ARIN 48 Election Forum Transcript - Thursday, 28 October 2021 [Archived]

Opening and Announcements

Jason Byrne: Welcome, everyone. I hope you’re all doing well today. We’re here for the ARIN 48 election forum. I’m Jason Byrne, Senior Customer Success Analyst here at ARIN. As part of that role I help facilitate the ARIN elections.

I’ll be walking you through some general overview information about elections and voting. And then I’ll be getting out of the way and letting you hear directly from the candidates.

Next slide. Just some reminders to start off with, if you’re in chat, we’re asking you, of course, to be professional, on topic and follow the ARIN Standards of Behavior.

Next slide. Some rules and reminders, most of these have to do with the Candidate Forums later on where ARIN’s president and CEO will moderate forums, presenting questions sourced from the community where we had the email and surveys that went out earlier, asking people to submit questions and then rank them.

Candidates will each have a limited amount of time to respond with preselected questions in order to have a chance to hear from everyone. And the Standards of Behavior mentioned earlier are in your Discussion Guide at the URL below.

And next slide. Okay, slides and recordings. We’re recording and livestreaming. Recordings of the candidate speeches and election forums will be available as soon as possible after the meeting, and transcripts will also be available. And you can see the URLs there on your screen.

Next slide. The ARIN 48 website – if you participated in the Public Policy meetings last week you’ve probably already been there. But if you haven’t or if you’re planning on going to the Members Meeting later, the website is a lot more than just registration; there’s agendas and media resources. And we advise you to check it out.

Next slide. Big thank you to our ARIN 48 Network Sponsors, USI and Lumen. We couldn’t do it without the assistance of sponsors.

Next slide. And here’s our agenda for today. As I said, we’ll do a brief overview of the election and voting information. And then we’ll let you hear directly from the candidates with the candidate speeches. We’ll have a short break and then we’ll have a Board candidate forum and then an AC candidate forum.

And with that, I think we’re ready to go into the elections overview.

ARIN Elections Overview

As I said, I’m Jason Byrne, Senior Customer Success Analyst here at ARIN, and I facilitate the election process.

Next slide. For years we’ve actually had a really robust section on our website which we call the Election Headquarters. As you can see it’s at https://arin.net/elections.

We have statements of support that will be open until voting closes on November 12th. I think we’re currently just about at 170 statements of support submitted so far this year. You can go there to peruse what other people in the community have said about candidates or make your own statements. We have the election calendar and all the process documentation of how we run the elections as well as step-by-step instructions on voting with screen shots and everything else to help you if you get confused.

Next slide. This year is an NRO NC election year; we have two years where they’re elected and one year where they’re appointed. As such we have two different ways for you to participate in voting.

The primary one is the ARIN elections where Voting Contacts of eligible general Members in Good Standing as of 20 September 2021 may log in to ARIN Online and select the “vote now” link when voting is open. They may cast ballots for the Board, the Advisory Council and the NRO NC Representative. Voting will open on November 4th and continue until November 12th at 5:00 p.m. For the NRO NC elections, if you’re not already a Voting Contact and you’re a meeting attendee for NANOG 83 or ARIN 48, who registered by 1:00 PM today – so basically everyone here and anyone else who signed up for NANOG – you’ll be emailed a personalized custom link to our voting system. And those will be sent out around 1:00 on Monday, November 1st. And that will provide you a link to vote for the ARIN elections – for the NRO NC. Again, that opens on November the 1st and closes at 5:00 PM on the 12th.

Next slide. Some important reminders, as we get asked about this continually. A member organization must have been a Member in Good Standing and had a designated Voting Contact on record as of the 20th of September, 2021 to participate. And the only individual authorized to cast a vote is the Voting Contact that was on the record as of that time. If you changed the Voting Contact, that may hamper your eligibility. You can change it back, but the voting is connected to the Voting Contact that was designated as of that deadline.

Next slide, please. So now we actually present you your final slate of candidates.

For the Board, we have Bram Abramson, Dan Alexander, Jeffrey Bedser, Ron da Silva and Peter Harrison.

Next slide. For the Advisory Council we have Jeffry Handal, Kat Hunter, Brian Jones, Karl Morin, Amy Potter, Kerrie Richards, Rob Seastrom, Alicia Trotman, and Chris Woodfield. One small note that on the 25th of October Sami Sabat withdrew themselves from the final slate.

Next slide. Then we have NRO Number Council candidates – John Barfield and Chris Quesada.

Next slide. With that, any questions about what we’ve covered so far? We’re going to jump into the candidate speeches next if not. But I’d be happy to answer any questions.

If anyone does have any questions going forward, the best place to reach out to is [email protected], and we will get back to you as soon as possible with anything, whether before the elections or during.

I don’t see any questions.

Beverly Hicks: Looks like your questions are clear.

Jason Byrne: Let’s start the videos, then.

ARIN Board of Trustees Candidate Speeches

Voiceover: The first set of candidate speeches will come from those running for the ARIN Board of Trustees.

Bram Abramson: Hello to the ARIN members and to the many friends tuning in and greetings from Toronto. [Untranslated French]. And thanks to all of you for considering my candidacy for ARIN’s Board of Trustees.

Now, ARIN plays an important role in the Internet governance ecosystem. That ecosystem is largely self-governing. It’s not run by governments or nation states. And it continues to work because its stakeholders invest time and energy in stewarding it responsibly. I believe that stewardship has been effective in part because it’s balanced its needs for insiders, outsiders and for expertise. Internet governance is mature because it strikes that balance.

In the past I’ve been involved with ARIN as a stakeholder and as a volunteer. As a stakeholder I’ve advised ARIN members both as an employee and as an outside consultant and lawyer in various settings where ARIN resources were at issue. As a volunteer I’ve sat on selection committees and attended ARIN as a fellow and run for this Board before, in 2019. So, thanks for considering my candidacy a second time.

The current Board’s instructions to the Nominating Committee identify specific priority gap areas to fill in the Board. Those include experience in related industry sectors, experience dealing with legal or risk management situations and the ability to understand risks that may affect ARIN and its community. I believe that I can provide those skills. So I’m here to volunteer them and ask you to use one of your votes to support me.

Working at the Canadian Telecom Regulator early in my career taught me about going on roadshows, consulting widely with stakeholders, understanding how solutions need to work across the Board and where the art of compromise and silver second thought fits in. My role running legal and regulatory as an ISP employee just after the Edward Snowden disclosures thrust me in the hot fire of privacy rights and law enforcement. And I did a lot of work to systematize and balance those.

My broad work today in private practice on complying with and advancing data privacy, making and testing telecom policy, and dealing with regulations both in terms of their intent and their burden gives me a wide lens on the kind of work that ARIN does. I’ve advised and am certified on Board governance and fiduciary duty. As a former financial analyst, policymaker, and lawyer with experience in multiple arenas within the telecom and Internet worlds, I can compare and contrast in ways that I think will help me ask the right questions for the Board of Trustees and as part of the Board of Trustees.

If you support me you’ll get someone with a long history in networking governance, training, and experience in advising on and providing fiduciary oversight and a background in financial, legal, and risk analysis. Those skills are ones that I think are appropriate to the Board and that’s why I’m asking for your vote.

Dan Alexander: I’m Dan Alexander. I want to thank all the members who supported the petition making it possible for me to speak with you today. My hope is that I can extend the support to also include a vote for me in the election.

While there are always ways we can improve the election process, it was good to see the petition process pass the test as a possible resource. Updated Board guidance along with better options for the NomCom petitioner and staff to communicate would all help improve the election process. More balanced timeline, increased transparency, and a look at the required levels of support could also help.

I think the membership needs transparency and visibility into the work and decisions made by the Board. How else can the members effectively provide feedback and evaluate their performance? The members elect the Board for their experience and ability to serve the membership but to do so as openly as possible. While the election process is something we can and should work on, there are other Board topics that will benefit from active community input. As I mentioned in my questionnaire, ARIN fees, registry accuracy, a healthy transfer market, a healthy RIR system, operational excellence, government relations, internal governance, and organizational transparency are all topics that would benefit from active conversations, like the one we’re having with this election.

I have years of network operator experience working for a large ISP. I have previously been on the ARIN Board and served several terms on the Advisory Council. I survived IPv4 runout. I’ve deployed IPv6. I’m an active user of ARIN’s services. And I currently manage IP resources on a daily basis. I believe these are all things that make me uniquely qualified to bring a well-reasoned perspective to the Board.

I’m confident my experience can help lead this organization, and I have been thankful for the confidence you’ve placed with me in the past. I’d like to serve on the Board with a focus on your input and interests. And I ask you for your vote. Thank you and take care.

Jeffrey Bedser: Hi, I’m Jeff Bedser. I’m the CEO of iThreat Software Group. It’s a company that specializes in DNS abuse and threat intelligence and DNS abuse management. I’ve also been a very active member of the Security and Stability Advisory Council for ICANN since 2006, and I currently sit as Vice Chairman of the Board of Public Interest Registry, PIR, the folks that run .org.

I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m running for the ARIN Board of Trustees. It really comes down to a background I’ve got in the DNS industry as far as a financial technical as well as policy background. I see it’s very important to balance the mitigation of cybercrime and malicious activities online that target and victimize the end users of the Internet with privacy considerations and with other considerations around personal freedoms. I think that as an ecosystem both can be handled together in a way that allows for a safer Internet and avoids the potential for governments to start deploying regulations in the regions that ARIN serves that would compromise those freedoms and those privacies that we all enjoy.

Working in the technology and policy space I think gives really great opportunities for someone like me to bring to the ARIN Board of Trustees assistance in understanding where different parties lie and where their experiences bring them to the conclusions, whether it be on a cultural, nationality, job function, or role, to look for those commonalities that help us understand where the critical paths are to finding solutions to all the problems when it comes to the cybercrime and the abuse issues and enterprise issues.

Finally, I’d like to say I really appreciate your support, if you’d be willing to vote for me. I’m excited for the opportunity that running for the Board of Trustees has given me. And if selected, I would serve and be serving the Internet community. Thank you.

Ron da Silva: Hello everybody, Ron da Silva here. I stand before you looking for your support as I run for the Board of Trustees of ARIN. First of all, I need to begin with a thank you, a sincere thank you to the many of you who overwhelmingly supported the petition process. Without you I wouldn’t be here today and providing my credentials and my history and my interests and why I’m here in the first place. So, thank you to you, and thank you to the rest of you for listening as I share for you this morning.

