfactory feel, satisfaction among members regarding the registry and administration.

The fee structure was the one that had low satisfaction. I think part of it is the issue of cross-subsidy, but otherwise, overall, it's a relatively high degree of satisfaction here.

On the issue of IP transfers, IPv4 transfers, the question is what should APNIC do? The previous survey had talked about APNIC developing guidelines, but now it looks like the number 1 thing that APNIC should be doing is to monitor and report the transfer activity.

Developing guidelines would be next and then, at the bottom, acting as some kind of agent service would be lowest on the priority.

So basically members don't want APNIC to act as some kind of agent, but act as a clearing house of activities.

This is a slightly larger font, okay. Monitor and report transfer, develop guidelines, implement transfer policies.

In terms of the payment method, most people are satisfied with the current options. There were some requests for some specific payment methods because of the currency exchange controls. But there are a few countries, so for most members, the current options are fine.

Sunny Chendi: Can I just request all the delegates, if you are using Bluetooth devices, can you just switch them off, please? It's interfering with our Bluetooth device here, the keyboard which talks to the presentation laptop over there. It's just a suspicion that maybe it's interfering. It worked well all the way from day 1 to day 4. Just this morning -- someone is actually controlling, as you can see, I'm not controlling, I'm not doing anything here.

Thank you very much.

Ang Peng Hwa: On the issue of corporate governance, there's general satisfaction with the current membership voting structure and the sense that the EC is representing members' interests.

There was an issue of membership tiering. I believe this was discussed. The bulk of the members are for the status quo, keeping things as is.

Similarly, in terms of the votes, there's also no desire to change, and basically status quo. So it's half. It's a predominant number.

In terms of APNIC Outreach, most of it is still actually through word of mouth, individual contact. You see the mass media kind of approach is down, but membership through another member or direct contact from APNIC, in consultant and so forth, ranked highest.

In terms of social media, the feeling is that Facebook is number 1 and then Twitter and then the individual more country-specific social media sites are down.

In terms of training priorities, there's general satisfaction with the training priorities, but I believe most people want more training, especially for the less developed countries and closer to where they are. So cost also is a factor.

Sunny Chendi: Sorry for that. We just replaced the batteries, but I don't think it's helping any more.

Maemura Akinori: Thank you very much for your patience.

We are now working on the technical problem of the PC or PowerPoint. If we can solve the problem soon enough, then we'll keep on going with Peng Hwa's presentation.

If not, I am inclined to have it later, after the Secretariat report.

Please allow us another several minutes. The staff are trying to solve the problem.

Ang Peng Hwa: Don't worry, I won't start all over again! On slide 22, in terms of the training priorities, it's to provide technical and practical training.

I'll move on quickly here.

In terms of APNIC Conferences and interesting sessions, IPv6 is big. Again, the more technical sessions are really of interest to this group. Policy issues are down.

Remote participation. Many of you found the video streaming useful, live transcripts as is happening here.

Should APNIC Conferences be free? You would think most people would say yes, but members would say that yes, it should be free to members, at least a big group there. Some said yes to everyone, but some people pointed out that air travel can take out a big chunk, so being free is not so meaningful. There was some request also for discounts for members, as opposed to just being free.

In terms of IPv6 support, the involvement of APNIC, many wanted APNIC to share best practice with stakeholders to increase uptake of IPv6. This is quite a high response rate of 6, almost 7. Look at the mean scores there, they are pretty high.

On this, ideas that the Secretariat has proposed, there's a very high degree of agreement for what should be done by APNIC.

In terms of whether the larger level, CEOs and senior management, are aware of the risk of not adopting IPv6, so the big group says yes now. I think it's gone up from before.

Similarly, the plan to deploy IPv6, there are more formal plans, there's transition budget. I remember seeing the previous surveys, there were plans, but really almost no budget, so this is a big improvement here.

In terms of APNIC's public information services, the reverse DNS, there's a great degree of satisfaction with it and use.

The website was low there compared with the DNS service, so I guess there's some room for improvement there.

Areas of interest. Again, more technical areas are higher. You can see quite a distinct difference there.

Internet security, IPv6 deployment, ISP operations, versus public policy and Internet governance matters.

On government involvement in Internet governance, again, technical aspects were pretty high, security, infrastructure. These two were very key, especially for the developing and less developed economies. Many people have asked in fact for greater government involvement when it comes to infrastructure investment.

Some of the so-called softer issues, the important, but softer issues, consumer rights, IPR, they rank a little lower in comparison.

On engagement of government and authorities, the sense is that APNIC should engage with governments in the region, should communicate interest as well and it should work with regulators and law enforcement as well; a pretty high degree of agreement that APNIC should work with governments and authorities.

On the method of engagement, the first big one is sharing best practice information. Some of you have been victims of bad information given to the authorities, so sharing best practice information would be good. Also, APNIC is perceived as a credible, neutral body, so the information given would be seen as sort of correct as opposed to biased in favour of the organizations. So organization members, you would like more APNIC engagement here.

Just organizing round-table meetings would rank pretty low, so they do want some sort of relevant, targeted information.

On a public policy advisory committee formation, this was mooted and a big proportion said yes. The numbers do not add up to 100 per cent because a sizeable proportion did not answer this question, so about 30 per cent didn't answer this question. But those that did basically were favouring such a public policy advisory committee.

This is very different from the ICANN GAC. It's a different shape, so it's not called government advisory, but public policy advisory, which means those who can advise on public policy for APNIC.

I drilled down a little further, at the request of the EC and Secretariat, so this is the proportion. The darker green line below, 58.8 per cent of members, account holders and members said yes. Stakeholders, those who are non-members, said yes, but a smaller proportion.

In terms of developing economies, 74 per cent of the respondents overall in the survey were from developing economies, but only 67.8 per cent responded, and 71.9 per cent responded to this question. So in a sense, the developing economies were slightly under-represented when they said yes.

Those who said more, a little sort of over-represented, were in fact the developed economies, 21 per cent voted for when the total percentage of respondents was 15.8 per cent.

The least developed are about right. In effect, the developed economies were the ones asking for this public policy advisory committee, a slight over-representation there.

In terms of issues that should be addressed at the IGF, because APNIC is at the IGF, these were issues that were highlighted: cyber crime, a big one; tighter security; privacy protection; access. Critical Internet resource, which is the big reason for the IGF, is sort of in the middle, doesn't rank the highest.

Then the softer issues again for APNIC, keeping in mind your audience and members, it's a little down.

Regarding how APNIC should interact regarding management of IGF, participation in the regional and national events were quite key. They ranked the highest. Then output, tangible outputs and funding was a little low.

Just participating, interfacing in these events were major for members and stakeholders.

In the previous report, there was just a handful of people reading the report, including my mother, so we would like to increase the feedback from you guys to read. I have reduced the length of the report, so that it's a little more digestible and a lot of these are charts, so although it may be lengthy, it's charts, so I hope again to increase the number to more than a handful, excluding my mother.

All right. Thank you.

APPLAUSE

Maemura Akinori: Thank you very much.

If you have any questions or comments.

It seems we have some minutes.

Rajesh Chharia (ISPAI): After going through the report, what proposal I have moved of the PPAC, I think the very positive report has come. I will request now EC to take suitable action for formation of this committee, because we know that government is a very major stakeholder, especially in our economy, they are the player, as well as they are the policymaker, involving government to resolve some of the security and IP issues will help us, the service provider, in day-to-day working in our country.

Thank you.

Maemura Akinori: Thank you very much, Rajesh.

This survey result tells that the members and stakeholders have the big interest in public policy advisory group. The working group conclude with such importance of establishing that advisory group, and at that time the EC made some response to that working group, that the working group report is received with appreciation and we would work on gathering the government people who would be the main part of the PPAC, and we are now in the phase to gather such government people.

So in that sense, we are concerning about that and the Executive Council observe this survey result is reconfirming such a high interest in the PPAC. So thank you very much.

Any other questions or comments? All right. So let's move on to the next agenda item, which is the Secretariat report. I think Paul you are starting the Secretariat's report.

Paul Wilson, Director General of APNIC.

Paul Wilson: Thank you very much, Akinori. Good morning, everyone. Thank you very much for being here in such respectable numbers when Angkor Wat and other attractions no doubt are calling on this last day of the meeting.

I have got a few introductory words about what has been happening at APNIC, at the APNIC Secretariat, so far during 2012, that is since the annual reports were presented in March.

I'm going to speak for a little while here, but will be followed with more detail from senior managers, directors from the APNIC Secretariat, who are going to fill in all the gaps.

I think APNIC's main activities are divided into two general areas. Our core responsibility is for IP addressing, of course, which itself is divided into IPv4 and IPv6 very roughly, and then also an increasing area of demand on our resources in the area of Internet governance.

Under IPv4, the dual issues of handling IPv4 address exhaustion, that is also adopting the new allocation system under the final /8 policies and then also dealing with the new set of policies and procedures around transfers. These have been our main activities in IPv4 address management and you'll be hearing more about this.

On the other side, we're also, of course, very much involved with both promoting and supporting the implementation of IPv6. We're being called on in many ways to help, particularly with information and training, capacity building, helping the broader community, not just APNIC members, but the broader community to understand the implications of IPv6.

As I said in my lightning talk yesterday, IPv6 really is a here and now challenge for all of us.

During this year, we have seen increasing activities. We have had a pretty productive year so far, I would say. On the services side, that is financially on the revenue side, we have had really an unexpected increase in membership growth this year.

I think the future is always hard to predict, naturally, and we've tended to take an approach of conservative projections for our budgets, based in conservative projections of membership growth.

But a few factors, I think, are combining to actually see increasing membership growth. As you'll see in more detail later, we have set some records each month for the last several months in membership growth, and that's good news in the short term, at least in terms of sustainability of the organization. Because of the initial allocation fees that we collect from new members, the revenue that we've received this year has been substantially above projection.

The other side of this, of course, is that without additional IPv4 addresses to be received in many cases, the ongoing fee income from those new members is going to be quite low, so this is another part of our forward projections that we need to consider.

We have had steady allocation activities, increasing allocation activities, from the last /8 ration supply as a result of the membership growth and of course ongoing IPv6 allocations.

We have now implemented the transfer system of the procedures within the APNIC systems to implement the transfer policies. It's early days, however. We have a number of pre-approvals but no transfers actually conducted yet.

On the activities side, likewise, as I said, in terms of projection of membership growth, we also had conservative income growth projections. We made conservative forward projections on expenses as a result as well. We have maintained minimum staffing growth.

However, we have had increased activities and substantial expenses, particularly in the Internet governance related arena.

We have got quite a few new developments to report today and services in some really nice internal systems developments and APNIC Secretariat and staffing structure.

The senior team at APNIC looks like this these days.

As you may recall, Sanjaya is now the senior director in charge of operations, so he looks after a team of the directors of APNIC illustrated here who have respective operational responsibilities.

Also, a new face on this chart is Craig Ng, who is our legal counsel and Craig is here this week, waving.

Hi, Craig.

APNIC is steadily refining a planning process.

I think you understand that our rescheduling of the APNIC member survey is figuring into that, because of course our planning starts with the APNIC member survey.

Peng Hwa's report that he presented this morning summarises the latest survey, which is going to be the major input into our planning for next year.

So we have, between the senior team and the EC, planning activities which produce strategic and operational plans and budgets and the operational plans then go to the Secretariat for implementation. But I think it's really important to illustrate the left to right flow here, that starts with the membership and the member survey.

I do hope, in the reporting that you hear this morning, you will hear some clear linkages between what we have reported in the member survey in the past and what activities and projects and so forth are being prioritised by the Secretariat and by the EC, of course.

The survey we have heard about. This really is one of the most important functions and projects that we run regularly at APNIC. I have already said, we have realigned the survey for better input into the planning process. It will happen every two years, however, from this point on.

The next steps are that the survey reports will go into a public comment period and also, of course, the survey and comments will be considered by the EC, and the EC will make a response which gives some interpretation from the EC of what the EC has heard from the survey, and that will be passed onto the Secretariat for our implementation.

There will be the normal regular EC planning retreat in December, of course, which will contribute into that activity planning and budgeting for next year.

Our operational plan, as we develop it within the Secretariat, is organised in these four pillars of activities. We see ourselves engaged in delivering value for members, primarily, and also for the broader community.

We see ourselves involved with supporting Internet development, and this is something that goes right back to the founding of APNIC itself, nearly 20 years ago.

To help with that and also, I suppose, as part of our philosophy, we see ourselves collaborating and communicating across the region and more widely. APNIC is not an organization that needs to or wants to do everything, so collaboration with peers and partners around the world and in the region is really important to us.

The corporate support pillar is really the set of internal activities, technical and business activities that support all of that, hopefully in the most efficient and effective way that we can.