So, that said, I was asked what – what’s my history. What are my qualifications? Where do I come from? And those of you that don’t know me, I’ve been involved in ARIN for a very long time, throughout my career. I started early on. I jumped into the Advisory Council. I chaired that for five years. I later served on the NRO for five years. And then as many of you realize, the NRO appoints two of the members of the ICANN Board – I served in that capacity for six years. So a lot of experience in leadership and in governance, and I bring that back to you today. It seemed like a natural path to come back. To me, it feels like coming home and bringing all that experience and qualifications and leadership and bringing it to a place where I can serve and give back to our community here at ARIN.

But then I’m asked, what are some of the issues that are important to me. I really think of three. One, what happened in the DNS with regards to GDBR and Whois compliance and how a lot of that value and information was sort of diminished as an organization’s registries and registrars all tried to find ways to comply with a variety of different requirements. I’m afraid we’ll run into something similar if we don’t get ahead of that in the numbering space. That’s something that’s important to me.

I look at the geopolitical impacts, in particular seeing what’s happening in AFRINIC in the Mauritius courts. And I think it’s important for us to be sensitive to what those geopolitical risks are and how they could impact the numbering system as a whole and more specifically, how that could impact ARIN and what role ARIN should have in a much broader geopolitical landscape.

Lastly, I look at how many people in our region are still without broadband. And this is sort of a personal conviction, personal interest of mine. Is there something that can be done with ARIN’s unique role to help encourage and support what’s happening with stimulus funds and enabling broadband for everybody in our region? It’s a little bit outside our remit, I realize that, but perhaps there’s something we can do.

Lastly, I’ve got to come back to the NomCom. I’ve heard from many of you that there’s better governance that can be applied here – more transparency, more accountability. I think that’s low-hanging fruit I want to tackle at the very beginning, as a new member of the Board. And I think there’s some good work we can do there. So, without further ado, thank you for your support. And I look forward to working for you. Thanks.

Peter Harrison: ARIN’s governance must be strong. If this is important to you, then vote for me. Our membership expects us to be both flexible and firm, a hybrid organization. This creates both short- and long-term challenges. I propose a way forward.

As a member of the Finance Committee I participated in stricter controls, balanced budgets, and a selection of vendors who are more invested in our destiny. Facilitated by technical debt reduction, ARIN’s Engineering Services must exceed member expectations, or cyberattack exposure must be minimized; we cannot be complacent.

I will monitor this. With ARIN-sponsored CARIBNOG, CarPIF, and regional government forums, my understanding of the Caribbean landscape has evolved. I’ve supported regional Internet resilience as a part of the Grant Program Committee. Committee feedback isn’t always continuous and consistent. Increased R&D investment should explore new opportunities to create scalable, effective, and meaningful services, useful for business and the public good.

I will continue to challenge the executive leadership on this. Your vote for me will advance these causes. The challenges of IPv6 adoption and promotion will continue. As the overhead of IPv4 management subsides, ARIN’s software role will regain prominence. Its positions in societal well-being – mainly cloud services, cybersecurity, education, privacy, regulation, and law enforcement – will be monitored more closely. This challenge isn’t just technical, as in RPKI, RDAP or DNSSEC. As mentioned before, it will also extend to ARIN’s data governance.

We need to be bolder. The governance of the organization needs to mature to minimize the risk to its future. The nomination process is frequently debated and is being addressed. But there’s more. The committee needs to have a better understanding of what the Board does. The transition process for Board and membership turnover needs to be fine-tuned. We need to explore new sources and representations of data to make strategic decisions. The Board structure must be periodically reviewed. There may be Board operation changes that need community input. These topics and more don’t surface in our daily community communications, but need to be addressed as part of my ongoing role with the Board’s Governance Working Group.

There’s more to explore. You will hear more if you vote for me. We need to identify and credibly manage tomorrow’s dangers. It extends beyond recent RIR circumstances, greater awareness of the type and size of ARIN’s principal risks as needed. Its management must be an integral component of strategy, culture, and operations. New risk and strategy Board committees will ensure comprehensive oversight. I will lobby for this.

Finally, internal risks must not be forgotten. The pandemic has created unexpected illness and death. The Board must continue its work with the Executive Team to develop and approve succession plans for various scenarios. This would include a process to develop key staff members, promote a culture that encourages professional development, and consider transition details. This helps to create the orderly transition the community would expect.

There are many things to consider when casting your vote. These areas must be addressed. If strong governance is important to you, then vote for me. Our challenges this decade are hybrid. We must be firm and flexible. The membership believed I could bring transformation. I know that support will continue. Thank you.

ARIN AC Candidate Speeches

Voiceover: We welcome the next group of candidates. They are running for the ARIN Advisory Council.

Jeffry Handal: I’m Jeffry Handal. And I’m a self-proclaimed IPv6 evangelist.

But in all seriousness, I’m a Cisco engineer that works in the Meraki division. One of the things I’ve learned over time is how to make things simple. Doesn’t mean we dumb it down. It just means is it easy to understand. Is it something I can relate to? Does it help me solve a problem? And that’s the kind of point of view I want to bring to the table for the ARIN Board is – look at rules, regulations, adoption; what’s going on? What’s broken? And best of all, listen. Because that’s one of the things that it really takes to make things simpler is to listen: Where are the caveats? Where are the things that are misunderstood? Because by making things simpler we make it easier to understand, easier to adopt. That’s one of the things we want to look for in any organization is that our rules and regulations are adopted, that they are understood. And that makes everybody’s lives easier from the regulators to the Board members to everybody that we serve with the precious resource which is IP.

Now, I’d like to make a call to action to make sure that you run IPv6. But remember it’s not dual stack anymore. The days of that are over. It’s IPv6 only. And also vote for me. Thank you very much.

Kat Hunter: Hello, everyone. My name is Kathleen Hunter, and I’m running for my second term on the Advisory Council. I want to take the time to thank everyone who has given me the opportunity to serve my first term. Thank you to the members for voting for me. And thank you to the Nomination Committee for your vote of confidence for another term.

In my day job, I manage the number resources from ARIN down to the edge customer for voice, video, and data at Comcast. More recently, I’ve been involved in assisting our security and business teams on issues involving SWIP, fraud, and geolocation. In addition, I have experience working with our RPKI teams and continue to do some work with the international registries.

During my first two years on the AC, I shepherded policies from proposal to adoption. This last year I transitioned away from shepherding policies into the Vice Chair role, where I’m additionally involved with all three working groups and continue to be coached on the Chair position assigning policies to shepherds and assisting with meeting planning. In addition to my Advisory Council role, I volunteered as part of the Grant Selection Committee for ARIN for the first time this year.

The virtual atmosphere we are currently serving in has provided us with some new challenges. ARIN staff, the AC, and Board are providing excellent new ways for our community to contribute. I hope in the future we can continue using a hybrid method for our meetings so the community that cannot attend meetings in person can continue to have an equal voice.

Simplification of the NRPM, updating the PDP, and adjusting according to the Policy Experience Reports continue to be important goals which I would like to continue working on as an AC member.

I love what I do here on the AC and would like to continue a second term. I believe my record will show that I have always taken the community’s interest in mind when voting on policy and plan to continue this in my upcoming term on the AC. I support meaningful justification for IP space without impeding business. There are parts of the community that still feel they need a voice, and I encourage you to be part of our meetings and Mailing List. Your voice matters and I would like to see more participants on PPML and the meetings.

Thank you again for putting your trust in me for a first term. And I would appreciate your vote again for a second. I hope to see everyone soon when we can be together in person and continue to look forward to our virtual discussions. Getting to know candidates is hard in a virtual environment, but all of us are here for questions. So please feel free to reach out. Thank you.

Brian Jones: Hi, my name is Brian Jones. I am running for one of the open seats on the ARIN Advisory Council. I would appreciate your vote.

I have been working in IT since 1984 at Virginia Tech. Strong proponent of IPv6, and fair and equitable IP addressing for Internet users of all types. Thank you.

Karl Morin: Hi my name is Karl Morin. I’m the president of Hive Data Center here in Montreal, Canada. I’m also a Board Member of the Montreal Internet Exchange called QIX. I’m really a young person in the industry. I’ve been involved in the whole aspects of the Internet. The peering aspect, all the technical deployments as Hive Data Center is a very retail-focused company. We’re on the field and we see what small businesses need. And that way my role in the field is really interesting where I can help small businesses translate their network needs into concrete deployments.

So, in the last couple of years I’ve helped multiple networks deploy IPv6 and go over the steps that different networks could go through, especially in Canada, where the whole process has been really slower than in the United States, for example.

Where I’d like to be involved in the ARIN community is being more connected with the community. Being connected in the Montreal space at QIX really helps push the deployments, as IPv6 is not only a financial and technical thing, but it’s also political in some ways, especially when it comes to peering some networks aren’t always open to new policies.

So I’m looking forward to bringing a new, young twist to the ARIN committee, bringing a new vision, and really translating the needs of small businesses that don’t really have time nor resources to get involved and go through all the policies and really – make ARIN, make BGP, make the whole Internet processes easier and more accessible for these smaller companies, smaller networks that play a huge part in the Internet, arguably a bigger part than these larger networks.

So, that’s really what it comes down to, a young new vision, IPv6 and small businesses needing – especially small businesses in Canada – needing more representation, more help, and more guidance.

Amy Potter: I’m Amy. I’ve been serving on ARIN’s Advisory Council for six years now. And I would really appreciate the opportunity to serve another term.

My time on the Advisory Council has been really meaningful to me so far. I really love being a part of this community.

I came into this world through kind of an unusual path. I come from a legal background, and I started coming to ARIN meetings because I was a part of an organization where I was helping to lead the development of an IP address brokerage. So we were starting to get into policy. And this community was so welcoming to me, and I was eventually elected on to the Advisory Council. And I really loved being a part of this whole world. I think that my professional history is something that’s been really relevant to policy that has been going on over the course of the past several years.

For many years I worked as an IP address broker, where I helped organizations of pretty much every type and size to navigate the ARIN transfer process and the transfer process in other RIRs. I worked with just about every type of organization from rural ISPs to multinational corporations, universities, enterprise organizations, legacy holders, non-legacy holders, you name it. I have probably handled some transfers for those types of organizations. More recently I’ve been working for Amazon as a technical business developer where I help ensure that Amazon has the Internet number resources that it needs to continue to run and grow its network.

And there I have gotten a chance to take a deeper dive into the needs and concerns of really large cloud services companies, really large networks, and then even concerns of their customers as well. I think my experience over the past decade has been pretty substantial in its breadth, and I have quite a bit of insight into the ways that ARIN policy impacts a wide variety of types of organizations and the way that it impacts the market as a whole, and the amount that organizations end up having to pay to acquire the resources they need to run their networks.

I think that this insight is something that’s particularly useful to the Advisory Council as we deal with IPv4 exhaustion and the issues that that continues to present to organizations within our community. I think that we’re going to continue to be developing policy to address some of those issues for quite some time now.

I would really love the opportunity to continue to tackle these problems for this community and new problems that come up over time. So I would really appreciate your support in serving another term on ARIN’s Advisory Council. Thank you.

Kerrie Richards: Hi, my name is Kerrie Richards. I’m a Jamaican national living and working here in the English-speaking Caribbean. My technology background is in ICT4D as well as business information systems.

My relationship with ARIN goes back to 2011 with my work and further studies in Internet governance and data protection and security. I received my first ARIN Fellowship in the spring of 2017 and was nominated to the elections slate in the fall of that year. I was honored to fill a seat made vacant by David Huberman at the end of the election cycle. I was again on the slate in 2018 and was elected for a full term.

Today, I’m approaching the end of my first full term on the ARIN AC. In my time on the AC I’ve had the pleasure of working on four policies, namely 2021-2, 2020-9, 2019-10, and 2018-2.

I’m also on the Policy Development Process Working Group mandated by the Board of Trustees under the charter to review that document. My tenure on the ARIN AC has been a great learning experience at shepherding policy in the most transparent way. I’ve also realized that many of the Number Resource gray areas faced by us in the Caribbean aren’t unique and that we are truly a part of one community.

I ask that you favorably consider me when making your decision on who to vote for in the upcoming elections. Thank you.

Robert Seastrom: Good morning, good afternoon, or whatever time it may be where you are for this hybrid ARIN 48.

My name is Rob Seastrom. I’m standing for reelection to the ARIN Advisory Council. My day job is at Capital One where I’m on the cybersecurity team providing oversight on network security concerns. I’m part of the team that signs the DNSSEC root. I also help run a tiny friends and family co-lo company. In the last quarter century, I’ve worked for large ISPs, small ISPs, TLD operators, a large CDN, and a big cable company. My background makes me sensitive to the needs of the whole spectrum of number resource users – large, small, ISP, enterprise and nontraditional.

I’ve spoken in the past about the need to have policies that address IPv4 runout in a way that is fair and equitable. IPv4 runout is firmly in the rearview mirror, and with years of experience in the post-runout world, we have made good progress in paring down legacy policies in the NRPM. Yet our work is not complete. We can continue to relax requirements; make ARIN’s policies and documentation more understandable, especially to newcomers; make IPv6 Number Resource issuance as frictionless as possible; and make our processes work more smoothly without neglecting our stewardship responsibilities or creating opportunities for fraud.

I’d like to thank my colleagues on the AC and on the Board of Trustees for countless hours of work to enact good policy. But most of all I want to thank you, the community, for bringing policy proposals forward whenever you see the need.

In closing, I ask you to vote for me as a candidate for the ARIN Advisory Council. Thank you.

Alicia Trotman: Hi, my name is Alicia Trotman. I’m a technology specialist in the public safety sector. I’m currently running for re-election in the 2021 ARIN elections.

I would first like to thank everyone for their support as I have served the community for the past three years. The past year and a half has been very challenging. ARIN, like many other organizations, had to find a way to continue its vital operations as well as engaging with the community. With the commitment of the ARIN staff, the AC, the Board of Trustees, we were able to have two successful virtual meetings and now transition into a hybrid meeting.

Throughout my term here, I’ve shepherded and co-shepherded several policies, served on the fellowship committee, mentored in 2019, and again this year I’m very proud to be a virtual mentor.

Most recently I’m currently serving on the Policy Development Process Working Group. This group was created to review the PDP, identify any concerns, and compile and submit a comprehensive set of updates to the ARIN AC. These will then be considered to potentially recommended to the ARIN Board of Trustees.

I would love to continue my work here volunteering on the ARIN AC and serving the community. But I need your vote to do it. Thank you.

Chris Woodfield: I’m Chris Woodfield, and I would appreciate your giving me an opportunity to serve on the ARIN Advisory Council for this term.

As many of you know, I’m an Advisory Council alumnus, having previously served on the AC from 2016 through 2020. During this time, I authored or coauthored seven policy proposals, of which – four of which have been implemented into the NRPM after successful Policy Development Process. Several of these were developed during my chairmanship of the Advisory Council’s Policy Experience Report Working Group, to which I’m grateful for the collaboration opportunity that produced these policies with a member of that group.

I’m currently a senior staff engineer with Twitter, where I am currently focusing on many issues that are front of mind to this community, including our own adoption of IPv6 and our use in conservation of IPv4 address space on our own network.

With over 20 years in the networking industry, I’ve gained quite a bit of experience to draw on, and I hope to carry that forward in the spirit of service back to the community as an AC member if I were to be elected. There’s no question these are very interesting times for the ARIN community, not to mention the global RIR community as a whole. This community has a wide range of interests and priorities, some of which may profoundly disagree with each other as to their vision of the role of an RIR and its responsibilities to the community.

While I definitely have my opinions, as you must likely know if you read the PPML, I see a seat on the Advisory Council as something of a peacemaker role who can help foster productive discussions and shape future policy that serves the entire community. I hope to build on my experience in the industry as well as my earlier AC tenure to help guide policy that makes all of our professional lives easier, helping to remove ambiguities where possible, and promoting clear, consistent policy language that can always be a little bit less opaque.

During my prior tenure on the Advisory Council, I embraced the concept of working groups as introduced to the AC by Tina Morris, who was the AC chair at the time, and volunteered to chair the Policy Experience Report Working Group, which was one of several working groups that were established. This group is tasked with looking for ways to address specific issues that are causing specific community members difficulty and work on proposing or guiding policies that aim to make significant positive impacts on members whose policy questions and concerns are noted in those reports.

If elected, I aim to continue to guide policy based on both this feedback and more direct community feedback when available and ensure that ARIN remains a responsible steward of the resources that the community has entrusted to manage.

In conclusion, I’m grateful for the nomination and having been given the opportunity to serve you in the past, and hopefully continue to do so in the future. I believe I have a lot to offer this community. And if you agree, I would very much appreciate your vote. Thank you.

NRO Number Council Candidate Speeches

Voiceover: Finally, we have candidates for the NRO Number Council.

Chris Quesada: Greetings. My name is Chris Quesada. And I am a candidate for the NRO NC.

Before I tell you a little bit about myself, I would like to thank those who encouraged and supported me through the process. It has meant a lot to me. You folks know who you are. Thank you so much.

I’d also like to thank Louie Lee for his many years of service to the NRO NC. I’ve known Louie for a while now, and his dedication to the community and the NRO NC is a record of service and excellence that one can only aspire to. Again, thank you, Louie, for your service.

So, let me tell you a little bit about myself. Though, I’ve not held any formal positions within the ARIN community, I’ve supported its efforts for some time now. And a colleague and mentor of mine suggested I do a little more than support. So here I am.

I’ve been in the industry for over 20 years. And in that time I’ve been a circuit provisioner, peering coordinator, resource manager, infrastructure strategist of networks. And I’ve dabbled in them all, and I still do today. Earlier in my career I supported the efforts of 6bone on the PAIX, which came under Switch & Data and later, at Switch & Data in 2006, I helped to phase out 6bone to IPv6 across all the Switch & Data IXs. Additionally, while at Switch & Data, I managed, through the cooperation of ARIN and the community, to acquire the v4 address spaces supporting IXs. This is well before the mainstream v4 address space market that a lot of you are familiar with today.

So, I may not have taken formal positions with ARIN but I was convinced to take a position with NANOG to support its efforts and transition from Merit to NewNOG. And I believe strongly in supporting the community.

So, why the NRO NC? Well, those long years of dabbling with networks taught me a thing or two about numbers, specifically the benefits and hurdles of v6, the financial pressures of v4 scarcity, and how this ties into the global community. I follow all five RIRs reviewing policy and determining how proposed and adopted policies impact its region and the global community. I’m committed to an Internet whose innovation benefits us all. And with the next wave of innovations upon us we need policies that also benefit us all.

I hope you will support my candidacy for the NRO NC. And thank you, everyone.

Voiceover: Our last NRO Number Council candidate, John Barfield, chose not to present a speech so we will share his bio.

John Barfield is a Sr. Site Reliability Engineer at Joyent, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Samsung mobile, and one of the first pioneers of both cloud software and service technologies in the world. Joyent created Triton DataCenter and Manta Object Storage, both being cloud software used to deploy and operate the Joyent Public Cloud services. Both projects have been open source since 2014 alongside other native Joyent projects such as SmartOS (a bare metal container and OS hypervisor) and Node.js. Today, Joyent operates the largest private cloud infrastructure in the world on behalf of Samsung.

John was previously the global SRE team manager at Dynata, Inc., and the founder and CEO of BISS Inc., an IT management, hosting, voice, and Internet provider in Dallas, Texas. John has been involved in one capacity or another with Internet-related business or open source projects and has been in the technology industry since the first cable modems were being installed in the late 1990s. He switched to engineering around 2008 and went into business for himself in 2012.

BISS became an ARIN member in 2016 with a handful of IPv4 and IPv6 IP allocations for its direct customers. BISS utilized SmartOS and Triton DataCenter as the basis for all cloud infrastructure starting around 2012 and was recruited from Dynata by Joyent because of his direct industry experience operating a private cloud utilizing their open source software.

John is a full-stack cloud SRE who specializes in both open source and commercial network engineering, container technology, visibility, and automation.

Jason Byrne: And there we have our candidate speeches. Hopefully everyone got a lot out of that. We’ll be making those speeches available as embedded videos on the statements of support where the biographies are and also on the ballots once voting opens.

We’re going to go to a short break right now until 1:15 – give you a chance to have a little break. And then we’ll come back and start the candidate forums.

Coming up, yes, we have a ten-minute stretch with Erin as everyone always enjoys those. Then we have free time until we resume at 1:15. Thank you very much.

Next slide. I think that’s it. I’m going to say that’s it, then. Thank you very much.

[Break]

Board Candidate Forum

John Curran: I’d like to welcome everyone back. This is ARIN’s Candidate Forum. I’m John Curran, President and CEO of ARIN. We’re going to start out with the Board Candidate Forum.