We are updating internally our activity structure, our subdivision of these pillars for ongoing improvements in our activity planning. You'll hear some more about that.

Just very briefly -- I don't want to steal the thunder of the people who are reporting after me -- but some key achievements in these areas. In delivering value, we have successfully implemented a set of changes in our procedures for IPv4 allocations and transfers in particular and we're fully ready to go with those.

There have been a few ongoing improvements in our IPv6 allocation services, extending the automation through MyAPNIC to all classes of members and non-member account holders at APNIC.

We're doing ongoing work on further development of Whois and, of course, the RPKI functionality, which is one of those areas of great collaboration amongst the RIRs and particularly between RIPE NCC and APNIC.

Under supporting Internet development, we're running training conferences and planning to move more into a set of consulting activities where we're continually being asked by trainees and by members who we speak to, particularly in developing countries, to provide more customized help on the problems that members face in those areas.

Under the learning and development area, Philip Smith is taking charge of development of a consulting approach on a cost recovery basis, to add value to the training activities that we have.

Under that area also is the IPv6 program, which is really the focal point for a lot of activities that cross many parts of APNIC technical support service and outreach, and in fact public affairs activities, which really all start to have big components of IPv6 in their different respects.

Miwa Fujii, of course, is the person in charge of the IPv6 program and maintains a really busy schedule of activities with that hat on.

APNIC Labs. We are now referring to the research and development activities of APNIC under the label "APNIC Labs". That echoes and indicates that we are collaborating with RIPE Labs in Amsterdam, of course.

I think we all know the work that Geoff is doing, which has a truly global impact in many areas. All credit to Geoff and also George Michaelson for the work that's being done ongoing under APNIC Labs.

We have also made some nice steps forward in the small grants area. We have been running the ISIF program on behalf of IDRC for quite some time. That has recently been extended with a large grant from IDRC to become a global program, so we are collaborating, again with LACNIC and AfriNIC, on a global grants program and we are looking forward quite soon to receiving another injection of funding for that from the Swedish International Development Agency.

Under collaborating and communicating, APNIC Connect is a banner that we're using for a more on-line and social media oriented approach to collaborating and communicating. Those who answered the APNIC survey would have seen some questions that led into that.

We have been working very hard to support the new India NIR and we look forward to the inauguration of the NIR in the very near future.

External relations is being coordinated under a new program. Of course, Internet governance is a really active area of our attention at the moment under Pablo Hinojosa and numerous other staff. The amount of attention and work that we have to do in this area to make sure that our voices are heard is increasing.

You'll be hearing about some of the quite significant advances in the efficiency of our internal systems under corporate support, business processes and internal systems, planning and, of course, an approach to legal issues under the very able assistance of Craig Ng.

Now for the details. We have just got a series of reports to bring you some more specifics in each of those areas, so I'll hand over to the next of those reports. Byron.

Byron Ellacott: Good morning, everyone. I think we have a few moments to wait for the slides to come up, but in the meantime, I'll introduce myself.

I'm Byron Ellacott, I'm the technical director at APNIC. Over the next 10 minutes or so, you'll hear about how APNIC is delivering value to members and to the community.

You'll hear about what we're doing in IPv4 transfers, which is of course a very important aspect of allocation policy these days. You'll hear about our IPv6 delegation streamlining activities and I'll tell you a little bit about what's going on with resource statistics and membership growth information.

Then I'll just give you a little bit of information about some of our technical services activities, so I'll talk about an alternative Whois access protocol and what we are doing in the RPKI.

With IPv4 transfers, the main news, of course, is that inter-RIR transfers are now available. This is between ARIN and APNIC at the moment and I expect that over time, as the policy process churns along around the world, will expand to include other RIRs.

A transfer between RIRs is conditional on a willing source being found and it's also conditional on the recipient being able to demonstrate a need for addresses under normal APNIC allocation policies. As Guangliang introduced in the APNIC Services session, there is a pre-approval process that we strongly encourage people who expect to receive a resource to use.

We have also agreed on an inter-RIR transfer procedure with all the RIRs. This was a collaborative piece of work done by the resource service managers of all the RIRs, so that we now all understand how to transfer the resource between ourselves.

We also have an IPv4 transfers listing service, such that pre-approved recipients can be listed on our website for potential sources of resources. This is an opt-in service and it is anonymous and it enables a source of resources to make contact with a potential recipient before a transfer is initiated.

Also, just this week we have finalised the details on providing a broker listing service as well to allow both potential sources and potential recipients to find parties who can help them find each other.

If you would like to find out about our transfer process or policies, there is a very large amount of information at www.apnic.net/transfer.

We have done work over the past few years to streamline the IPv6 delegation process under the IPv6 One Click program. This program now applies to existing members, to new members and most recently to NIRs. This program has been a great success, as you can see from the graph, which is going up and to the right -- the best direction to go for a graph. We have passed 800 IPv6 delegations under this program.

If you have v4 resources with APNIC, you only need one click in MyAPNIC to also get v6 resources if you do not already have them.

In resource delegations, generally, this has been a steady and continual amount of delegation going on.

There is a very large spike there around April of 2011, which was of course as we approached the final /8 policy trigger. But after that event had passed, we still evened back out and we are still processing delegations at about the same rate as we did.

In fact, if we look at the final /8 delegations, when that policy first came into effect, there was quite a large volume of delegations under that policy, which tapered off a little bit, but now we're back to a normal, steady, continued growth in delegation rate.

For IPv4 distribution by economy, you can see that China, Japan and Korea continue to be the largest holders of IPv4 distributions, with Australia not too far behind.

For IPv6 delegations by economy, Australia is in the lead there, with Japan, China, Indonesia and India fairly close behind again.

Membership growth. It has been continuing as Paul noted, we are seeing a high rate of membership growth at the moment. Indeed, we passed the 100 new members this month, which is a record for us and the month is not yet over. I think we have a few hours left.

Our primary membership is of course in the very small, small and medium groups there. You can see that that's by far the largest proportion of the overall membership. We don't anticipate that changing in the near future, although, as Paul said earlier, the future can be very hard to predict.

In technical services, this week during the APNIC Services session I introduced the alternative Whois protocol, that is tentatively known as WEIRDS. This is the Web Extensible Internet Registration Data Service.

It is an alternative protocol for Whois. It is not changing the Whois data, just offering a separate way to get to that data. It addresses a number of shortcomings of the current Whois service. It will provide for internationalization support. There will be a specification for queries and responses and errors that will be common across all the RIRs and potentially across all of the name registries depending on how the work in the IETF goes on that. There will be a referral mechanism, so if you ask a question about a number resource of any RIR, you will be http re-directed to the right answer.

Authentication mechanisms will be provided for to allow differentiation of service as necessary. We provide this sort of thing in various ways right now, but it's not very clear or specific on how it works.

It's usable with a web browser. There's an example URL there. If you go and take a look at that URL, I think everything about this will become a lot clearer, so please do download the slide pack and take a look after the presentations today.

One of the goals of this protocol is for it to be easy for web developers to embed directly in their applications, and at APNIC we see that a very large proportion of Whois queries come in through our web access script anyway, so we think that this is going to be quite popular.

At ARIN, where they have implemented a RESTful Whois service for several years now, they see 60 per cent of their Whois queries load through that service now.

With the resource public key infrastructure, this year we published the specifications as Internet RFC number documents. This is a fantastic milestone for the RPKI and I think this is a very important achievement for the IETF and for the RIRs who participated in that process.

We are working with ICANN and the other RIRs on a global system for the RPKI, including a global trust anchor. This is collaborative work that takes place at the IETF and back in everyone's offices.

This week in the RPKI Birds of a Feather session, we introduced the general purpose signer for RPKI services and this allows MyAPNIC users to sign arbitrary files digitally with RPKI certificates. We think that this could be used for things like ISP service provisioning requests and maybe in transfers as well. But we think the APNIC membership will find many ways to use the RPKI that we can't imagine ourselves.

You've heard a bit about how APNIC is delivering services. I thank you for your attention and your time.

Are there any questions.

Okay. Over to you, Akinori.

Maemura Akinori: Questions or comments? If not, we move on to the next presentation.

Byron covered Sanjaya's part, right? German Valdez is not coming here, but he will make a report remotely from Brisbane.

Sunny Chendi: We are just connecting him up. He's doing it over the Skype and I'll do the slides for him.

German, are you there?

German Valdez: Hello?

Sunny Chendi: We hear you, German.

German Valdez: Yes. Are you okay?

Sunny Chendi: Yes, I'll drive the slides for you. Just say next.

German Valdez: Fantastic.

Good morning, all. It's a pleasure to be here to present reports on collaborating and communicating activities of APNIC, one of the four pillars in which the fulfilment of our mission is supported.

My name is German Valdez and I'm external relations program director of APNIC.

This presentation will inform you how APNIC is working and collaborating with the community. Among the many activities, I'll mention the specific work we are doing in our external relations program to support the Internet system, Internet governance processes and collaboration with the ITU and other regional organizations like APEC.

The demand for APNIC representation has grown steadily in the last decade. In the last three years, we have accumulated more than 90 different events and organizations that we engage with and follow. Note that these numbers do not consider our training activities.

We have collaborated on sending staff, providing information, statistics and opinions, and in some cases also we have financially supported events in developing countries.

The amount of information to process, share and manage also has increased in the last years, so for this reason, this year APNIC has implemented an external relations program. Internally, this program allows better knowledge sharing and better integration of institutional strategies and messages for APNIC's representation abroad.

The program looks after APNIC staff preparation before each trip, which helps us to improve our representation overseas.

Next slide, please.

During 2012, as usual, we have had active participation with a wide range of stakeholders across the region. We maintain strong support and commitment with the development of Network Operator Groups. For example, APNIC is part of the steering committees in SANOG and PACNOG and we supported the launch of MYNOG in January this year.

We made financial contributions to the Malaysian, New Zealand, South Asia and Pacific Island Network Operation Groups, and in most of the events conducted this year we contributed to their programs with workshops, training and relevant information related to APNIC activities.

Additionally, we have continued our participation in NIR events in order to foster our relationship with NIR communities. This year we have participated in an IPv6 summit organised by Viet Nam NIC and we were part of NIR member meetings in China, Taiwan and Indonesia, and participated in the KRNET 2012 event organised by KISA in South Korea.

We continue to fully engage, through our IPv6 program, providing relevant IPv6 information to the community.

China, Singapore, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Viet Nam have been some of the countries we have visited to support IPv6 events.

This is a more graphical representation of our events across the region. Up to August 15, we have contributed or collaborated in events in 23 different cities in 16 economies in the Asia Pacific region.

These numbers are following the same trend of past years.

This level of participation is consistent with previous input of APNIC member survey and the strategic mandates from the APNIC Executive Council, who has set the vision of the organization in giving strong importance to representation.

There are more events that we participate in globally, like ICANN, IETF, ITU and global IGF, but I wanted to concentrate the information of this report by our priority, which is the Asia Pacific region.

For those who attend APNIC 33 Conference in New Delhi, you noticed that a new NIR registry has been recognised by APNIC EC, the India Registry for Internet Names and Numbers, which is now operated by NIXI. This new NIR was the product of a successful collaboration between Indian organizations and APNIC.

This implementation included three-week training covering all aspects of NIR operations; more hands-on and detailed three-week training for Hostmasters; a high-level Indian delegation visit to Brisbane; and videoconferences to coordinate details of the India NIR implementation.

As you have witnessed in this Conference, we have a better integration of social media channels as a communications tool. We have now an internal streamlined process that allows more fluid way to communicate with our members and community in general.

APNIC Connect aims to deliver timely information for our members on APNIC services, news, research, statistics and general activities across the region. At this stage we have almost 1,600 followers in APNIC Twitter account and around 14,000 different people have seen content associated with our Facebook page. I'm happy that these numbers are increasing every week.

As you know, the Regional Internet Registries are organized through the Number Resource Organization to deal with global topics of common interest. The work of the NRO is driven by the Secretariat that is rotated each year among the eight RIRs.

During 2012, it was the turn of APNIC to support the Secretariat function. As part of this role, APNIC has supported the operations of the Address Supporting Organization and the NRO itself.

For example, this year we supported the process in the election of seat 9 on the ICANN board, which resulted in the re-election of Ray Plzak. Just a few days ago, we opened a new nomination period for the selection of seat 10, currently used by Asia Pacific member, Kuo-Wei Wu.

Our support to the Internet ecosystem is not limited to alike Internet organizations. APNIC has been collaborating with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD. Also, we are a founding and active member of the Internet Technical Advisory Committee, ITAC, which is a global coalition of Internet organizations invited by the OECD to provide input on Internet related issues.

In this space, APNIC has been providing information about the success of the multi-stakeholder model, IPv6 deployment, security and the future of network infrastructure.