As I remind people, the Candidate Forum is an opportunity for you to meet the candidates a little more and hear their views on key issues. The questions we’ll be asking are the questions that were submitted by the community. We put out a survey and the questions are submitted. And then we put out a second survey. We rank those questions by community interest.

The top five questions have been provided to the Board candidate forum – to the candidates before the forum. They’ve prepared one- to two-minute answers on each. I’ll ask each candidate – after reading the question, I’ll ask each candidate to give their answer on that issue. And then if there’s time I’ll go back and allow a brief follow-up from each candidate in this forum before moving on to the next question.

We have five questions; we have an hour for the Board candidate forum. It’s not a debate, but it is a chance for the candidates to speak their views and hear the others clarify their views if they wish.

So, with that, I’d like to now bring on the candidates, make sure they’re available here in the forum. And I’ll start out with the questions.

So, Board candidate questions, first question is: Do you support open elections for Board seats or do you prefer ARIN’s present system with a Nomination Committee as a gateway? And why?

So, we’ll go through the candidates in no particular order and get their view. Again, the question: Do you support open elections for Board seats, or do you prefer ARIN’s present system with a Nomination Committee as a gateway? And why?

First, I’ll take Dan Alexander. Dan, take it on.

Dan Alexander: Thank you, John. I don’t know if I’m supposed to be on video, but I’ll jump in.

I lean more on the side of having a nomination committee in place. Whether that nomination committee is a Board committee or whether or not that would be managed by a third party is always open for conversation. But to have an “anyone and everyone” model, I think it would kind of distract from the conversation of the community trying to sort out amongst possible pool of 10, 20 candidates. So, I don’t think that’s a very practical approach. And I think the Nomination Committee serves a very valuable role in vetting potential candidates, more so with the Board than with the Advisory Council. When you’re looking at a Board member, they’re the fiduciary of the organization. You need a certain amount of review of those candidates. If someone had a criminal record or had a line of bankruptcies in their past. As a fiduciary of the company that’s a real risk. And that’s a conversation that the committee needs to have with that nominee to clarify their situation, and potentially have the conversation of them not being on the final slate.

But the key is that that committee who is doing those reviews be as open as possible but also have very clear guidance, because the committee – you don’t want a case where the committee is picking the Board for the community. You want to leave the decision of who is on the Board up to the community as much as possible.

So, I think a balance between the two and as much transparency as possible is the right way to go.

[unidentified]: John, you’re muted.

John Curran: Thank you, Dan. I was trying to go through the candidates alphabetically and I thought I would be safe with going with Alexander, but I realized I missed Bram.

So, Bram, on the same topic, do you support open elections for the Board of Trustees, or do you prefer ARIN’s present system with a nomination committee, and why?

Bram Abramson: I always did have the first locker.

On the question, clearly there’s a problem. We’ve seen that spill out on PPML and so on, and I’ve been sitting in the background reading with interest, obviously.

The question is about open elections, and without openness, without transparency, particularly transparency of process you don’t have trust and you need trust. So, as a starting point, I imagine many of us will be on the same page there. But at the same time there’s a problem that creating a NomCom was designed to solve. And I think you just heard a little bit about what problem is sought to be solved.

Like anything else, Board governance is a serious undertaking and discipline with best practices and lessons learned. So, how do you ensure that the Board you end up with has and reflects the full range of skills that need to be represented? Will a general member election do it, or do you end up with a group of the most popular insiders, whatever their skill sets, and how do you control for that? Look, above and beyond minimal vetting, there are a range of models for how to solve for it. All of them meet openness, transparency, and ground rules. And PPML has seen some pretty good proposals for reform, some whackier ones, and so on.

And those go for minor reforms like providing feedback to candidates on why the NomCom went the way it did to much more fundamental reforms up to and including, “Let’s just have a general election and why have a filter – isn’t that the members’ job?” In part of doing that there’s also a range of activities ARIN can and perhaps should undertake to build the governance capacity of its members with a special interest in that activity, including training, including connections to diverse Board opportunities so we don’t only start the conversation a month or whatever it is before each election.

Right now, the petition process is there’s a safety valve – fortunately it seems to have worked this time – but I think most will agree reform is needed. The right reform is one that the membership is involved in designing and likely voting on with full view of the problems we’re trying to solve. That process needs to ensure we don’t have people bounced from the slate without knowing why. And that will be absolutely a job for the next Board.

John Curran: Thank you. I’ll go to the next candidate, Jeff Bedser. Jeff?

Jeffrey Bedser: Thanks, John. So, to me it really comes down – and it’s not something that Dan or Bram didn’t already indicate – it’s about transparency. You do want to have the right fiduciary roles filled by the organization.

By the way, if you hear background noise, I apologize; I’m actually in a real office with real people on the other side of my door, and they’re being a bit loud right now.

So basically transparency is the key. A NomCom process does, with the right structure and organizational oversight, give you the ability to find candidates with the right skill sets and knowledge to serve the fiduciary responsibilities for the Trustees. But at the same time, it really has to be community driven and really has to be community approved by the membership to ensure they feel the transparency and are comfortable with the outcomes of the efforts of the NomCom. Thank you.

John Curran: Excellent. Thank you.

So, our next candidate, Peter Harrison. Peter Harrison, the question is: Do you support open elections, or do you prefer ARIN’s present system with a Nomination Committee as a gateway, and why?

Peter, you need to unmute.

Beverly Hicks: He’s off mute but it appears we’re having trouble hearing him.

John Curran: Peter, I’ll move on to the next candidate and I’ll come back to you.

The question is: Do you support the open election – do you support open elections or, for Board seats, or do you prefer ARIN’s present system with the Nomination Committee as a gateway and why? We’ll hear from candidate Ron da Silva.

Ron da Silva: Thank you, John, and thanks for the opportunity to speak on this.

I think going through the petition process has brought this definitely to light. I’ve heard from a number of folks when going through this petition process that there are concerns, there are issues with respect to our current process.

I think the origins of having the NomCom process is good. I remember early on we had challenges in getting sufficient number of eligible candidates for the AC or for the Board identified and put before the membership. And there’s always been the concern of having sort of a popularity vote, that you have perhaps people that aren’t involved in the community being placed in, say, the AC, or candidates that don’t have any senior leadership or governance experience being placed in the Board. And that puts a bit of a burden on either body – the AC or the Board – in bringing somebody new into the process and having to manage that.

So, I think the origins there were good. Let’s find, right, the directive for the nominating committee, let’s go find good candidates and have a healthy ballot so the membership has choices. Where I think it goes astray is if the NomCom begins to preselect and decide from qualified candidates and even from folks within our industry that – oh, let’s not put certain members or candidates on the ballot and take that decision away from the membership. So, I think there’s some work to be done here.

There are probably a couple things I would bring in focus as a new member on the Board with regards to the nominating committee process. One would be a better transparency. Today we don’t know which candidates were there and there’s no visibility into which candidates thus were not advanced. That would provide a little bit of visibility into what’s happening without having to really fully expose the inward workings of the NomCom. And secondly I think for accountability – because we need a healthy supply of candidates and finding those amongst ourselves is good governance. So having a requirement that the NomCom explains to candidates that are not advanced why they weren’t advanced – because it could be very simple.

For example, if the need for the Board at the moment is to have highly skilled fiduciaries and that’s a skill set specifically in this election year that the Board is looking for, then that’s good feedback that the NomCom can provide to a candidate: “Hey, you’ve got great governance; you’ve got great experience; we know you in the industry, but we need somebody specifically in the finance. Try again next year. That’s probably a gap that’s not going to be on the Board next year.” So that kind of feedback would be, I think, really important in providing accountability to the NomCom in its decisions.

So, there’s a couple of things. But I think definitely focusing on this and working as a Board to identify better ways to increase transparency and accountability are key. Thanks.

John Curran: Thank you, Ron. We’re going to come back to Peter Harrison. Peter, the question: Do you support the open election – do you support open elections or, for Board seats, or do you prefer ARIN’s present system with the Nomination Committee as a gateway and why?

Peter Harrison: There have been many good suggestions on the PPML, and my fellow candidates have made a number of good suggestions as well. Adjustments are definitely needed for the NomCom. We’re going to have to focus not just on disclosure but also on consistency. Transparency is one thing, but I think these factors affect the entire Board selection process, not just the NomCom but also voting, term limits, and even supporting committees. And I’ll get back to this in a few minutes.

Everybody has been discussing on the PPML the fact that the whole NomCom is a black-box process and there are challenges to operational consistency. One of the issues is that successive committees start from scratch each year and there’s no transfer of standing rules and templates, and that has been an impediment to the smooth transitions. Another thing that could be done is we could match the nomination questionnaire to the guidance letter. I think that will also be helpful.

But these are small things in comparison to the overall bigger picture that we need to address, and that is candidate evaluation with less exclusion. One of the ways in which we could do this – there are many different ways – but one that I’ve been thinking about is the potential to rank candidates in categories or just general buckets for, like, say, for example, the preferred or acceptable for the obvious reasons. And there’s a national guild of US lawyers that does this already. And so, we could probably refer to that as a potential option.

We also need to have term limits. It will help to reduce the incumbent advantage.

Once we start to take all these factors into consideration, the NomCom, the PPML questions, some of these suggestions from the candidates, then we’re going to have greater faith in the whole process. And when we have that, we’re going to have more candidates.

Now, when we have more candidates, the current first/past/post system of elections is not suitable. There are five of us that are running for the positions at the moment. Any one of us on average could win with 20 percent of the vote plus one. That is not a strong mandate. I won last time with 30 percent of the vote. That’s not good either.

I strongly suggest to the community that when they’re thinking about the NomCom and all these other things that they think of the single transferrable vote. It’s also called the ranked-choice voting. It’s used in a number of countries, in a number of cities around the world.

These are types of things that I’ve been looking at as a member of the Governance Working Group. We are going to be having a number of consultations with the community in the coming weeks, and I really look forward to those discussions. I will also be lobbying for the Governance Working Group to become a permanent standing Board governance committee as well.

I know these things are important to you. And if they are please vote for me.

John Curran: Thank you, Peter. I’d like to now move – we heard the question about skills on the Board and evaluating candidates. I’ll move on to the next question.

If the Board is meant to be strategic, what experience do you bring that will help guide ARIN and ARIN staff on its mission? And I will – this time I will start out first with Bram Abramson. Go ahead, Bram.

Bram Abramson: Thank you. Thank you. So, this is sort of the bio question. Look, we’ve all put lots of material online. So, I’ll guide you through a little bit of it.