APNIC has maintained a history of productive participation with the ITU. We were one of the first Internet organizations to join as a sector member back in 2003. Our focus of attention in engaging with the ITU and its membership has been IP addressing and Internet governance related matters.

As an example, we have an active contribution with the NRO to the ITU IPv6 group. APNIC, as many other Internet organizations, contributed with the preparation, delivering and discussion of documents, supporting an open, bottom-up multi-stakeholder model of the Internet and, specifically, the Internet numbers management.

As a consequence, this group recently closed, as no current concerns are identified with the existing allocation model.

As part of the collaboration initiatives with ITU, we are working together in organizing IPv6 capacity-building activities for developing countries in Asia Pacific.

APNIC has been following closely the regional discussions through APT in the preparation of the World Conference on International Communication, WCIT. This Conference is considering changes to International Telecommunication Regulations, the ITR, which was last updated in 1988.

There are valid concerns that some existing proposals to ITR can touch and eventually have an effect on the ongoing stability of Internet.

APNIC's position for WCIT is that the ITRs have worked well for telephony but are difficult to translate on to the Internet.

It would be difficult, and potentially detrimental to the Internet, to broaden the scope of these regulations to include Internet routing.

Right now, APNIC is actively engaging with government representatives in the region to share views around the potential impact of changes to the ITRs affecting the Internet. This is with the aim to help inform governments' positions facing the WCIT Conference in Dubai in December this year.

APNIC maintains a strong support of the Internet Governance Forum. We believe that the IGF is the best incarnation of the Geneva principles and the best example of a multi-stakeholder dialogue.

APNIC's position is to keep it alive and ongoing, respecting its original foundations. But our support is not only ideological, but also material. This year, APNIC as part of the NRO has doubled its annual contribution to the IGF to US$75,000 this year.

Additionally, Paul Wilson, APNIC DG, is participating this year in the IGF's multi-stakeholder advisory group. Just last month, as every year, we supported and participated in the regional Internet Governance Forum in Tokyo, Japan.

It's important to collate and determine the regional views and positions to be presented to the global IGF in Baku, Azerbaijan, in November this year.

Finally, APNIC has been successful in getting IPv6 on the APEC TEL communications working group agenda and has helped develop IPv6 deployment guidelines for APEC TEL members and participants.

This has been through a consistent collaboration and cooperation since 2010 in APEC TEL meetings.

Just a few days ago, in the last ministerial APEC meeting in St Petersburg, Russia, Asia in conjunction with RIPE NCC contributed in the ministerial declaration on reinforcing support for IPv6 an APEC state members.

That's all from me. Thank you very much for your attention.

Maemura Akinori: Thank you very much, German. Any questions or comments on this part? Thank you very much, German.

APPLAUSE

Maemura Akinori: The next up is Philip.

Philip Smith: Good morning, everybody.

This is a summary of the activities that APNIC is involved in supporting Internet development.

I'm going to cover these six areas. I'm going to look at training, what's been happening there. We're going to look at the v6 program activity.

The APNIC Conferences, we're going to look at policy, we'll look at APNIC Labs and of course the Information Society information fund.

The first one up, training. As Paul mentioned in his opening remarks, APNIC has been focusing quite heavily on v6 deployment. The training team has been very active. Most of the workshops we have been doing have had an IPv6 element in them, if not being out and out IPv6 workshops.

We also do quite a lot of v6 focus in the eLearning sessions that we offer.

ELearning itself, we offer one-hour modules. We originally used to start with quite -- well, longer sessions, but we found that one hour was probably the best to deliver the correct level of information for our on-line session.

So we offer these. They are offered fortnightly in three time zones. The time zones really cater for the Pacific Island region, Southeast Asia and South Asia.

We have a new schedule for 2012, so we've really upped the anti in the number of sessions and the amount of content that we offer.

Face-to-face training. A lot of the face-to-face workshops, they're running roughly 50 per cent presentation, 50 per cent hands-on lab exercises. We have remote training lab as well as a portable lab as well, as Champika mentioned earlier in the week, and that allows us to offer a great deal of flexibility in the workshops that we offer.

The lab actually looks like a service provider with multiple operating regions, so that allows us to offer training to suit most needs.

Courses offered, well, they are too numerous to mention, but Internet resource management, Internet Routing Registry, Internet technologies from the core of the materials, extensive range of routing, IPv4, IPv6, DNS, DNSSEC and network infrastructure security.

The eLearning courses, new ones on offer include DNS concepts, how to request IP addressing, as well as the Whois Database.

For v6, in eLearning we have the overview of v6, we look at addressing and subnetting. As I mentioned the other day, this has been a very frequently demanded content from us, how to do v6 addressing with operational network, so that's a very popular eLearning course.

V4/v6 transition, v6 address planning. The workshops themselves range from two days hands on, with flexible content really trying to meet the needs of the folks being trained, all the way up to the full five-day v4/v6 workshop which some of us saw here at APNIC 34 last week. Tutorials on offer include network management and Internet resource management, which we offered at APNIC 34.

The training delivered in 2012, unfortunately, this graphic got a little bit chopped, the Pacific does exist and we have been to the Pacific as well, New Zealand, Samoa and Fiji and we have courses coming up in Vanuatu later this year. But as you can see, we cover pretty much the region, with the training that is offered.

The v6 courses, 18 courses in 18 locations, 568 participants; other face-to-face courses, 27 in 27 locations, over 1200 participants there. ELearning, 54 courses so far this year, 470 participants.

With v6 collaboration, providing continuous support to the community on v6 deployment. Our goal really with the v6 collaboration is to support real and tangible v6 deployment. We have passed the day of just talking about it and APNIC is now very much encouraging people to deploy v6 and we can supply whatever help we can.

This includes outreach, educational activities and so forth.

We have strong collaboration with regional and Internet organizations. So sharing v6 deployment status, providing customized information on issues related to v6 deployment within local networks and trying to address some of the concerns and issues relating to v6 deployment.

In the community, while we had two v6 sessions at APNIC 33 in New Delhi, February 2012, targeting business decision makers, an APNIC assists with the Secretariat for the Asia Pacific IPv6 Taskforce, providing information, exchange between Asia Pacific economies.

The AP IPv6 tasks force met in New Delhi and it visited Beijing in March 2012 to learn about the status of deployment in China.

We're working on developing new consultation collaboration services to support actual deployment.

This is one-on-one v6 consultation for network operators and government agencies. Again, customized content based really trying to address the needs that those folks request us.

Increasing collaboration, delivering customized v6 content as well for example, we worked with ITU Asia Pacific Centre of Excellence, Pacific Islands Telecommunications Association and the Secretariat for the Pacific Community in delivering v6 content.

For APNIC conferences, APNIC 33 had a total of 573 delegates, 43 economies represented, 97 APNIC member organizations, remote participations. We had 14 in Brunei, 25 in Viet Nam. These are the two remote hubs.

The remote participants via the webcast was 72.

For APNIC 34, brand new one week of workshops. That was last week here, 21 to 25 August. We offered a v4/v6 workshop as I mentioned, as well as a network infrastructure security workshop and our partners, Network Start-up Resource Centre, ran a campus networking workshop in collaboration with ITC here in Phnom Penh.

Policies at APNIC 33. We reached consensus for prop-102, this was the sparse allocation guidelines for v6 resource allocations and that was implemented last week, 20 August.

Prop-101 did not reach consensus at APNIC 33.

Prop-099 also did not reach consensus. Both were sent back to the mailing list for further discussion.

Prop-098 was abandoned at APNIC 33.

APNIC Labs, this one slide probably can't do justice to all the work that APNIC Labs has been doing. But amongst the many things, the v6 capability tracker, which is the Google analytics tool, to enable website operators to measure v6 capabilities, there is all the v6 measurement work, measuring the end-to-end capability of v6 clients per economy, readiness data at end user level for various inter-governmental organizations and economies, there is the work on v6 preference by AS number, which measures the client capability by autonomous system. The v4 address report, so measuring the v4 free pool address exhaustion.

The labs website, of course, is labs.apnic.net and the blog is on blabs.apnic.net.

Finally, the Information Society Innovation Fund.

This is a grants program aimed at stimulating creative solutions to ICT development needs in the Asia Pacific region, now part of the Seed Alliance. This is an alliance, basically a joint effect with LACNIC in their Frida program and AfriNIC in their Fire program with very generous support from IDRC and possibly new funding coming from SIDA. IDRC of course is the Canadian Internet Development -- whatever it was -- Council.

I don't have my speaker notes here. And SIDA of course is the Swedish Internet Development Agency.

A new round of funding was launched in 2012, with four new categories for both grants and awards.

Innovation on access provision, innovation on learning and localization, code for the common good and of course rights. The actual grant program just closed a few days ago, so the successful awards will be announced soon.

ISIF grants. Expansion of the program means that new awarded projects will receive up to $30,000 and the funds will be managed and invested in the Asia Pacific region.

For the 2012 ISIF awards, 3,000 has already been given to established initiatives and a travel grant to the IGF and first time Community Choice Award will be given to the project with the highest number of votes from the community.

So there's more information about the ISIF program on the website, www.isif.asia.

That's all I have to report. Thank you very much.

APPLAUSE

Maemura Akinori: Thank you, Philip. The last part of the Secretariat report is from the business area, from Richard.

Richard Brown: Thank you, Akinori.

For those of you who don't know me, my name is Richard Brown, I am the business director at APNIC. I'd like to take this opportunity this morning just to give you an update on some of the important initiatives in corporate support in this Secretariat. There's a number of key projects.

As Paul mentioned, we have been through a large project to implement a new ERP system. I'll give you some more detailed information on that project. I'll provide some information on the work that the Secretariat did to support Prof Ang Peng Hwa in the 2012 member and stakeholder survey. I'll identify some of the issues that we're working on in our risk management program. I'll give you an update on some important human resources initiatives and there's also some projects in technical infrastructure and technical facilities management, I'll give you an update on.

ERP solution for APNIC. APNIC has grown a lot in the last 10 years and we had got to a point where we had a lot of cobbled together systems that we used to run our operation. We knew that we had to do something to make our Secretariat operations much more efficient, so we set up a project incorporating a large number of technical and non-technical stakeholders to work out what sort of solution we would go for. So we started with a very detailed, agile process where we looked at what are our requirements? Then, of course, we started from the bottom, we worked out what we wanted and then we went out to see what was there. It's a little bit difficult for an operation of this size, because there's a lot of very impressive ERP solutions up the top end that cost a lot of money, and there's a lot of nice small accounting and finance solutions that are useful for running a small business, but in the middle, there's not a lot.

So we were trying to get something that was cost effective so as close to out of the box as possible.

The key things we were looking for was we wanted to reduce the complexity of all the processes and procedures we have in place. We wanted to just put the data in once. We had all these cobbled together systems with spreadsheets and all sorts of other sources of information that worked their way through the system and then they get to the finance team and they have to put them all in manually and then eventually some reports were coming out at the end.

We wanted to be scalable, so what we wanted to do was be able to adapt the system to meet our future needs, so we wanted to be able to do what we needed it to do now, but also to develop it further as our operations changed.

We wanted to be web based. We always have this conflict in our organization between the Mac users and the Window users and it's very hard to find systems in the sweet spot for us that would work effectively across both.

So we were very happy with the result of the system that we chose in the end. When I talk about timeliness here, I talk about realtime reporting, so for managers managing budgets, as soon as information or invoices are entered into the system, it's available for them to see.

So we're dealing in a realtime environment. We're not waiting until the end of the month and a report comes out. It's all happening realtime.

Effective controls and monitoring, we wanted to put in as part of our risk management framework, we want really prudent controls on how approvals and delegations of authority as far as resources go, so we wanted to have really good audit trails and traceability of transactions.

We wanted to automate and integrate as many of the systems that we were using. We had many disparate systems, so we really wanted to focus on getting it all into one point.

Finally, we were looking for the most cost effective solution we could find.

I won't go into all this detail, but I'll highlight some important points in here. We started this project nearly two years ago. We went into implementation stage from 1 January this year. We started with our general ledger and accounting functions, so the system now immediately gave us some wins, so we were able to take a lot of spreadsheet based inputs that we were doing on the side and automate those, so the data goes in once and we see immediate wins.

I said we have a structured realtime reporting, so all the managers and all the staff, it's a dashboard based system, so based on your role in the organization, you can see different levels of information in real time for the organization and that helps us really understand what's going on in our business.

We have APIs through web services integration, so with our membership renewal system, there's no manual steps. The information is automated through our accounting system.

Of course, we continue to refine our project and activity based costing. This application gives us a lot of flexibility in how we set that up, and we're continuing to improve in that area, and as I mentioned before, a very comprehensive audit trail for every transaction going through the system.