But I think overall and first and foremost through expertise in law, governance, risk management, privacy, and data protection and then a breadth of domain and sector experience applying those things; and I think in terms of what I would bring to the Board, certainly that’s an area that’s been highlighted in the Board’s instructions to the NomCom in terms of areas where they’re looking for expertise. That’s where my training and professional life lives.

I’m used to advising clients including Board directors on these matters including ISPs and other telcos, but also the non-telco critical infrastructure sectors, media and technology companies, government bodies, not-for-profits and so on. I’ve more directly sat on advisory committees here in Toronto for the Ontario Securities Commission, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority. I’ve acted as a Director of smaller organizations, like community arts and technology not-for-profits; larger ones like Canada’s consumer and small business complaints body for the telecom sector, whose size is not far off ARIN’s actually in terms of employees, and helped steer their direction and strategy both as a Board member and then as a governance committee member in some cases.

More broadly, you can read about my background obviously in the candidate statement. But one of the things I talked about there was adopting a pro-privacy, pro-security, and pro-rights approach in all areas. And that’s part of the lens I think certainly I would apply. So overall my highest and best use is likely from the expertise that drives my day job as a law and policy advisor as well as a privacy professional.

John Curran: Thank you. I’m now going to move to Dan Alexander. Dan, same question: If the Board is meant to be strategic, what experience do you bring to help guide ARIN and ARIN’s staff on its mission?

Dan Alexander: I’ve helped one of the largest broadband ISPs with navigating v4 free-pool runout and the deployment of v6. That required managing multiple multi-year plans that required considerable coordination. I’ve previously served on the ARIN Board and helped develop the strategic plan. Previously chaired the Nomination Committee. I’ve served several terms on the ARIN Advisory Council, including serving as chair. And I actively use ARIN’s services.

So, I think it makes me uniquely qualified in that I well understand all the pieces to be able to coordinate that strategic plan from the Board, the membership down to the staff level as to how a lot of these things need to interoperate and how to best come up with a plan that can move forward.

John Curran: Thank you. I’ll now move on to Jeff Bedser. Same question: If the Board is meant to be strategic, what experience will you bring to help guide ARIN and ARIN’s staff on its mission?

Jeffrey Bedser: Thanks, John. Strategic thought processes are enhanced by both historic knowledge – how things have been done – as well as detailed knowledge of the indicators and the broader ecosystem within the entire stack, from the numbers, from the naming, and the policies.

I bring 20 years of industry experience coupled with a lot of volunteer Internet governance efforts. This gives me a broad perspective to notice trends, to see where policies are evolving in places like ICANN and ISOC, IETF, APWG and MAWG, all the places where activities are happening and how they’re being addressed in the broader conversations about them and how they would impact ARIN and ARIN’s missions and strategies.

Additionally, I’ve been an entrepreneur for almost 30 years now. And strategic thinking is how you develop business plans. It’s how you market – how you do market roadmaps and how you calculate pivots when things change that you have to deal with to modify your plans to unforeseen difficulties such as global pandemics.

I’ve survived long enough to feel pretty confident in my abilities to support strategic thoughts and processes. Thanks.

John Curran: Thank you. And we’re going to move to Peter Harrison. Same question, Peter: If the Board is meant to be strategic, what experience do you bring that will help guide ARIN and ARIN’s staff on its mission?

Peter Harrison: Thank you. I’ve been in the industry for quite some time. I’ve worked in the – as an ISP with Google Fiber, with Netflix in the content area, with cloud, and a number of other areas.

But ARIN provides a really unique challenge. When we think about it, the economy of humanity really depends on RIRs. It’s a completely different viewpoint that I’ve had to have with ARIN.

We have, what, like 100 employees. We have a budget of about $25 million. And so, when we start thinking about it, it’s not just about implementing RFCs and IP resource management; it’s a question of figuring out how can we ultimately make the Internet a better place. And we need to be thinking and think in terms of decades rather than just potentially like an election cycle.

And so, some of these long-term things that we need to be considering are like IPv4, the life after IPv4; the organization’s stability and that of the whole RIR system – which are things that I’m now working on in my position as the Board; and also thinking of new ways and methodologies to use new data.

One of the things that we’ve been trying to work on the Board itself is to try and find ways in which we can set the foundations of these sorts of strategic views that are different from the private sector in general. And so, we now have this Governance Working Group that we’re working on. We now have better financial controls with the hiring of a CFO to make sure that ARIN is stable in the future. We now have a Cybersecurity Chief. And we also have a product management approach as well for the services. The Caribbean now has a director-level management focus.

These things are really important for the organization on the whole. And these are types of things that we’re strategically thinking about in the long term.

And I hope that the community considers these things when they vote for me. Thank you very much.

John Curran: Thank you, Peter. The final trustee, final candidate to be asked the question, Ron da Silva: If the Board is meant to be strategic, what experience do you bring that will help guide ARIN and ARIN staff on its mission?

Ron da Silva: Thank you, John. I think there’s some critical experience here that, as a director on a Board, is important to ensure the right balance of staying strategic versus kind of meddling in operations and day-to-day work of the chief executive and his senior staff.

I’ve got that experience – senior management experience dealing with C-suites, dealing with both sides of the boardroom. I’ve gone through formal training for leadership and strategy and for governance.

And I have a long-standing history, not only with ARIN but with the Internet global industry as a whole. So, I bring all that perspective in governance experience and background. And would bring that as a benefit, I think, in ensuring that we strike the right balance of keeping the Board focused on strategic issues and fiduciary oversight versus meddling into the day-to-day operations that belongs to the chief executive.

John Curran: Okay. Excellent. We’ll move to the third question, an interesting one. I’ll ask each of the Board candidates to address the question: What safeguards, if any, ensure independence of Board members from each other and staff?

So, we’ll now invert the order. So, Ron, I’m going to pick on you first. What safeguards if any exist the independence of Board members from each other and staff?

Ron da Silva: That’s a great question, John. I think some of the very simple, easy items in this space to ensure good governance – you don’t want to have Board members that are related to or married to staff. You don’t want to have – vice versa, staff working for or having some sort of side business with other directors. You don’t want directors between each other having some financial arrangements or joint ventures together or, worse, having some directors reporting to within the same company to each other. So, these are like low-hanging fruit issues.

I think the bigger challenge with this is bringing independent directors into ARIN is really hard for this community. Why? Because we naturally try to identify members within our own community to put into the Board of Trustees or into the Advisory Council or to represent us on the NRO. So complete independence is always a challenge. I think it’s admirable to strive for that. And that might be also something else we ask the NomCom to think about, is how do you broaden the scope of candidates, so you’ve got clearly independent members, the Board, that don’t have this intersection that I think everybody has here in this community?

I’ve been in this community for a long time. I’ve known a lot of you for many, many years. And I know each of you have also known each other for a lot of time. It’s a really small community. Today we probably have 40 people listening in and another dozen and a half that are here that are panelists or candidates, and then another dozen and a half that are staff. That’s really not a large group of folks. So, it’s natural that there are friendships that happen. And trying to make sure that those friendships don’t impact, or influence independence is key.

And having a culture of a Board to make it safe for people to identify, “Hey, I have a conflict with this issue, because, I don’t know, I’m an operator and I have a huge amount of resources from the organization. So, this particular policy is a conflict for me even though it’s being advocated by a friend of mine at a neighboring company.”

So those kinds of things, I think is a cultural aspect to how you deal with that within the Board. And then there are some of the easier items that are just good governance. So, thanks, John.

John Curran: Thank you. I’ll now go to the next Board of Trustees candidate working backwards in alphabetical order. It will be Peter Harrison.

Peter, what safeguards if any, should exist to ensure independence of Board members from each other and staff?

Peter Harrison: One of the ways that we have independence built into the system is that Board members are elected, and this improves the independence between each other. We mustn’t – like Ron said, we mustn’t lose track or sight of the importance of the NomCom and its approval process for candidates.

So, one of the issues that the NomCom is always looking at is trying to find the existence of any indirect or direct material relationships between candidates and staff or candidates and themselves. And then to really figure out whether those material relationships are impacting the independence of the Board.

Now, one of the things that has been coming up frequently has been the general nomination process and how the NomCom operates. I think once we create a modified system in which there’s greater transparency on both the inputs and outputs of the NomCom, I think that will help to show or prove to the community that this actual independence is being implemented and it will manifestly show itself in that regard. And then we should also try to think about what those filters should be when we’re doing the evaluation process.

Now, these are types of things that we’ve been working on the Governance Working Group. We will be discussing this as a part of consultations in the near future. And I really look forward to the vigorous discussions that are going to come out of this. There are a number of them that I would like to see discussed at length. And I really hope the community thinks about this and considers this when they vote for me. Thank you very much.

John Curran: Thank you. I’d like to move to our next Board of Trustees candidate. The question is: What safeguards if any should exist to ensure independence of Board members from each other and staff?

Jeff Bedser, take it on.

Jeffrey Bedser: Thanks, John. Policies regarding disclosure and conflict – they need to be well documented and they need to be a topic of both new trustee onboarding to the Board of Trustees as well as simply annual training. So, it should be something that’s constantly in the forefront of the way the trustees govern the organization. These things should be covered by a risk committee charter that talks about the risks of disclosure and confidentiality as well as conflict.

You know, there can be many places in an industry where we are – in effect there’s always going to be an appearance of conflict because there is a role between the entity and what they serve, and the organization in which they’re on the Board. But that just means you have to have open disclosures. Everybody needs to understand what needs to be disclosed, what relationships are a problem.

As Ron said, there are certain situations where you shouldn’t have spouses serving, one as an executive of the firm and the second on the Board. But beyond that, simple awareness, policies, and basically opportunities for abstention for anything that causes a conflict or the appearance of impropriety because of a non-disclosed conflict.

This can be achieved through policy, through training, and it can also be structural. For example, between staff and the organization – I’m sorry, between the organization, the staff, and the Board of Trustees, there should be a filter. It should be basically the Trustees communicate through the CEO or his designated senior staff anything that needs to go to the broader staff so that there aren’t conversations going on where a particular Trustee is having a conversation with staff and seems to be directing them when that’s not an appropriate role for the fiduciary governance of the Director.

This is all manageable. But it’s all things that have to be ingrained as part of the model to ensure that there are no issues that come about. Thanks.

John Curran: Thank you. We’ll move on to the next Board of Trustees candidate, Dan Alexander. Dan, the question: What safeguards, if any, should exist to ensure independence of Board members from each other and staff? Go ahead.