Purchasing and requisitions is an area that we took in stage 2, so that was about moving from web forms and spreadsheet based purchase orders and walking around the office and getting someone to sign it and going up the tree until you find someone with the right level of authority to approve it and the budget. It's all automated. We have workflow that supports it based on the financial delegations and the organizational hierarchy.

So those who own the budget are effectively managing the budget, they're making all the approvals for expenses in that budget and because we have so many staff out of the office, we're able to do that remotely, so that's been a big improvement.

Also it gives us a lot more ability to verify the receipts and goods for services, because there's automated approval process, there's a receipting and payment process that comes in behind that. We, of course, have searchability and end-to-end visibility, so all the paperless documents in there are all searchable and we can basically go from a high-level monthly finance report and drill right down to the individual invoice that feeds up from there, so that's a big step for us.

Of course, when we are inputting data into the system, we can put in reminders and tasks, so if we're putting contracts in for 12 months ahead, we can create an auto-reminder at this point to let us know in 11 months' time that that contract is up for renewal.

Moving onto the asset register and depreciation, so this was a different system isolated from our accounting system before. It's all fully integrated. Again, it's all on-line approvals, on-line receipting and then the assets are linked to the PO and we can always search on that information.

Expense management. This has been a real success story. We leveraged off a solution that RIPE NCC had been using that we had seen. We had been looking at that for some time. Because we have a lot of people travelling, expense management has always been a bit of an issue for us. We have a solution and anyone who has one of these or an Android equivalent, can on the run, photograph all their receipts, submit their expense claim forms, it can be approved by their manager and it can be reimbursed into their account. All the credit card transactions are automatically fed through to the user as well to be matched. So significant savings for us and it has been a very successful project.

Human resources is the part of the project we're working on at the moment. We are currently working on the HR solution. We have been doing payroll since 1 July. Having now payroll and HR system fully integrated with our ERP has really saved us a lot of messy processing in month end. It's a much more usable system and of course the HR statistics and whatever are maintained on dashboards and it's very easy to focus on what's going on in the organization in a very timely manner. We have got very good relationship with our suppliers. So that's going very well.

I just give you some information on the survey project that we've been supporting, Prof Ang Peng Hwa on. We commenced this project in November 2011 with some initial scoping work. From there, we developed a very comprehensive project timeline. That began with the focus groups that ran through March and April in 2012.

The survey ran from 7 May to 8 June. We had a lot of support, of course, from Dr John Earls, who many of you will know, to help us in the Secretariat side managing the project. He and Prof Ang Peng Hwa worked together on the focus groups.

The statistics are very promising. We received over 1,300 valid responses, so we achieved nearly 68 per cent higher than the previous survey, which is a very good result.

As Paul mentioned, we've pulled the survey a little bit forward, so it's better aligned with our planning process. So we move from taking the feedback we receive in the survey through to the EC strategic recommendations on that through to our planning and budgeting process, so it's all much better aligned.

Risk management. We have been through some review of our travel insurance and changed providers to get an offering that's much better suited to our business. We have taken on emergency international SOS support for travellers, just to give us confidence that they have access to emergency support when they're travelling.

We continue, of course, to work on our BCP activities and we're more aggressively rolling out that out into other parts of our business. In meetings like this, we try to run a mini-BCP to cover not only the technical sides of things, but as far as workplace health and safety and ensuring the environment and everything is -- the risk is mitigated as much as possible.

Human resources. Louise and her team are introducing some organizational KPI methodology into the organization, so they're really trying to develop what the high-level KPIs are and rolling that down through the whole organization and building that into the measurement of performance.

There have been some improvements made in our recruitment process. We are particularly working more on having remote interviews for candidates on line. We have got some technology to support that. We are also working with LinkedIn to get exposure to a broader range of candidates across the community.

We continue to review our organizational structure and the resources we have to ensure that they align with the types of services we need to offer and what the business needs to go forward.

We have had one workplace health and safety incident where a member of the finance team actually was injured in an accident on the way home from work and we have been working with her on a fairly lengthy rehabilitation program and that's going well.

Just a brief update on some of the projects in technical infrastructure. We have been focusing a lot on using virtual machines, so we're looking for getting better utilization of hardware and space, we're trying to minimise our effect on the environment by using less electricity. Of course, we focus on high availability and having a faster disaster recovery process. As far as the office technology, we are looking at full disk laptop encryption, we are trialling two-factor VPN authentication. We are looking at streamlining our mail delivery and spam filtering.

For technical facilities management, as part of our BCP, we have a triangular architecture, but of course we are always reviewing the relationships with those co-location providers to ensure that we have what's best for our business and we're currently migrating from one supplier to another in Brisbane and we're doing that through virtual machine migration.

That's about it for me, I think.

Any questions?

Maemura Akinori: Thank you very much, Richard. Any questions or comments? I think you can do that for entire Secretariat report.

APPLAUSE

Maemura Akinori: That is all for the morning first session and we come to the time for the tea break.

The second session will be starting at 11 o'clock, so please come back a bit earlier so you will not miss the first part of the second session. Thank you very much.

Maemura Akinori: The APNIC Member Meeting will resume very soon, so I request members for the APNIC Member Meeting to please be seated, so that we can start the second session.

Thank you very much, everyone, for your cooperation to be seated earlier.

The second session will start with the Executive Council reports and the first speaker is James Spenceley, the treasurer of the APNIC Executive Council, to give the Treasurer's report.

James Spenceley: Thank you, all. A relatively short presentation today, as this is halfway through the financial year, so we will just look at how the finances are tracking halfway through and expect a longer and larger report on the full-year financial performance at the APRICOT meeting.

The finance team has implemented the new enterprise

resource planning system. This is going through implementation in the final stages, but will allow us to provide a fair bit more detail in terms of financial reporting and smoothness of the way that moves through the organization.

The financial status year to date for June 2012 is a reported surplus of $1.54 million on revenue of $8.57 million. If you minus the surplus from the revenue, you have expenditure or costs of $7.03 million.

Membership growth. There is a large number of growth in terms of members to June 2012. I have some slides on membership growth towards the end of the presentation. We now have 3,223 members. That is a growth of around 9 per cent for the half year and 350 new member accounts. As you can see, really starting to accelerate in terms of new members, which is also leading to a surplus in excess of what we were expecting at the budget around seven months ago in December.

The full year financial projections. This is our estimate of the end result to the financial year end on 31 December. You will see a forecast surplus of $2.2 million, forecast revenue of $17.33 million, which is 5 per cent above budget -- the previous budget was $16.46 million -- and forecast expenditure of $15.13 million which is 3.9 per cent below budget, the budget figure being $15.73 million.

We set very realistic budgets but are always focused on controlling cost, as that is within the EC's and the Secretariat's control. Revenue is more variable and you can see a faster take-up of members is leading to more revenue.

The income statement for the accountants in the room. You can see the year-to-date June 2011, where we were at a year ago today, and then the year-to-date for 2012. You can see an increase in the IP resource application fee, which correlates to a lot of new members joining, new members taking new resources, paying the one-off resource application fee.

You can see the original budget we had in December last year at our planning meeting was $1 million of resource application fee and we are now forecasting double that, so $2 million in terms of the line item -- again, quite a large increase in new member application fees. New members. Obviously more members equals more membership fees. We have gone from a budget of $14 million for the year to $14.3 million, again just representing more members joining up than originally we expected.

Sundry income is the one item that will be down.

Sundry income was some training and cost recovery based training that was expected, about $563,000, but it doesn't look to be happening in this period, hence the number will be a fair bit lower. That income is expected to be $174,000, not $886,000. There are corresponding reductions in some of the costs associated with that.

Looking at the expense line items, there are a few items that have increased a little year on year, that is to do with the scale of APNIC and the work of outreach training and IGF-style events that APNIC are attending.

You see communication expenses are a little bit under budget, some timing of projects there that will move into the next financial year.

Sponsorship and publicity is quite a bit of an increase, but that's to some extent down year on year, but we are expecting some costs in the second half.

The next largest one, salary increase, salary is expected to be exactly where budgeted, but that's an increase from the previous year, just representing some additional resources we talked about at the last meeting and the previous meeting, and mostly to do with outreach and training as well as staffing for the larger number of members required.

As you can see, overall our total expenses are

forecast to be less than expected in the budget, so a very good job by the Secretariat and the finance team.

The revised forecast is $17.3 million of revenue and total expenses of $15.1 million. Whereas we expected a modest surplus of $700,000, we now expect the surplus to be $2.2 million.

The mid-year review. The surplus is much higher than anticipated, with increase in new membership and also an increase in the resource application fee. The APNIC EC views this as a positive thing. We set conservative budgets in terms of our target for increasing the surplus but it is positive to see the result coming through and puts APNIC in a much better financial position.

In terms of the requirement for a better financial position, the EC continues to note uncertainty around the IPv4 exhaustion. Once there is an end to IPv4, we will see, and certainly the final /8 policy, with the increase in the number of members, the time window to that final /8 being exhausted is shortening. I hope Geoff will do some work towards giving us some ideas of when that will happen, maybe by the next meeting.

I just volunteered Geoff for some work.

Geoff Huston: Thank you.

James Spenceley: The balance sheet. Obviously we are

making a surplus, so our net position will be better off. We are seeing an increase in terms of our balance sheet, going from $20.2 million at the year end 2012 to $21.9 million. So generally, basically an increase in current assets, being mostly cash.

This is a slide we have presented for a number of years. Back in 2010, we took the purchase of the office building in Brisbane, so you will see a decrease in cash, which is the blue line, and then our financial assets, which is investment grade assets that the EC takes from time to time. You can see a big decrease in cash, but a proportional increase for the office building.

We started reporting this slightly differently in 2010 when I took over as Treasurer, and you can see that our goal to maintain one year's surplus of cash, as operating expenses as cash, dropped significantly. We were a little bit over $13 million in terms of operating expenses, with a cash or cash equivalent basis of around about $7 million.

The EC's goal and my goal as Treasurer is to increase the cash balance again to as close to the one-year operating costs.

Year on year, we have done a particularly good job at that. The line is a little bit high in terms of

expenses because we are under budget, so we are closing the gap to have the stated goal of one year of operating cash and/or equivalents.

We talked a little bit about membership growth.

This is a year-on-year comparison, so the lighter colour is last year, 2011, and the darker colour is 2012. As you can see, in most cases, every month is showing a much larger increase in 2012 in membership growth and the general trend is actually increasing quite significantly. We have gone from doing a new member growth of around about 40, 45, 46, 48 members, pretty much constantly throughout last year, to doing quite large numbers, 51 being the lowest, and last month being the highest at 82. I believe August has already surpassed July in terms of membership growth.

You can absolutely see a trend for a larger number of members joining, which is as a result of service providers no longer having IPv4 space to allocate, recommending that their customers go directly to APNIC, correlating with an increase in end user organizations as opposed to serve providers.

There is a graph of the different membership categories, blue being associate members, red very small, green is small members, the purple is medium, large, very large, and you almost can't see extra large

at the bottom -- a small number of members there.

This is showing we have almost exponential growth in membership. It should be quite interesting to see where the membership numbers end for the full year, at the APRICOT meeting, but we are seeing a large increase in members and smaller members. We expect to take that into account in December in our offsite planning and budget meeting for the next year, but we expect a large increase in members for the 2013 year.

Any questions from the floor on the financial report?

Rajesh Chharia (ISPAI): You must appreciate that you are able to control your expenditure and by reducing your expenditure by 3.9 per cent. The same way we, the service provider, also wants to reduce our expenditure.

Usually we are budgeting our complete financial into US dollars.

A few years back, when the US dollar was coming down and the Australian dollar was constant, and when all the APNIC fees were in US dollars, at that time the APNIC changed their pattern of financial billing from US dollars to Australian dollars, with some factors, the arithmetic what you have given, I will explain in my email.

Now the time has changed and now the Australian

dollar is much stronger than the US dollar, and as all the budgeting is being done in US dollar, what we request to APNIC and the EC is to make some dynamic controls, so that this should be considered for lowering some fees, according to the difference, the hike in the US dollar and the Australian dollar.

We know that the expenditure has also increased into APNIC, but still, if you can consider that, it will be very beneficial at the present situation for all the service providers. Thank you.

James Spenceley: Certainly. Thanks for the question.

I can't speak on behalf of the EC, but as Treasurer of APNIC, as well as a lot of positives about tying the exchange rate to the US dollar, there's a lot of negatives for APNIC itself. Almost all of our costs are in Australian dollars, so it would make it a very difficult process to have a prudent budget for the APNIC organization with our income not in the same currency as our costs.

This was the original rationale, probably four or five years ago, to switch to billing in Australian dollars. The unfortunate thing is that has varying degrees of positive or negative impacts on different countries or different economies.

I know, against the Japanese yen, the Australian

dollar has weakened, so for the Japanese organizations they are certainly seeing a reduction in fees, and possibly against the Indian rupee it's the reverse.

Absolutely we hear the concern, but we have to balance that with our ability to provide a stable and financial organization, but we will absolutely table that at the December offsite meeting, and potentially even maybe look at some of the impact that's had over time on different economies.

I appreciate the question and we will look at that in December.

Martin Levy (Hurricane Electric): If you can go back a slide and show the near exponential growth, can you provide -- this is a follow-on to a question from a couple of days ago to Paul and all the RIRs -- you mentioned that you are seeing a growth in new members at the moment, being sent over from ISPs and their suppliers directly. That obviously reflects in the financial status.

How does this graph look, planning wise, as you go out through 2013, 2014 and through the date when you run out of the last final /8 and the v4 address space is truly not available even through basic membership or the like. This graph will have to change. Can you give us some insight from the financial side as to how that will

affect planning, what would happen and where would the change in the financial numbers be?

James Spenceley: I think it is based on a number of criteria. When IPv6 adoption takes hold, because we may see an increase in the number of end user members coming for IPv6 resource sources which will take over from IPv4, so that's a timing difference and a technology selection difference, I guess.

The other issue is the timing of how long the final /8 will be in existence.

I think, Geoff, you might have an idea. Is it 15 years we planned, right at the beginning, we expected?

Geoff Huston (APNIC): We expected a little bit over 15, but it has been quite a lot, and at current run rates, it will last for about another 15. But the world in three years' time will not be the world today, so the 15 years is just a number, it's not a rational prediction.

James Spenceley: I don't think there's any danger, we are not suggesting we will run out of the final /8 in the next financial year or the following financial year.

I guess, in long and short, the answer is we don't know when that event is likely to happen, and what we are trying to do is put the APNIC organization in the

best financial footing so that we have a large buffer, so if we see a shift or a change in terms of resource fees from IPv4 before resource fees from IPv6 start coming in in any quantity, ensure we have the buffer to be able to survive as an organization and operate in a similar fashion as APNIC has previously operated in.

Martin Levy (Hurricane Electric): Thank you.

Andy Linton (NSRC): Wearing my NSRC hat for this particular question. I spent last week here teaching at a workshop at universities in Cambodia and have done similar things in Viet Nam in the last six or seven months and I have also done similar things in Africa.

In Africa, educational institutions don't have to pay the high initial assessment fee, and the universities here and in Viet Nam, and I suspect other parts of the region, especially developing countries, do have that high fee.

I wonder whether we need to re-look at that fee, given that the process of doing an assessment is effectively much simpler than it ever was before: you get a /22 or you get a /32, and for the vast majority of assessments it seems unlikely there is $3,500 of costs, or if it's a developing country half of that, because they get the discount. That should be something that you should look at in the fee structure. The initial

membership fee is a big hurdle for a lot of people to apply for address space and would be a good one to rationalise, maybe for educational institutions or developing countries or whatever, but it's a hurdle.

James Spenceley: Yes, absolutely, point taken. One thing the APNIC EC does at the planning meeting each year is look at fees, we have done that for the last couple of years and elected not to change the fees. We have seen membership growth increasing more than we expected and we were nervous when we changed the fee structure that membership fees would decrease or plateau and we would not run at a surplus, but that has not eventuated.

The perfect time to look at that is when we discuss fees for the coming period. Again, we will do that at the December meeting. I will take both the US dollar question and the resource application fee, in general, and also the resource application fee for LDCs, less developed countries, for December.

That is a record number of questions for the financial report. Anything further? Thank you, and see you in Singapore for the next meeting.

APPLAUSE

Maemura Akinori: It is time for the Executive Council report from myself, and I am waiting for the slides.

My name is Maemura Akinori, Chair of the Executive Council of APNIC. Here I deliver the Executive Council report. The main part of the financial issues are already covered by the Treasurer, and I will do some others.

This slide shows the members of the Executive Council. Many of them, as you see, are on the stage, so I would like to have everyone introduce themselves, please. I would like to ask Chee-Hoo to start.

Chee-Hoo Cheng: I'm Chee-Hoo Cheng from Hong Kong.

Wei Zhao: Wendy Zhao from China.

Kenny Huang: Kenny Huang from Taiwan.

Gaurab Upadhaya: Gaurab Upadhaya from Nepal and Singapore.

James Spenceley: James Spenceley, from Vocus and I'm the Treasurer of the APNIC EC.

Paul Wilson: You know me, Paul. My position on the EC is ex officio, which means that under the by-laws the Director-General sits as a voting member of the Executive Council.

Maemura Akinori: Thank you, everyone.

Ma Yan, who is the Secretary of the Executive Council, is not here, due to his health problem, but he is observing this APNIC Member Meeting by the web casting and I should send his regards to you.

The functions of the APNIC Executive Council are as shown here: represent the interests of members in the governance of APNIC; oversight of the activities of APNIC; to consider broad Internet policy issues for APNIC's strategic direction; to set membership dues; and to endorse the policy consensus toward implementation.

The Executive Council holds monthly regular meetings, and here are listed the meetings of the Executive Council for the year 2012. We had a few more meetings than usual, as you see.

The Executive Council meetings, of course, we take minutes and they are published on the EC website and it is really easy, www.apnic.net/ec, so please read them if you are interested in our business.

We have been working on some corporate documents.

As you remember, the standard APNIC membership agreement was amended and it is already in effect. Now we are still working on the NIR membership agreement and it is being drafted and published, and now we are exploring the opinions from the NIR, because the NIR and APNIC, the membership between them are quite -- not very easy.

We are now carefully working on that, and try to incorporate the input from the NIRs to our draft right now.

Membership fees. The membership fees are determined

by the Executive Council. That is the power which is provided by the by-laws as the representatives of the APNIC membership.

The EC has considered the matter of the additional costs and legal and financial risks associated with processing address transfers. When we started the address transfers, the EC determined that the fee for the transfer would be waived for the time being, until we decide another decision.

Recently, the Executive Council has been discussing about setting the fee for the transfer, and I would like to announce that the EC has decided to levy a service charge for processing IPv4 address transfers, effective as of today.

This slide shows some details of the transfer fees.

The fee is set at 20 per cent of the membership fee for the transferred block. For example, in the case of a transfer of a /24 it will be charged at A$236. It is 20 per cent of the amount of the annual membership fee for the case of the /24 holders.

The fee will be charged at the time of processing the transfer, before registration records are changed.

For a transfer between APNIC members, the receiver will be charged this transfer fee. For a transfer from a member of another RIR to an APNIC member, an incoming

transfer, the APNIC member will be charged the transfer fee.

For a transfer from an APNIC member to a member of another RIR, which is an outgoing transfer, the APNIC member will be charged the transfer fee.

This is the initial setting of the transfer fee and the APNIC Executive Council will monitor the transfers and review the fee annually as part of the EC's annual review of APNIC fees.

To set the transfer fee, we had a substantial amount of discussion among the Executive Council, whether we should do it or not. But they determined, as I said, we set the fee for the transfer.

There is some reasoning for setting the transfer fee. We have some cost factors which we perceive we should set the transfer fee. Because operating the transfer procedure requires some human resources within the APNIC Secretariat, so the human resources is the cost involved, so we need to cover this cost.

Additionally, there is a liability risk factor, particularly for large blocks with high transfer, which impacts the Secretariat's insurance arrangements and residual liability.

We can consider the cost for doing the transfer will be covered by the general APNIC fee, but the address

transfer will benefit the origin and the recipients, then it should be covered by those who benefit by the transfer mechanism. That is the cost factors.

We have another reason to set this fee. It is the potential for abuse of membership fees. The membership fee is charged on the anniversary date of the members, then the anniversary date of the members is different from member to member, then there might be some possibility to be abused, to transfer a large address block from a member to a member, to have less address block on the anniversary date.

As I said in the previous slide, this is the initial set-up of the transfer fee, and so far we have not had sufficient information to decide whether the fee setting is appropriate. We set the annual review in our resolution, to revisit the transfer fee annually for exploring the better set-up for this transfer fee.

Another point I would like to mention is the membership and stakeholder survey. Thanks to Prof Ang and also John Earls, the membership and the stakeholder survey was successfully conducted and we have had the results of the report in this APNIC Member Meeting.

The member and stakeholder survey is a really precious input for the Executive Council to design the mid-term business plan, so we study the survey report

carefully in order to make the mid-term plan for the near future.

As you see in front of you, the EC is here to serve you as the representative of the members and the broader community. Please contact any Executive Council member and please let us hear your opinion.

Of course, you can submit some opinions by email, in that case please send it to our Executive Secretary at exec-sec@apnic.net.

Thank you very much. That is all from my side. If you have any questions or comments, I am really happy to answer.

Skeeve Stevens (eintellego): I am actually happy about the transfer fees. It does put some barriers in place.

Firstly, my comment is I think they are way too low.

But, secondly, I also think they are way too high, following on Andy's comments regarding LLDPs and things like that, it puts another barrier, and in line with a lot of other aspects of APNIC, where Cambodia and other nations are getting breaks on those things, there seems to have been no mention in there that there was a 50 per cent discount for developing nations. It has raised the cost and made things more difficult for them, but when you are talking $2,000 for a /16, in big economies that's absolutely nothing, the price of a /16 based on some of the market prices at the moment is an obscene amount of money, over $100,000. So $2,000 is absolutely -- it's not even a small bump in their cost for doing that.

But those costs also have issues for the LLDPs.

James Spenceley: The 50 per cent discount applies to the transfer fees for the LLDPs as well.

Skeeve Stevens (eintellego): Sorry, it wasn't mentioned.

James Spenceley: Fair call. Point taken on the fees. We have tried to take a pretty good guess at what our costs are to support the transfers we are experiencing and then apply that backwards. This is really our first attempt to try to understand the impact of transfers, and quite possibly they may be low and that's something we will address when we look at fees each year.

Skeeve Stevens (eintellego): Transfers is a very complicated thing. Considering that they are -- even with all the policy and the RIRs, they are actually quite easy to bypass, but given the value, I have other concerns, I have concerns about members that have stocked large amounts of address space and it seems like we have been delivering gold bars to their door.

I don't have specific policies in mind at the moment, and I am in a complicated position where I cannot submit policy, so here is a recommendation to

anyone else who might want to: if a member in the last couple of years has had justification for /16s, /15s, /14s or /13s and they are now selling those, I think it is probably within APNIC's purview that if someone has given projections to justify extremely large amounts of address, that they are now wanting to transfer to other people because they don't need them any more, I'm not sure why we are supporting that and APNIC is not considering going, here are the transfer rules and the needs justification, that's great, but that's about the inbound accepting of the address space, as opposed to any analysis of the outbound that is transferring it out that doesn't need it any more, that might, either through business reasons, businesses have changed, business conditions have changed or they have just barefaced lied on their applications about the needs for the justification earlier on, there is actually no interrogation of that outbound address space moving around.

I would like to see that if it could be proven or even if the business went and failed, and they are sitting on a /14 and businesses fail, why is it now an asset that they can transfer for the price of $5 million, as opposed to giving it back to APNIC because they didn't end up needing it? I've just got

some issues in this area.

James Spenceley: Sure. As the APNIC EC we are very focused on what is our sphere of focus, which is on setting of the fees and operating the APNIC organization financially, for the benefit of the members.

These are probably more policy issues and they can be addressed in the Policy SIG, and I would encourage you to have a think about that and put a policy, if it matters.

Skeeve Stevens (eintellego): Yes and no. You have made the decision as the EC to put a price on inbound transfers.

James Spenceley: Yes.

Skeeve Stevens (eintellego): That's not a policy.

James Spenceley: No, absolutely.

Skeeve Stevens (eintellego): There is no interrogation of outbound transfers.

James Spenceley: I don't think APNIC can put a policy on transferring the addresses out, we could probably levy a fee on the person transferring the addresses out, that is possible, but it is difficult for us to say, you can't transfer that, in terms of our sphere of influence. I think that is something that needs to be addressed with the transfer policy itself.

Skeeve Stevens (eintellego): OK. I'm not sure where that

influence should be.

Valens Riyadi (IDNIC): I need the clarification if this transfer fee applies also for a transfer from an APNIC member and if the institution wants to change the account under the NIR, because in my opinion the holder is still the same institution, but of course in the APNIC account it changed from a company to the NIR.

Maemura Akinori: The question, I think, is that the transfer fee for this case will be applied, whether it will be applied for the NIR members.

Valens Riyadi (IDNIC): No, for example, if one company right now is a member of APNIC, they have their IP allocation directly from APNIC and they want to change the account under the NIR.