Dan Alexander: Thanks, John. A lot of it has already been said but having a clear conflict and duality of interest policy is critical. Having that policy regularly reviewed and collect disclosures are also important. And a lot of that is already in place. But you also don’t want these policies to be too specific or limiting because I’ve seen in the past where individuals get into a semantic argument over what is and isn’t considered a conflict. And that’s not a culture or path you really want to go down.

But the one thing I’d also add to the question as the question itself is a little limiting. Because it’s not just about staff and the Board members. We also have to include the Advisory Council into that equation.

John Curran: Thank you. Now getting to the final Board of Trustees candidate for this question. Bram, the question is: What safeguards if any should exist to ensure independence of the Board members from each other and staff? Take it away.

Bram Abramson: One of the things I talked about earlier, and something I’ve seen reflected on PPML and in discussions elsewhere is one of the great things about ARIN is that it’s been able to successfully build an approach to self-governance without the need for outside supervision in a way that it shows a high level of maturity that, to be honest, a lot of not-for-profits do not reach. So, kudos to ARIN.

But in terms of how it intersects with this question, being able to maintain a Board that’s diverse, that reflects governance expertise from a range of sectors and that’s more than a group of insiders is essential to maintaining and demonstrating the maintenance of that maturity. And that goes back to what we were talking about earlier with respect to the NomCom.

So yes, conflict disclosure, careful guidelines for Board and staff communication, and we’ve heard some very smart things in that respect. I guess what I want to further highlight is the need to foster diversity and lack of cronyism or clubiness. You don’t want a Board of buddies or worse a Board of mostly buddies. Now, saying that is easy. What safeguards get you there is a harder discussion because now we’re into tradeoffs. In a lot of ways, the current NomCom role is intended to address exactly that.

I’ve said there are challenges with that model, and the Board will have to see to involving the membership and bring the same kind of openness and transparency that members expect. And my going-in bias is that you provide voters with information so they can act responsibly and make correct or good or healthy choices that would avoid that kind of clubiness or insiderism. But at the same time, we’ve heard some of the other candidates talk about structural solutions and so on, and I do think that that’s along the right track.

The kind of mechanism design you need to ensure that you continue to demonstrate maturity, that you include outsiders, that you have something other than a Board of mostly buddies, not that it’s occurred in the past, but it’s a danger – is something the membership absolutely needs to be involved in determining and demonstrating. And that’s really the kinds of safeguards that the NomCom review process is going to have to be engaged with.

John Curran: Thank you. I’m going to move on to our fourth question. This is an interesting one. It’s, again, to the qualifications of the Board of Trustees candidates and what’s needed.

The question is: What is the importance of having pre-existing training or experience from other boards to serve on the ARIN Board? I’m going to mix it up a little. We’ll start in the middle this time. So, let’s go with Dan Alexander. Dan, what is the importance of having pre-existing training or experience from other boards to serve on the ARIN Board?

Dan Alexander: Previous Board experience is an asset and should definitely be considered. But it should not be used as a restriction. I would not have served on my previous term on the Board if that were a hard requirement back then.

Given the diversity of this community, I think ARIN should not limit itself as to who could be on the Board. The Board should lean more towards inclusion and not be an exclusive body. So, I don’t see where it would be advantageous to ARIN to limit itself on having a restriction that you would have to be or have to have previous Board experience.

John Curran: Next candidate, going from the middle out, this would be Jeff Bedser. What is the importance of having pre-existing training or experience from other boards to serve on the ARIN Board?

Jeffrey Bedser: I’m going to come a little bit off of what Dan said. I think it’s a combination. You need to have people with prior experience with other boards, but you also need people without experience on boards because you need to have that mix of people bringing completely new ideas as well as people who have done other things before and seen successes and failures in the way boards have been run.

Board governance is guided, structured around existing governmental laws regarding incorporation and formation. And there are tax codes that have to be known and be part of the fiduciary responsibilities of how the organization is run. There are requirements around even not-for-profit missions that have to be met. So that type of knowledge is good, but it also can be trained to new directors and new Board members.

The nice thing about people with previous experience is that it does bring perspectives of how things have been done in other places that can be brought over in that experience from other like organizations, either 501(c)(3) and not-for-profit status, or even from other parts of comparable industries where it can be useful or helpful. But it’s critical to allow the Trustee a background to begin contributing immediately, as soon as they join the Board so the fiduciary responsibilities are fulfilled.

For me, if you come with that background, also make sure there’s a training program and on-boarding that gives them that background on day one. Thank you.

John Curran: Thank you. I’m going to continue with our Board of Trustees candidates. Next one will be Peter Harrison.

Peter, the question is: What is the importance of having pre-existing training or experience from other boards to serve on the ARIN Board?

Peter Harrison: A lot of the thoughts that I’ve had have been expressed by the existing candidates. Generally speaking, pre-existing experience and training is important. Training and experience is important but not necessarily exclusionary.

And there’s been discussions about the fact that we have a relatively small community and there’s a risk of recycling the same people over and over again. As a result of that we need to expand or broaden our horizons when we start to look for potential candidates, looking outside of the active community potentially looking at all sectors, all industries. General legal jurisdictions within the ARIN region for all the reasons that are fairly obvious so that we have a breadth of experience in a number of areas of policy related to the Board and its structure. As a result of that that’s going to be very important.

One of the things that I think we should also take into consideration is that we shouldn’t conflate technical experience with – and then certifications with – governance ability. There’s a number of things that governance requires and that I think everybody knows and understands.

There’s risk management accountability, transparency, disclosure, and those sorts of things that need to be taken into consideration. And these things can be also learned as part of ongoing training. These are the types of things that I think we need to be taking into consideration.

And just in closing, it’s important but it’s not exclusionary. We’ve been talking about ways in which we can make the whole process more inclusionary. And I think we’ll be discussing a lot of that in upcoming consultations with the community. Thank you.

John Curran: Bram, the question is, what is the importance of having pre-existing training or experience from other boards to serve on the ARIN Board?

Bram Abramson: I agree with everything I’ve heard. Obviously, I think it’s important or I wouldn’t have invested time and training and continuing to train. Recently I discovered I’ve been doing governance training through the Chartered Governance Institute of Canada, and I was kind of tickled to discover it’s a major force in the Caribbean. I was actually the only Canadian in the course that I was doing. So, it was an interesting experience and a very positive one.

Look, I think that when you talk about the importance of pre-existing training or experience, you look at things at a Board level and what your overall skills matrix looks like, what’s missing around the table and how do you fill in the gaps. So absolutely, and I wasn’t being flip when I said I agree with everything that’s been said. It’s not a question of certificates or diplomas or anything else. As with all certification it’s a way of ensuring that somebody has spent time but it’s not the only way of getting there.

And in particular ongoing training including ongoing development of Board members is a very important role. Earlier I talked about ensuring that or thinking about bringing more governance training to ARIN’s membership in general for those with an interest. And I think that sort of activity is really one to think about.

But, yeah, at the end of the day it’s at a Board level – what’s needed, what’s missing. A lot has been learned about how to govern successfully. That’s not a wheel worth reinventing. I think as an organization, ARIN always wants to be aware of and build on best practices, and there’s lots of ways of doing that.

John Curran: Thank you. Now our question for our final Board of Trustees candidate, Ron da Silva. The question: What is the importance of having pre-existing training or experience from other boards to serve on the ARIN Board?

Ron da Silva: Thank you, John. Another good question. Certainly, I think the key skill sets that you look for in your directors are senior executive experience, fiduciary experience, and governance experience.

If you could have all of your directors with all of that, that would be great. But in reality, that doesn’t always happen. If you look at the composition of the Board over the years. We’ve had plenty of folks without senior leadership experience, without prior governance experience and without any financial experience. But I think what’s key is every year I would expect the Board does a self-evaluation and look for gaps, identify where there are needs. And that’s part of the communication that goes with the Nominating Committee on, hey, we need these specific skill sets. These are the gaps. Maybe look at the total composition of the Board.

But you also have to, I think, consider this is a relatively small Board. There are only six seats, ignoring your seat, John, that are elected from the membership. And with a small Board there isn’t a lot of luxury to spend bringing that one Board member who is missing the experience or that’s missing a grasp on the financials or doesn’t really have any experience in governance. It’s hard, I think, for the rest of the Board to be able to kind of bring somebody along. So, it’s important to have those. It would be really painful to have many Board members missing those skill sets.

I think one thing that would be worth exploring, and I would love to do this as a new member of the Board, is to think about the pipeline. How do we identify candidates? And people coming into the nominating process are great candidates to think about. If they’re missing a particular set of skill sets, how can the Board work with them to make them kind of fill out that gap so that perhaps in a later year or later process, election process, they’ve then filled in those gaps and have the necessary experience or skill sets and had an opportunity to develop. That might be – creating a bit what’s called an associate director path might be – it’s good governance. I see it in other boards. I think it’s something that would be worth looking at to ensure a good healthy pipeline of candidates.

John Curran: Thank you, we’ll now move to on to our final question for the candidates for the ARIN Board of Trustees. This one is a long one, but we’re moving off the space of what makes for good trustees. We’re moving into almost a policy issue.

And so, the question is: Should ARIN distinguish between the practice of IP address leasing and the practice of LIRs charging for IP addresses associated with their services that require use of IP addresses? Example: cloud and network providers.

Fairly long question, but I think the essence of it is pretty clear. I’m going to start – I’m going to go back to alphabetical order. I’ll start with Bram. Bram, should ARIN distinguish between the practice of IP address leasing and the practice of LIRs charging for IP addresses associated with their services that require IP addresses, like cloud and network providers?

Bram Abramson: Thanks. So to start, I will start with the line I suspect you’ll hear a lot. It is not the job of the Board to decide on the policies. There’s a process for that. And one of the things that a mature Board has to be careful about is not stepping in and really substituting itself for the judgment of those who do the day-to-day work.

That said, it’s an interesting topic because it’s one that actually does go to the strategic direction of ARIN in a lot of ways. Because there’s an obvious tension here. At some point what’s the difference between purchasing services to get at resources and just purchasing access to resources themselves, while at the same time ARIN has an existing set of policies based on demonstrating need? And if “need” simply means I need these to sell to other people, then what does that mean and how do you apply your policies downstream?

So, to answer the question directly, I’m not opposed to it in principle, but I do think it really goes to the core of a lot of how ARIN does things. So, I think it would need to be thought through very carefully. I think membership would have to have a very important voice in answering that question as it’s been debated long and hard in the past. And in a lot of ways, it’s one of the few that I think would come to the attention of the Board in some way because fully fleshing it out means fully fleshing out a bunch of things. And that’s one of the things the Board would want to have oversight over.