Maemura Akinori: Under the NIR?

Valens Riyadi (IDNIC): Yes.

Geoff Huston (APNIC): I can quickly answer that. There is an APNIC transfer policy document which you should look at. If you roll back a few slides, Akinori, down the bottom, have a look. It says the transfer as decided by the EC will apply to sections 3 and 4 of that policy and will not apply to section 5 or section 6 or to any other. If what you are contemplating is described in sections 3 and 4 of the policy, the fee would apply, otherwise it will not.

Valens Riyadi (IDNIC): Thank you.

Geoff Huston (APNIC): Have a read of the policy and see if what you are describing is encompassed or not.

I don't believe it is, but that is my personal interpretation. Check out the policy document.

Valens Riyadi (IDNIC): I think it's not clear, that's why I need clarification.

Geoff Huston (APNIC): That's why we put the text in to help you with that. Thank you.

James Spenceley: If the question is between two members and an NIR, that's a transfer between members, I suspect. We can clarify that a little further and post that to APNIC.

Valens Riyadi (IDNIC): Does the transfer fee apply or not?

James Spenceley: Yes, I understand the transfer fee would apply because it is a transfer between members.

Valens Riyadi (IDNIC): In my opinion, it should not apply because the holder, the user of the IP address is still the same institution, it is the same company, even the Whois name is the same.

James Spenceley: Can I clarify the question: is it a transfer between two members of an NIR?

Valens Riyadi (IDNIC): No. Right now, for example, one company has a direct IP address allocation from APNIC

and they want to change their account to be under NIR.

For example, a company in Indonesia, right now the company in Indonesia can be a member of IDNIC or directly to APNIC. For example, right now they are a member of APNIC, they have got the IP directly from APNIC and they want to change their account to be under IDNIC.

James Spenceley: That's not a transfer. If you are moving the entire account under the NIR, that's not a transfer of resources. The transfer policy encompasses transfer of specific Internet resources, so if a /22 out of your /23 were to be transferred, that would be considered under this fee proposal. A transfer arising out of a merger and acquisition or between a holding company and a sub-branch in a different area or, in this case, moving the account to the NIR would not attract a fee.

Valens Riyadi (IDNIC): OK. So I suggest you make the clarification quite clear for this case, so we don't have any dual interpretation in the future.

James Spenceley: Just a clarification, for anyone who didn't understand that, the difference is between a transfer of addresses and a transfer of the member account. The transfer of a member account is something that's happened previously on a number of occasions.

However, this is just talking about effectively the disposal and the acquisition of an Internet resource between two different members.

Valens Riyadi (IDNIC): Thank you.

Brajesh Jain (Spectranet): The transfer fees, I raised it the other day also. When these addresses come to an account holder, his category of membership may change because the number of addresses has now increased beyond the limit. So in such a case, the recipient will have to pay a transfer fee as well as the increased fee.

I think this is what should be considered, and this, my suggestion is that addresses which are transferred from some other, and if a transfer fee is applicable, these addresses should not count for his membership fees.

Thank you.

James Spenceley: Is that a question or a comment?

Brajesh Jain (Spectranet): This is what we want to suggest, that both charges should not be applicable simultaneously, in case a member's category changes, then transfer fee should not be applicable.

James Spenceley: I can explain the theory behind it.

Whether you get your resources from APNIC or you get your resources through a transfer, that still increases your membership size and the amount of resources you have, and therefore increases the amount you are charged

on an ongoing basis. The APNIC EC has not taken a distinction between how you attain those resources, rather we have just applied a fee to processing the transfer on behalf of the parties involved.

I think if we weren't to charge a fee or adjust the membership fee after the transfer, you may see a situation where people would transfer large amounts of address space into different members or new members, to avoid paying the fees long term. We can't see a way necessarily around that, without allowing just the natural increase of the members' payment, and I don't think that would be fair to the members, if you acquire a large amount of address space via a transfer, you are not contributing equally as a member who received the address space directly from APNIC.

Brajesh Jain (Spectranet): My second comment is the transfer fees, especially for a smaller block, for example /24, which is $1 per IP, which is rather a high amount.

James Spenceley: That is a one-off fee in terms of transfer.

Brajesh Jain (Spectranet): It is one-off, but already there is some amount charged by the transfer.

James Spenceley: Going back to Skeeve's comment, the cost of a /24 will be significantly more than the small fee

the APNIC is levying. There is also work for APNIC involved in transferring that between members. There is risk APNIC assumes, if there is a legal dispute between the members, APNIC could potentially end up in court.

There are a number of factors the EC needs to consider in order to make sure we are supporting the organization long term. We don't know if we will have 50 transfers a year or 5,000 transfers a year.

We have tried to make it equitable, as 20 per cent of the membership fee, so it is the same for someone transferring a /24 as it is for a /16 proportionally to their membership.

Brajesh Jain (Spectranet): Thank you.

Izumi Okutani (JPNIC): I understood APNIC EC has made the decision to charge a transfer fee to cover the admin costs or preparing for the possibility of handling court charges and things like that, I understood that part.

The question I have is the rationale for charging 20 per cent of the membership fee, rather than just charging a flat rate transfer fee, because from my understanding the size of address space being transferred doesn't necessarily correlate with the administration fee, because if a member is really experienced, even the size that is being transferred is large, the cost of evaluation could be low, and even if

somebody is requesting a very small size but a member is inexperienced then it really takes a lot of time to evaluate. So what would be the rationale for charging a proportionate fee to the size of the address?

James Spenceley: Thanks, Izumi. This is certainly something we considered. We put a lot of thought into the transfer process, because with any fee structure there are positives for different types of members and different transfer events. What we tried to do is put a fee structure that certainly covered our cost, based on the historical amount of transfers we have seen. While it is quite low to date, it was part of the rationale.

Secondly, it is fair to say the amount of work that does go into an application for a transfer of a /16 or a /14 is more than a /24. It is still based on justified needs. So the Hostmasters put a lot more work into evaluating somebody requesting a /14 of address space than somebody requesting a /24.

The workload does increase -- possibly not in proportion, but it does increase.

Thirdly, the view is that there is more chance for a legal dispute or issues between members transferring larger amounts of address space. Logically, larger amounts of address space will have much larger values attached to them, which means the court cases could go

on longer, there could be more reasons to have the cases, whereas something for a /24 probably wouldn't justify the legal reasons to have that. That was our thinking behind it.

Izumi Okutani (JPNIC): Thank you.

Andy Linton (NSRC): I will come back to the point I made earlier. You have clearly done a lot of work assessing the costs of doing this assessment and the numbers up there don't bear any relationship to the current initial assessment fee. If the work to assess the requirements and so on currently is $1,900 for a /16, as you say, and $674 for a /20, if I'm applying for a /22, $3,500 seems like an excessive amount compared with that, if you've truly identified the costs in there.

James Spenceley: Again, Andy, it's also to do with the amount of risk APNIC assumes and we have tried to balance that with fairness across people transferring.

Somebody transferring and getting a larger economic benefit pays slightly more.

Andy Linton (NSRC): I'm not talking about these fees being wrong, I'm saying if these represent the costs, then our initial assessment fee of $3,500 represents something that's highly overcharged.

James Spenceley: Point taken.

Gaurab Upadhaya: To reply to Andy, the initial allocation

fee is already paid by these members, because when the initial allocation is made it also includes all the assessment and all the paperwork that needs to be done to create an APNIC account for them. These fees are only applied to existing APNIC members. If somebody transfers a fee into APNIC and becomes a new APNIC member, they will still have to pay the initial assessment fee. That is what we thought.

Rajesh Chharia (ISPAI): If IP resources are coming from different resources to our RIR, APNIC, this is incoming and automatically you are going to collect the -- because his membership status will increase and you are going to take the membership fee from that organization.

OK, then in that case there should not be any transfer fee. But here, I agree that if any IP resources are going from our RIR to a different RIR you should charge the transfer fee because you are losing your money in the admin charges from the resources.

What I suggest is for the incoming IP resources coming into the APNIC RIR, we should not charge any transfer fee because the membership fee has to be paid on a per year basis. One-time charges also. I am speaking of one-time charges only.

Brajesh Jain (Spectranet): I would like to agree with Andy here because, number 1, we saw that the total

number of new members are coming up, so the processing fee per member on whatever cost is accounted, it has to fall. Accordingly, the processing fee probably should be much lower than what it is today, and if it could be reviewed by the EC in that light. I once again request that transfer fees probably for incoming may be considered to be waived. Thank you.

Paul Wilson: I would like to comment on Brajesh's remark there. It's quite true that an incoming transfer will result in an increase of the holdings of the member receiving it, and that member will therefore pay more fees. But those fees will be paid on their renewal date, which could be quite some long time later. So this works in exactly the same way as the receipt of the normal allocation previously, in that the annual membership fee later on will increase.

One of the concerns and one of the reasons for a transaction fee such as this one was that multiple transfers could be undertaken by a group of members which would actually result in no cost recovery by APNIC at all, if the transfer out were conducted prior to the renewal of the membership, because if the transfer of the address space has gone from the membership, then the membership fee is lower, of course.

I think the EC had to consider a number of different

contingencies or scenarios and the possibility that the fee may not be able to recover the cost. Again, the fee being proportional to the size of the allocation is also because it is proportionate to the likely money involved for the transaction. As we have heard, for a very large transaction there could potentially be -- if you believe what we hear -- millions or tens of millions of dollars involved.

We found, in discussion with insurance and lawyers, that if we have a transaction of many millions of dollars and there is a legal problem with that transaction, APNIC having had a role in that transaction makes it quite likely that a legal problem would involve us as well, so we would find ourselves brought to court, to have to answer some claims. Of course, even if we successfully defend those claims, the costs are quite high.

In the case of a very small address transfer, clearly the amount of money involved would be small, the risk is small, but in the case of a large one, the risk could be very high. So if you look at the possibility of large transfers happening in multiple steps or at multiple times without the opportunity to recover that cost, I think this is what the EC was mostly concerned about.

Skeeve Stevens (eintellego): You will be happy this is not about transfer fees, this question.

I would like to know -- this is about the initial allocation fee of $3,500 -- has APNIC got any published information on the rationale of that figure?

Maemura Akinori: For the initial allocation fee?

Skeeve Stevens (eintellego): The $3,500, even in non-LLDC places like Australia, where small businesses find that extremely struggling to deal with, I would like to know where the cost justification is, what the analysis is of the $3,500, especially these days, when we are talking about the initial members only getting a /22. I do understand what the purpose was in the past, where there was a significant amount of effort required to train new members, justifications, submissions and everything else like that. Given what new members get these days from APNIC, which is a tiny bit of address space and an AS number perhaps, I'm not sure where I see the justification of $3,500. I would like to see a report from the EC, perhaps prepared internally, which justifies that and, as a comparison to other RIRs and what they do. Because from what I know at the moment, with RIPE considering flat rate yearly fees of $2,500, whether you have a /22 or a /12 and things like that, they might have 8,000 members, but we all have access to the same software, the same expertise, the same staffing, why are other RIRs able to provide much more cheaper costs for these sorts of things? I think a request that the $3,500 is justified, I realise it applies to LLDP, where, for example, new members in Cambodia are paying 50 per cent or whatever that is, but it doesn't mean that there aren't poor little companies that want portable space in Australia, New Zealand, Japan and places that aren't on those spaces, where $4,000 is a massive burden. I know one member here, who is from Australia, who wants to get a /22 but he's a sole trader, and $4,000, he has appealed to me and said, "Skeeve, what can I do about the $4,000? It's what I live on per month." He's not from an LLDP, but that $4,000 just to get a /22 to keep his business going because he's got some historical space -- sorry, $4,000 is for a new member, so $600 plus the $3,500 or whatever it is. So that initial allocation, I don't understand where the justification is for it to be that large these days.

James Spenceley: I suppose one thing I have heard today is that people would like us to look at the initial resource application fee, the next time we review fees, so we will absolutely take that on board and address

that as one of our priorities in the December meeting.

The second statement I would like to make is that I suppose the APNIC EC and I as Treasurer have to look at the overall budget of APNIC. It's not physically possible for APNIC to charge a cost recovery basis on everything we do. In that event, we wouldn't be having a meeting here today, we would have to be charging a significantly higher amount to each person who wanted to attend the meeting. We wouldn't be conducting training events, AUSNOG, NZNOG, those types of participation events. There is a lot of stuff APNIC does in the background that it doesn't get cost recovery for.

While we can look at individual fees in their individuality, it's very difficult for us to then provide a lot of the services that APNIC provides to the broader community and to the outreach. I suppose the point I'm trying to make is, looking at the numbers quickly, if we were to take out the resource fee entirely, APNIC would be in deficit for this financial year.

We need to consider the cost structure of APNIC, the long-term viability of APNIC, as well as the individual fees from a cost recovery point of view. Does that make sense?

Skeeve Stevens (eintellego): It completely makes sense.

But then move it around, you are still calling it a resource allocation fee. There are no longer resources to allocate to them. Call it a training leverage fee, if you want, figure out how else to justify the costs.

But at the moment it is still an initial resource allocation fee --

James Spenceley: Absolutely.

Skeeve Stevens (eintellego): -- which you have no justification to do any more, you have done it so many times, $3,500, to allocate someone a /22 and shuffle paperwork around for a few days. You know how many members I set up; this is not a major effort for something like that. I understand you need the money, but we have to figure out how to do that.

Yes, the larger economies will support the cheaper economies and I massively appreciate the training that you do, sending people to Pakistan, to Cambodia and all those places and they have to be paid for, and I understand the cost recovery, but at the moment you have this fee for new members who may not benefit in any way personally by that specific resource allocation fee.

They don't understand it.

James Spenceley: The purpose behind the resource fee is when you apply for resources, you are getting benefit, you are getting the resources. These are a scarce

resource, at the end of the day. They will run out. If you make it more accessible in terms of fees, then they will run out faster. So there are a number of issues that need to be balanced. I'm not saying that is a bad thing, but there are a number of issues we need to balance.

It seems like a flat fee potentially isn't equitable, if somebody is taking a /22 versus somebody taking a /16. Again, when we look at the fees in December, I will absolutely take that on board, and potentially it may make sense to move that initial fee down but increase the ongoing fee to account for members having more resources, some change around that.

If it is a barrier to entry for people getting resources and especially in least developing countries, that's something we will take on board.

Skeeve Stevens (eintellego): It's not so much the barrier for entry, but for people to be innovative. We want people to come up with new solutions, IPv6 and many different things, where what they need might not be very much. They might need a single /24 to make themselves multi-homed and do a few different things like that but when they are a small business in innovation and have this barrier of $3,500 on top of their base level membership, there are people in Australia, New Zealand

and other developed countries that can afford that less than some of the people in the non-developed countries.

This is where the innovations are going to come from, they will come from the very small innovators, and they are the ones who have the barriers at the moment.

James Spenceley: Point taken.

Maemura Akinori: Thank you very much for your valuable input. Thank you very much.

This is concluding the Executive Council report.

Thank you very much.

The next agenda is the Policy SIG report.

Skeeve Stevens (eintellego): No, open mic.

Maemura Akinori: The mic has been open. Thank you very much, Skeeve.

Skeeve Stevens (eintellego): Just a quick question to the EC about the status of the -- I believe in Busan the voting working group and there was the other working group, they were taken back to the EC to decide how to proceed. It's not clear to me what the next steps on those were, so I wanted to understand where the voting group is. It was left with you guys. It's not clear to me -- considering I'm one of the Co-Chairs of the voting working group, I don't know where we are.

Maemura Akinori: Public policy advisory group, as I commented in previous questions, the working group

report was received by the Executive Council and we are now seeking the interest from the government officials who will be the main part of that advisory council, because the government is the primary stakeholder who takes care of public policy. That is the current position.

Skeeve Stevens (eintellego): There were two working groups: the governance; and the voting working group.

You have answered one. What about the other?

Maemura Akinori: I am not very clear for that.

Paul Wilson: There was a question about the APNIC voting structure and some other governance related questions in the survey, as Prof Ang Peng Hwa reported earlier, so that has to be considered by the EC in terms of the response.

Rajesh Chharia (ISPAI): In Busan, as I remember, this voting group was being postponed until the time of the Delhi APNIC Meeting was taking place, but in Delhi we were not able to present, the working group was not able to present the report on one member one vote voting structure group and we hoped it would be postponed. We agreed that in the APNIC survey you have put this as a question but still, in my opinion, the working group is live.

Geoff Huston (APNIC): I would like to communicate to the

meeting a decision taken by the EC in December and put out on the EC web page. You will see it there on the EC web page. It is the EC's review of the report from the membership voting rights working group. I will briefly summarise it, if you wish.

"The EC noted there was no clear consensus from the working group in support of proposing any changes in the existing membership voting tiers, nor have the Chairs noted any visible prospects for achieving consensus in their request for further extension to the charter. The EC noted this was an important topic for APNIC and mindful of the need for clear consensus before making any changes.

"The EC suspended the charter of the working group and said in December it would take the topic of interest in membership structure and voting to the 2012 APNIC membership and stakeholder survey. Through this survey, the EC would like to collect input from members and stakeholders and work through what to do next.

"The EC thanked the members of the working group for their interest and contributions and invited folk with an opinion to say so in the survey." At this particular point, the charter of that working group has been suspended and I understand the next steps will be based around the consideration of the

membership survey that was presented this morning.

That is what was on the web page in December.

I believe that is a summary of the outcomes.

Maemura Akinori: Thank you, Geoff, for the clarification.

Rajesh Chharia (ISPAI): In Busan, during the working group meeting, the working group has sought some detail from the APNIC Secretariat to come to a decision about this complete charter allocated to them for giving their report.

I don't think the working group has some difference of opinion among them, and they have sought some detail from that meeting. I was president of the Busan working group meeting. That's the reason I am saying so.

Maemura Akinori: Our observation was that there was no consensus. That's clear, I think.

Rajesh Chharia (ISPAI): What I will suggest here -- you can seek the information from the working group Co-Chair, because in the last minutes of the meeting of the working group in Busan, they have clearly sought the data from the APNIC Secretariat to come to a conclusion of this issue. May I request that --

Skeeve Stevens (eintellego): I'm Co-Chair of the former voting working group. I'm happy where we are at the moment with regards to the report being handed back.

The consensus was not full, and the EC put it into the

member survey. The data was released in the reports.

I would like to look at the data and see what people thought about the voting and things like that and then, based on that data, we will review whether we have to re-establish that or if there was enough interest in the RIR. Given that the process has been followed and the working group suspended, I can only comment about that working group at the moment and I'm happy where it is, but we need to look at the data to be able going forward and, obviously, I need to confer with the Chair as to what his opinion is.

James Spenceley: From my perspective, it was left that there were a number of people that had different opinions in the working group, but the working group participation was not necessarily at a level representative of the 2,500 members at the time or the 3,200 members at the moment, which is why the EC took the decision to put it into the member survey. We have only recently reviewed that member survey, this week, so we will have some time now to see the comments and feedback on voting from the members. It looks like Geoff might have that.

Geoff Huston (APNIC): Just a brief recap from the presentation you saw this morning, in section A3.3, should there be a change in the way votes are allocated,

of the membership and stakeholder survey, 49.7 per cent of respondents responded, keep it as is. 9.5 per cent were in favour of one more vote at the next lower tier and 6.1 per cent were in favour of 8 more votes in the next lower tier. That is what was presented.

You will need, as an EC, to look at this in more detail, but that seems to be the top level bits of the membership survey.

James Spenceley: Thank you, Geoff. We will have access to more data from that survey, to answer specific comments on the record or feedback. That was very useful, and that is the next thing for the EC to consider, the results of that survey and the importance of voting changes to the membership.

Maemura Akinori: Thank you very much. If we don't have any other comments on our open microphone session, then I want to move on to the SIG reports.

The first of the SIG reports is the Policy SIG.

Andy is coming.

Andy Linton: I have a few items to cover off with you.

The first item is the Policy SIG Co-Chair election, which was the first item on the agenda on Tuesday.

Congratulations to Masato Yamanishi, who was re-elected for a two-year term.

I would like to thank the other nominees who stood.

Just a note to you that there was a change to the draft SIG guidelines, which didn't have any effect this time, but I want to note it was there: "Following consultation with the community and the APNIC EC, it was agreed that newly appointed Chairs, although they will be elected at the start of the meeting, will take up their seat at the end of the meeting. Newly elected Chairs will join the outgoing Chairs for the meeting so there is better continuity in the policy process. Outgoing Chairs are expected to follow proposals reaching consensus at the current OPM through to the completion of the policy development process." The Chair and Co-Chairs take quite a lot of interest in the consensus process, as you would imagine, and we felt it was useful to allow that interest to follow right through for the whole life cycle of a proposal, rather than have people arrive on stage with no experience of what was going on. We have done that after discussion with the EC and the community.

In this case, it didn't have any effect because Masato was being re-elected, so it was not an issue.

We had four proposals in front of us from the call for proposals. The first one we received a proposal for was carried over from the last meeting, prop-99, about

IPv6 reservation for large networks. The aim was to allow multiple prefix requests within a reserved space.

The proposal talked about justification for up to five years, and a reservation under that policy would expire after two years.

That proposal was withdrawn before the meeting because other events overtook it, in that prop-102 and some changes to the documentation carried over from the previous meeting. Actually it meant that the author felt it was no longer necessary. It was a good example of cooperation and discussion on the list between various people, who said, "Do we need this?" It was a good example of our process in action.

We also had prop-101 returned from the mailing list, removing multi-homing requirement for IPv6 portable assignments. The aims were to remove that requirement from IPv6 assignment policy and would be available to those had already had an existing IPv4 assignment or a reasonable technical justification. There was some discussion in the meeting about what that would mean.

There is a set of IPv6 allocation guidelines which are effectively an appendix to the way the policy works and the meeting felt that as long as the list was well documented and well publicised, that is an effective way to manage this.

The proposal reached consensus, so we here today will be seeking consensus from the member meeting on that one.

Prop-103, the final IP address policy proposal, the aim was to reduce the number of policy proposals discussed by the Policy SIG. There were two versions from the author and then some discussion of the suggestion from the mailing list. The main thrust of where we got to before the proposal was withdrawn during the meeting was that discussion of problems should precede proposal submission. I suspect this hasn't gone away, this issue, and the questions. It was withdrawn by the author, so it neither went to consensus nor failed to reach consensus.

Prop-104, clarifying demonstrated needs requirement in the IPv4 transfer policy, it extended the demonstrated need evaluation period for IPv4 transfers to allow for larger block sizes and the proposal sought to increase the demonstrated need evaluation period for IPv4 transfer from 12 months to 24 months. Again, that reached consensus, so we are here today seeking consensus from the AMM.

We also had three informational presentations, one which was about adjusting critical infrastructure definitions to include Internet RPKI, one about address

reallocation among RIRs, and one about discussions, leading from some discussions in Japan about delegations of IPv4 address space in the APNIC free pool. Each of the authors, I believe, was seeking the feedback of the meeting to see if there was an interest in these issues and taking them forward to perhaps a more formal policy proposal.

The meeting gave some feedback and people learnt some things and so on, so we had three of those.

Lastly, we had an update from the Secretariat about some work being done on streamlining our documentation procedures and also merging our resource policies into a single document. We have documents which have similar but perhaps competing definitions in multiple places, so bringing all that into one place. That document will be put in front of the community for feedback and ratification, I suppose.

The idea is to improve transparency and access, reduce opportunity for error and reduce Secretariat workload.

That's the last slide and I'm happy to take any questions on that.

Maemura Akinori: Thank you very much, Andy. Questions or comments? This is the process to confirm the consensus of the

Policy SIG at the APNIC Member Meeting. Once we have the slides up, I can proceed with that.

First, I would like to ask you for the support, if you support the prop-101 "Removing multi-homing requirement for IPv6 portable assignments", which reached consensus in the Policy SIG.

I am now asking those who support this proposal with consensus, please raise your hand.

Thank you very much.

Those who are against this proposal, please raise your hand.

OK. I think this is a consensus of the member meeting to endorse this prop-101. Thank you very much.

Next is prop-104, "Clarifying demonstrated needs requirement in IPv4 transfer policy", which reached consensus in the Policy SIG.

Again, I will do the same thing. Right now, I am asking those who support prop-104, please raise your hand.

Thank you very much.

Those who are against the prop-104 to supporting AMM, please raise your hand.

No one. Then I think this is the consensus of the ...

POWER BLACKOUT

Maemura Akinori: For sure, prop-104 has reached consensus.

APPLAUSE

Skeeve Stevens (eintellego): That's what you call policy.

Maemura Akinori: For sure, we need the recording, so I need to stop the process of the AMM. Please wait.

Sunny Chendi: Can I request all the delegates to stay in the room. It is completely dark outside. The whole hotel has lost power. In case you should fall over or anything. Please stay in the room and they will restore the power as soon as they can. Just for your own safety. Thank you.

Maemura Akinori: The PA is coming back.

Please let me know if we are ready.

Paul Wilson: APNIC folks, can we continue with the reports now with the projectors or are they still out? It seems we still don't have our connectivity back.

We can continue with the stenographers taking the notes, but the notes won't be sent out. They will be kept for the record, though.

I think we can continue with the reports.