Tricky but good question to include in this particular packet as opposed to the next one.

John Curran: Thank you. Okay. We’ll move on to our second candidate, Dan Alexander. Dan, should ARIN distinguish between the practice of address leasing and the practice of LIRs charging for IP addresses associated with their services which require IP addresses, like cloud and network providers?

Dan Alexander: If the AC and the community could agree on a policy set that works for both scenarios, that would be great. But it likely does need clarification. An LIR charging for a scarce resource, for users who connect to their network, is very different than providing portable address space for use by third parties.

I regularly come across registrations currently in Whois that have been leased and subleased several times over. And the obfuscation carries a lot of risks and issues when being used by bot providers, as an example. So, I think the leasing topic will likely need to be a distinction or separate set of policies. But, as it was mentioned, that really is up to the AC and the community to decide and the Board to determine if the policy process has been followed.

John Curran: Thank you. Going to move on to the next Board of Trustees candidate, Jeff Bedser. Jeff, should ARIN distinguish between the practice of IP address leasing and the practice of LIRs charging for IP addresses associated with their services that require IP addresses, such as cloud and network providers?

Jeffrey Bedser: Thanks, John. I’m not going to say much that’s new, but I’m going to say because ARIN is a community, policy-based organization, their structure around how things are done and why they’re done and the LIR issue does bring about a lot of questions that – can they be controlled contractually. For example, if an LIR allows you to assign the geolocation of an IP address, but they assign it outside of the RIR’s region. If it’s being done for the purpose of obfuscation of the origin of the traffic, that’s coming around a heck of a lot of cybersecurity protocols that are used to protect systems by trying to understand where the traffic is coming from.

So, if it can be controlled contractually and if the LIRs can be held accountable to the policies that ARIN has developed over its history, then I will give it, as I guess Bram said, probably a real firm maybe.

John Curran: Okay. Thank you. I’ll now move on to our fourth panelist, Board of Trustees candidate Peter Harrison. Peter, should ARIN distinguish between the practice of IP address leasing and the practice of LIRs charging for IP addresses associated with their services that require IP addresses? Example: Cloud and network providers.

Peter Harrison: There’s been a lot of discussion about this in recent weeks, and the PPML has been particularly active on it. There were hundreds and hundreds of emails that I think I read all of them just to try and get a good understanding of what the issues are.

And there are very many pros and cons, but just as the other candidates have said, the Board is really not about so much on the policy side, it’s more about the long-term strategic direction of the organization. And this is going to be an issue that would have long-term implications for the organization on the whole.

One of the things that I have been wondering about related to this is whether this may be a topic of so much concern to the community that we may need to have a ballot of – some sort of a ballot initiative related to it, rather than just to talk about whether or not fundamentally it should be done before we start thinking about what particular policies could be done to make sure that it’s in effect.

Ultimately, it’s a member decision, and I think we need to think of ways in which we can address this definitively in the future. Thanks.

John Curran: Thank you. Moving on to our final candidate. This is Ron da Silva.

Ron, the question: Should ARIN distinguish between the practice of IP address leasing and the practice of LIRs charging for IP addresses associated with their services which require IP addresses? Example: Cloud and network providers.

Ron da Silva: Thanks, John. I couldn’t help, when I first saw this question on the list, to think, oh, this is on the wrong list. It should be over on the AC list because it’s, like everybody said, it’s a policy issue. And I think you’re hearing all of us come with the same response of the role of the Board is to ensure that the policy issues – the policy process is being followed and the recommendations coming from the AC are implemented.

So kind of weighing in on this specific policy, it raises the question – it’s interesting that it floated up as like a priority from the community for the Board to respond to. Is it a bit of a litmus test to figure out, hey, where do you sit? Are you pro leasing or pro keep the numbers different for cloud and network providers?

I just personally have no skin in the game. I’m not conflicted with this topic at all. I don’t have any opportunity to gain or lose on either side of the decision. And I see, just looking through the discussion on PPML, decent conversations about the pros and cons of either option.

Like the rest of the candidates here, I’ll look to the community to kind of vet that out and the AC to eventually come to the Board with a recommendation to look at. But I think if there’s one thing, I would personally love to see come out of that, and I think Jeff touched on this a little bit, and that is better accountability for the data.

Regardless of whatever process is put in place to distinguish leasing versus infrastructure assignments, if the net result is, in all cases, we got better data in Whois and better accountability for what addresses are being used where, whether they’re in market or out of market, and whether they’re being used and reused, as long as it’s all updated and maintained, I think that would be very valuable, not just to the organization but to the community and the operators as a whole, especially security practitioners who need that information to understand when there are bad actors how to quickly identify them and shut them down. That would be my personal bias on the outcome of the process. So, thanks.

John Curran: Thank you, Ron. Okay. That actually concludes all of the questions, the five questions selected. I’m going to let each of the candidates wrap up. We have about, we have a few minutes left. So, each candidate can make 30 seconds to a minute statement of anything that they’d like to clarify or anything they’d like to respond to.

And I’ll take them – I’ll actually go in alphabetical order again. So, it’s going to be you, Bram. 30 seconds to a minute. Is there anything you’d like to add or clarify? Your last comments here. Go ahead.

Bram Abramson: I won’t take that long. Just thanks for having me, everyone. It’s a pleasure to see a lot of familiar faces and names again. And I hope you’ll seriously consider my candidacy.

John Curran: Okay. Thank you.

Dan Alexander, 30 seconds to a minute, anything you’d like to add, correct, or say in final comments?

Dan Alexander: No clarifications. Just a definite thank you for all the people who have provided support through this election process. And I’m always available and interested. If you have any feedback, you can definitely reach out to me and appreciate the consideration for vote, thanks.

John Curran: Thank you.

Jeff Bedser, anything you’d like to say in closing, clarifications, or comments, final remarks?

Jeffrey Bedser: Firstly, thank you for the opportunity to be part of this process. And I think as a message to everyone, you’ve got five really strong candidates here. I don’t think you’re going to go wrong no matter what the outcome of the elections are.

I think that the thought and heart behind the answers and the real strength behind them – I think you have a strong slate to choose from. I don’t envy you in the choice.

John Curran: Thank you.

Again, closing remarks, any final comments or clarifications, Peter Harrison.

Peter Harrison: Thanks. I would like to echo the sentiment that the candidates that are here are really strong. I don’t envy the choice of the voters when they’re making that final selection. But one thing I would like to close with is that the Board is really listening to the community. We recognize the fact that we need to be flexible and the fact that in some areas we need to be a little firmer.

We will be discussing this more and more with community consultations that are coming. And I wish all the candidates the best. And good luck. Thank you.

John Curran: Final candidate, final closing remarks, Ron da Silva, any clarifications, comments or 30 seconds to a minute.

Ron da Silva: Thank you, John. I feel like I should, I guess, start by saying, look, I didn’t come here to, like, disrupt the NomCom process. That wasn’t my motivation. I hope it doesn’t come across that way.

My understanding is the Board does regularly do its own self-assessment, look for self-improvement, find ways to adjust. And the nominating process being yet another thing that the Board continuously looks for feedback and improvements on. I think all the attention in this election cycle around having to exercise the petition process and improving on accountability and transparency, that’s all good. It should go into the Board as it looks for self-improvement in those areas.

But that’s not why I’m here. I bring a lot of history and experience in ARIN and in the industry and in governance experience. That’s really what I’m bringing to the table. I think we can take some of this input, make some good adjustments to the process and move on.

And so today, just thank you for your time. I appreciate everybody tuning in. And appreciate your support and ask for your vote. Thank you.

John Curran: Thank you, Ron. At this time I’d like to give a round of applause to all of our Board of Trustees candidates for their participation in the panel. Wish them good luck. Round of applause for our candidates. Actually no one can hear anyone but me, but I know you’re clapping.

I’ll now release the Board of Trustees candidates so we can move on to the AC Candidate Forum.

We’re starting a couple minutes early, but with the number of candidates we have, I actually think that’s a good idea.

AC Candidate Forum

At this time, ARIN AC candidates. I’d like to remind folks we have, oh, let’s see, we have some nine candidates for the ARIN Advisory Council. There are five questions that were submitted by the community and prioritized by the community.

Because of the number of ARIN AC candidates that we have, I recommend that we go no more than one minute per answer. The ARIN Advisory Council candidates have been given these questions in advance. For the candidates – I will be mute while you’re speaking. When you see me come off mute, that’s a minute. And you should wrap up promptly so we can actually give everyone a chance to speak. I’ve made an order here, somewhat random. It matches the list that we published for the AC candidate when we published the final slate. So, with that I’m going to start right in.

The first ARIN AC member to be asked will be Jeffry Handal. And the questions that we have, the first question: Currently, the community is self-selected and is a smaller but focused group of individuals. Do you think the policy process should be changed to reflect wider stakeholder views that may be less engaged but more representative?

Jeffry Handal, go ahead.

Jeffry Handal: Thank you John. So, deliberating in a very large group setting is very hard. So keeping the number of deliberators who are talking should be maintained small. However, this begs an interesting question. Maybe we should provide ways to make it easier and simpler for the members to engage to provide their opinions.

Maybe the methods that we have today, which I, in full disclosure, I’m not aware of all of them, may not be as engaging, may not be as easy. So, if we find a way to make it easier, more engaging to provide that input into the meetings for the deliberators, that would be awesome.

John Curran: Thank you. I will move on. Next one up will be the same question. It’s to you, Kat Hunter. Currently the community is self-selected and is a smaller but focused group of individuals. Do you think the policy process should be changed to reflect wider stakeholder views that may be less engaged but more representative?

Kat Hunter: I think we need to distinguish the community versus the active community, because the community really is everyone that wants to be involved. We have the PPML open to everyone in the virtual settings we have now. We’ve heard the chair say multiple times anyone within the sound of my voice can vote.

So, it is already pretty available and open for the community, but this doesn’t mean we can’t make things better. I think the way that we’ve changed meetings from hybrid back in the day to hybrid now makes people feel more included.

I would love to get rid of the hand raising and do the online voting. We know that that works. But I think the other things that we can do in actual policy is to make all the policy more clear and more easily understandable. More people will feel inclined to participate if they can actually understand what’s going on.

John Curran: We’ll ask the next question to our next ARIN Advisory Council candidate, which will be Amy Potter.