Maemura Akinori: I think that is very good timing. We had two proposals from the Policy SIG which had the consensus from the AMM, then the Policy SIG part is over, I think.

The next SIG report is from Izumi for the NIR SIG.

Izumi Okutani: Hi, I'm Izumi. I would like to give an update of what we discussed in NIR SIG.

Just to briefly summarise, NIR SIG is a SIG which shares information about NIR activities for better collaboration between NIRs, as well as APNIC. Mostly the people who attend are NIR and APNIC staff, but of course non-NIR people are welcome to attend as well.

We have one news about operation of the SIG. We have been having a Co-Chair, Ji-Young Lee from KISA, but her term has ended, she is on maternity leave, so she will be no longer with us, which is a bit of a shame, but I wish her all the best in raising a happy family.

The current Chair and Co-Chair is myself, Izumi Okutani, and Jessica Shen from APNIC, who is sitting over there, and you can see her photo on the slide.

The current NIR, we have seven NIRs because we have had IRINN, which is an NIR from India, newly established since APNIC 33. I'm sorry it says "NIXI", because I could not find the latest logo, but I understand the proper name is IRINN. That's the new name for NIR from India.

The NIR SIG this time, we have roughly 20 attendees, so small numbers, mainly APNIC and NIR staff. We had updates from four NIRs and two policy related

presentations. Both policy related presentations were presented at the Policy SIG as well.

Most of the updates from NIR focused on how they support IPv6 deployment in their economies, through training, providing test environment or getting involved in World IPv6 Launch.

A couple of points I thought were interesting from the updates, for example: CNNIC organized an event on the day of World IPv6 Launch and they set up IPv6 pilot centre on that day, which is to provide testing facilities for IPv6 deployment for their ISPs, and they also set up IPv6 Task Force. I believe some of the APNIC staff were invited to the event as well.

IDNIC is doing monitoring of IPv6 users. I have heard it is similar research as Geoff's method, as what Geoff does, and I think the percentage of users is very similar to the rest of the region as well. They are also doing a roadshow to raise more awareness about the situation, to corporate users and for governments as well.

In the case of Taiwan, TWNIC, they are getting government involved in this. They have conducted a survey to 826 of their government units and they have received the results of the survey, 66 per cent of the units will be supporting IPv6 by 2013.

The last one was an update from KRNIC, which is doing consulting for those who need technical support individually, and they have consulted on, I think, 10 organizations so far on IPv6 deployment, and they are also doing a project with SKT to set up IPv6 for LTE.

So they are hoping that as a result of this people will be able to reach IPv6 content through LTE.

That is basically the notable points I found from the SIG.

If you would like to find more information, you can find the details there, and you can find a link to NIR SIG mailing list as well. Thank you.

Maemura Akinori: Thank you very much, Izumi.

Questions or comments? Thank you, Izumi.

APPLAUSE

Maemura Akinori: Next we have the APIX report from Chee-Hoo Cheng from HKIX.

Chee-Hoo Cheng: I do a quick update about APIX, and I do it on behalf of Toyama-san from Japan.

APIX stands for Asia Pacific Internet Exchange, an association of ISPs in the region, very much like Euro-IX. Our objectives are to share information about technical, operational and business issues and solutions regarding Internet exchanges.

Right now we have 15 members, 15 IXPs as our members. We are glad to have IIX from Indonesia as our new member.

The topics that we will discuss in our meetings include a lot of operational, technical and business issues. I won't go through this.

We are still in the formation stage, we only have an interim board. We have Toyama-san from JPNAP, Raphael Ho from Equinix Asia Pacific, myself from HKIX, Gaurab from NPIX, and Kato-san from Dix-ie of Japan.

We have had six meetings and, of course, the last meeting was held here in Phnom Penh, and our meetings are for IXPs only, but we also invite our supporters and sponsors to attend part of our meeting.

During our meeting here, we are glad that we have a very good turn-out. We have 20-something people attending from around 10 IXP members, which is really good. Also we have to thank our sponsor, APNIC, for providing the facilities and other support.

The summary of our meeting here: we discussed our by-laws again and we finally reached the consensus and we will adopt that as our by-laws. We also got consensus to sign the MOU with other IXP associations around the world, including Euro-IX and LAC-IX, regarding the global IXP federation. Of course, APIX

will contribute to the global APIX confederation.

We also got consensus about the process of how to hold the next steering committee election. We intend to have that at our very first official AGM to be held in Singapore, along with APRICOT.

We also have started to design our logo, and we will put up a competition for that. I'm not sure about the prize, but anyway, if you have any idea about how to design the APIX logo, you are welcome to submit it to us.

We also discussed about the legal entity, possible legal entity for the APIX association. We have not come to a conclusion, but I think our consensus is we do not set up our own legal entity for now, until we are bigger in size. We may ask for help from our friendly associations to help us to establish our legal entity.

At the meeting we had some technical discussions and ISP updates. I won't go through those.

The next step. As I said, we will hold our next meeting at APRICOT Singapore, and at that time we hope we can have formally set up the new steering committee or board and we hope we can formalise our logo and decide on how we take care of the legal entity and, for sure, we will have more technical and operational discussions there.

OK, that's it. Thank you.

Maemura Akinori: Thank you very much.

APPLAUSE This concludes all reports for the APNIC Member Meeting.

The next session is titled "APNIC 35 and APRICOT 2013." I should invite Michelle from SGNIC to introduce.

Michelle (SGNIC): Hi, everyone. Seeing I am one of the last people between you and your lunch, I shall keep this really short and sweet.

I believe you guys have already heard the next APRICOT 2013 meeting will be in Singapore, in conjunction with APNIC 35. It will be held from 19 February to 1 March, and it will be at the Shangri-la Hotel. For those of you who are still unfamiliar with Singapore, we have prepared a short video for you.

VIDEO PLAYS I hope you enjoyed the video. I can show you that Singapore has more things to offer than those that you saw in the video. So with this I would like to extend a very warm welcome to you guys to attend APRICOT 2013 in Singapore.

Last but not least, just to give some incentive to you guys, all APNIC 34 delegates who register for

APRICOT 2013 by 31 October, you will stand to receive one complimentary day pass to Universal Studios Singapore.

We look forward to seeing you next year.

APPLAUSE

Maemura Akinori: Thank you very much.

This is all of the APNIC 35 and APRICOT 2013.

Then before the vote of thanks, I have something to announce. It is also the Executive Council's role to determine the venue for the August meeting. The February meeting was decided by APRICOT by the APIA. We had multiple proposals for APNIC 36, and after we had the presentation from the host candidate and we considered the various aspects, the Executive Council determined that the APNIC 36 will be going to Xian, China. I would like to invite Wendy Zhao, as the host company, to say something.

Wei Zhao: Thank you, everyone. Sorry to hold you back from lunch. I will make it really short, if you would like me to finish within one minute.

First of all, I would like to thank APNIC senior staff and EC members for bringing the APNIC Meeting to China again. We hosted APNIC, I think it was 28 in Beijing, and this time we choose Xian, which is the very rich cultural and history city, which has more than

3,000 years of history, which joins the fame with Rome, Athens, and the last one is Cairo. So you will have a very good experience there hopefully and we will try our best to deliver a very good meeting. Thank you very much. Welcome to Xian.

Maemura Akinori: Thank you very much, Wendy. I would like to express our appreciation to another candidate who is OPT from New Caledonia, who proposed the meeting for Noumea.

It was a really tough decision for us to choose one from these two excellent proposals, but this is my decision, and I think I invite you to give appreciation to OPT. Thank you very much.

APPLAUSE We have the decision for the APRICOT 2015.

Philip Smith: I will just be quick. It's not really a decision as such, in that APIA and APAN have been discussing another joint meeting, after the success of APRICOT 2011 and the APAN meeting we had in Hong Kong.

I just want to announce here that APRICOT 2015, APAN 39 and APNIC 39 will be held in Fukuoka, Japan in early March 2015.

APPLAUSE This is planning miles ahead, I know, but just so you can start planning your travel diaries.

Maemura Akinori: Thank you very much, Philip. Please allow me to add some words. I am from Fukuoka, which is my mother's town and my mother's language is not standard Japanese but a dialect of Japanese. I would like to invite you to Fukuoka by the word, "Kinshai", which is "Please come". "Kinshai to Fukuoka". Thank you very much.

Ole Jacobson: The dates are 24 February to 6 March.

Maemura Akinori: 24 February to 6 March 2015. That is a bit far away, but please prepare.

This is the very last part of the APNIC Member Meeting, which is the vote of thanks. I will leave it to Paul Wilson.

Paul Wilson: Thank you very much, Akinori, thanks everyone. The point of this final session is just to acknowledge all of the support we have from many different organizations in running a successful meeting here.

We really do rely on the sponsors, the generosity of many different sponsors and supporters who have helped with this meeting, as many have in the past and as I hope many will in the future as well.

The meeting was supported by NiDA of Cambodia and I would like to offer a gift to Madam Sok Channda.

Thank you.

APPLAUSE We had a silver sponsor in Google, and I think Jake Chen, our familiar Google rep, has returned with his gift already, but we would like to thank Google very much for their ongoing support.

APPLAUSE Likewise, silver sponsor in PHCOLO, who has also been a regular of ours. Judith could not come this year but she has sent David. If David is in the room, I would be able to say thanks in person. But we will pass that on to PHCOLO. Thanks to them.

APPLAUSE A bronze sponsor, Sabay. Mai Gardener.

That is for Sabay and we will pass that on to Madam Sok Channda as well.

The women in ICT event was sponsored by MekongNet and again by PHCOLO, thanks to them. That is a great addition to the APNIC program and I would like to say thanks.

For today, four of our NIRs have come to support the APNIC Member Meeting, TWNIC, CNNIC, APJII and KISA.

That support is really well appreciated. This final event of the meeting is a really important thing for all members, and the regular support from the NIRs is really well appreciated.

APPLAUSE If there are representatives, I do have some certificates here.

CERTIFICATES PRESENTED Thanks again to the NIRs.

APPLAUSE We had two regional hubs here. There was the Nepalese regional hub, run by NREN and by NPIX, and we do hope that the regional hub participants back in Nepal were able to get some value and see what happens at the APNIC Meeting. Thank you to those people for participating.

Thank you, Gaurab, for your role in those.

The other regional hub was at APJII. Thanks again to APJII and to everyone who participated from Indonesia.

Many more thanks, the keynote speaker and election Chair was Prof Kanchana, who came to us from Thailand.

Thanks very much to Kanchana.

SIG choirs and Co-Chairs and moderators -- Izumi, Jessica and Ji-Young, Andy, Masato and Skeeve, Kuo-Wei Wu, Vu The Binh and Dean Pemberton -- thank you for your contributions to the program this week, which I think has been a really successful program. Thank you.

APNIC EC and staff, colleagues from the other RIRs,

all of our speakers and workshop instructors -- there are too many to list here. One that I would like to give a special welcome to -- a special thanks to also are the fellows who came here under the fellowship program, many for the first time, and that fellowship program is sometimes externally sponsored -- in this case it was sponsored by APNIC itself, in other words by the APNIC membership, so I would like to thank the APNIC members in particular on behalf of the sponsors.

Once again, the stenocaptioners, Nicky and Helen, who always amaze everybody with the job that they do here.

Thanks to all of you for coming, thanks for participating here in the room, for coming a long way to do so, and also for sitting patiently at home or in your offices and participating remotely.

To all of those people, let's give them a big round of applause. Thanks.

APPLAUSE Last but not least, the local host. I would ask Madam Sok Channda to come again, and I think MekongNet did a really fantastic job with this meeting, great venue, really great support from the MekongNet staff and everyone who they helped to arrange to be here to help us. Here we have one of these. And something which

I hope you will enjoy very much.

APPLAUSE As you heard, the next APNIC Conference is with APRICOT, APNIC 35, APRICOT 2013, hosted by SGNIC and the IDA. We do look forward to seeing you all here.

I really hope that everyone here can come back and bring your friends and colleagues as well, and really get something special out of that next meeting.

You have also heard that the APNIC 36 meeting in 12 months will be in Xian, which is a very historical city in the Shaanxi province of China. It's home to the thousands of terra cotta warriors, if you are not aware, the ones that were discovered only a few decades ago buried underground. It is a fantastic historical site.

You will hear more about that in six months, at the next meeting.

We are doing pretty well with the planning these days. You can see APRICOT 2014 and APNIC 37 in Bangkok; APRICOT 2015 with APAN and APNIC 39 in Fukuoka, Japan.

With that, thank you, see you all in Singapore.

Back to the Chair, Akinori.

Maemura Akinori: Thank you very much, Paul.

All right. Everything is done now. So thank you very much everyone. APNIC 34 and the APNIC Member Meeting is over. Thank you very much.

APPLAUSE