Amy, currently the community is self-selected and is a smaller but focused group of individuals. Do you think the policy process should be changed to reflect wider stakeholder views that may be less engaged but more representative? Go ahead, Amy.

I’m not hearing Amy.

Amy Potter: So, I would like to see us engaged in more outreach. Years ago, we used to do Public Policy Consultations at NANOGs. I know that we stopped doing that because we weren’t getting a ton of attendees at that. But personally, I see the function of those sorts of things as getting input from people that might not normally participate in our process and that’s something that helps us to make better policy because we hear from individuals that might be impacted by the policies that we’re working on, in a forum that we might not normally see them in. So, I’d like to see us return to that. I’d like to see more outreach and encouragement to other network operators to participate and really see how this impacts them so that they can have a voice.

John Curran: Thank you very much. I’m now going to ask that same question to our next ARIN AC candidate, which is Kerrie Richards.

Kerrie, currently the committee is a self-selected and smaller but focused group of individuals. Do you think the policy process should be changed to reflect wider stakeholder views that may be less engaged but more representatives?

Kerrie Richards: Thank you, John. So Kat made a great distinction just now, which is the distinction I was going to make as well, because the ARIN community is everyone within, all users within the ARIN region. But we have the active community as well. And even within the active community of users and stakeholders, not all of them are represented today on PPML. They may not all be aware of the meetings in order to participate.

So, the challenge that I see is, first, how to become more visible to the less engaged stakeholders. So, I’m based in the Caribbean. So, ARIN in the Caribbean was an awesome program, or is an awesome program because it’s still going on. So, seeing ARIN in the pockets of the Caribbean where, in years gone by, knew nothing about ARIN, but were affected by the policies. And in the Caribbean, we have an issue where policies are decided upon for us and we don’t necessarily become part of the process.

Shepherds are also part of the stakeholders as well. And we want to hear as much from every pocket or every group or every member of the community, the active community. So, from a shepherd’s standpoint, I think that’s very important. I think John is – I’m right there.

John Curran: [Laughter.] Yes, wrap it up. Thank you, Kerrie.

So, I’m now going to ask that same question to our next candidate, who is Rob Seastrom.

Rob, currently the community is self-selected and a smaller but focused group of individuals. Do you think the policy process should be changed to reflect wider stakeholder views that may be less engaged but more representative? R.S.

Robert Seastrom: I believe the greater engagement to accommodate the widest possible range of stakeholders in the Public Policy process is a laudable goal. To that end, I’ve been an advocate for and supporter of the Fellowship Program and served on application evaluation nomination committees. I’m also highly interested in taking lessons learned during the fully remote and hybrid meetings during the current pandemic to enrich and level the playing field between remote and in-person participants at future meeting. All future meetings should be hybrid as we currently understand the term. This is a concrete way in which we can engage with wider constituency of stakeholders.

Regarding the question of a constituency that might be less engaged but more representative, and I’m making air quotes here, I’d like to quote Yogi Berra: If people don’t want to come to the ballpark, how are you going to stop them? I’m not sure how one would address the views of an implied silent majority of less engaged stakeholders and would look with a certain degree of skepticism at any person or organization that claimed to have their finger on that pulse.

John Curran: Thank you, R.S. I’ll ask the same question to the next ARIN Advisory Council candidate. That will be Alicia Trotman. Alicia: Currently the community is self-selected and a smaller but focused group of individuals. Do you think the policy process should be changed to reflect wider stakeholder views that may be less engaged but more representative?

Alicia Trotman: I’m going to echo the sentiments of a lot of people who came prior to me. That would be that the process right now is pretty much open. It is easy to engage in PPML. Submit policies – sorry, submit proposals. The opportunity is there. However, the participation is quite low.

We have to admit that these topics aren’t very “sexy” to the general public, but it does affect them. And I think what helps or stuff such as outreach programs – ARIN in the Caribbean as well as Fellowship Programs, because we’ve seen how the Fellowship Program has brought people who have gotten the opportunity to experience ARIN, then go on to be members of the AC and they become engaged in the process.

That’s my answer.

John Curran: Okay. Thank you. And then the final ARIN AC candidate available for the forum is Chris Woodfield.

Chris, I’ll ask you the same question. Currently the community is self-selected and a smaller but focused group of individuals. Do you think the policy process should be changed to reflect wider stakeholder views that may be less engaged but more representative?

Chris Woodfield: Thanks for the question, John. I think ARIN as a whole, AC, Board, staff, should be constantly looking at ways to make this process more inclusive.

One of the pillars of the Policy Development Process is that a policy must be supported by the community. Therefore, the community needs to be well-defined. And we need, in the passed sound policy, we need to be comfortable that the community as we know it is representative – the active community is representative of the larger community. That’s not an easy task. I think we’ve made a lot of headway. I’m going to echo a lot of things that other people have said.

But outreach, the Caribbean, other areas, the Fellowship Program, I think the text in the NRPM itself can seem to be an intimidating barrier with its density, but I also think that the community is a lot more inclusive than outsiders perceive it to be.

So, bridging that gap is a challenge we need to be constantly looking at. And just what can we do along the barriers.

John Curran: Thank you, Chris. Wonderful.

I’m now going to move on to the second question that we had for our ARIN AC candidates. And this question is: What is the correct mix of skills around the ARIN AC table? So, I’ll start out with Jeffry Handal.

What’s the correct mix of skills around the ARIN AC table?

Jeffry Handal: I’m probably going to make up a new word: professional diversity. So, what I mean by that is what’s your path been professionally? Have you broken networks? Have you hacked? Have you worked with the C suite? All those backgrounds, all those experiences have helped shape who you are and how you think.

And I think having that diversity in your background really helps you think about the members and how the policy may affect them. And again, you’re always going to remember back, what did you do? How was that person affected for any action you take? That’s essentially what we do with policy.

Policy will affect our end users, will who affect who we engage with. So, let’s think about that when we’re in their shoes. Thank you.

John Curran: Thank you very much.

Same question, moving on to Kat Hunter, what is the correct mix of skills around the ARIN AC table?

Kat Hunter: As Vice Chair, it actually gives me a great view of what we need and don’t need around the table. One thing I can say is with it being a volunteer organization, we definitely need people that actively participate and want to actively participate. It is volunteer, but it involves a level of commitment to be effective. And if people have voted for you, you should be showing up.

Varying views are another thing that we really need to take into consideration. It’s not just the networkers. It’s not just the ISPs. People with legal backgrounds, people that are brokers, all different – we don’t want an echo chamber, is what we want to make sure we have. And we want to make sure we have representation from all of the regions, not just the United States. Not just Canada.

John Curran: Okay. Thank you.

Moving on, same question. This will be to Amy Potter. Amy, what is the correct mix of skills around the ARIN AC table?

Amy Potter: As my colleagues in here have said, it’s important to have a diverse set of skills on the Advisory Council.

We get so many different types of policy proposals that come in. And it’s really helpful having a body where there’s so many different members with insight into different segments of the industry and the ways that different proposals might impact different groups that some of us might not have thought of.

And that’s something that’s really helpful, and it serves as a nice safeguard to prevent unintended consequences to what we’re working on.

John Curran: Excellent. Thank you.

So same question for the next ARIN Advisory Council candidate, the next candidate is Kerrie Richards. Kerrie, what’s the correct mix of skills around the ARIN AC table?

Kerrie Richards: I think at the table we need to firstly have diversity of thought, because a lot of these policies have different implications for the various stakeholders.

But going back to the textbook answer to this question, we need to have people with a legal background, people with commercial expertise, people with governance background, as well as people who represent end user groups or take into consideration the needs of end user groups as well. So to me, that’s a good mix of, the correct mix of skills required at the AC table.

John Curran: Okay. Thank you very much.

I’ll ask the next question to the next candidate, Rob Seastrom. R.S., what’s the correct mix of skills around the ARIN AC table?

Rob Seastrom: Thank you. Am I unmuted? Yes, I am.

My AC colleagues have a diverse set of backgrounds. They hail from academic and commercial backgrounds, consensus building and community organization, engineering and administrative, IP address brokers and legal. They hail from plenty of geographical backgrounds. And plenty of people on the AC span multiple segments.

I’m grateful that we have this kind of sounding board as we discuss policy proposals. And I’m always pleased to find myself in the company of more people with secret super powers of which I’ve been heretofore unaware.

I think that an incredibly good mix of skills on the AC has evolved organically. Thank you.

John Curran: Okay. Thank you.

I’ll pose that question to our next candidate, Alicia Trotman. Alicia, what’s the correct mix of skills around the ARIN AC table?

Alicia Trotman: Thank you, John, for the question. I’ll start with the basic academic skills such as engineering or Internet governance. These are all assets at the table.

But I also want to mention some, what we consider our soft skills, which are effective communication, teamwork, work ethic. And you also have to have a degree of empathy and you listen to the opinions of other people who may not have your similar perspective on policy.

And integrity as well – and know when you should abstain, know when your conflict of interest becomes an issue. So those are the skills that I think make a very good mix around the AC table.

John Curran: Excellent.

And final ARIN AC candidate with the question of what is the correct mix of skills around the ARIN AC table? Chris Woodfield.

Chris Woodfield: Thanks. If anyone’s keeping track of the number of times the word “diversity” has been mentioned here, I’m only going to add to that count, because I think it’s very important that the AC have a diverse background and diverse skill set.

You need engineering. You need operations. You need administration policy. You need legal, people with legal backgrounds. Not to mention demographic diversity and geographic diversity as well. And all those are important because there’s so many different aspects of the community that also need to be well represented as the AC considers policy.

I definitely want to put a pin in Alicia’s mention of empathy. That factors big in my response as well because hearing everyone’s point of view doesn’t mean a lot unless you are able to listen and understand where that diversity was coming from and the reasons behind that. It’s very important that AC members be able to express their opinions and listen to those opinions, other people’s opinions, and understand the motivations behind them, not just listen to the words, listen to the scenes behind the words, the words behind the words. And I think that is very important across the entire AC.

John Curran: Okay. Thank you very much, Chris.

I’d like to now move to our next question. And again, these are the questions submitted by the community. These questions were sent out and sorted by community on level of interest. So, the question is going to be starting at the top of the order again, it will be for Jeffry Handal.

And the question is, Jeffry, is the current size of the ARIN AC appropriate for the current and expected level of policy?

Jeffry Handal: When I first saw the size of the committee being 15, the number kind of blew me away. In any formal training that we’ve had, we’ve always seen how to run effective meetings, and it’s always a much smaller number. I don’t know how we get deliberations done. But anyway, the fact that we’re all volunteers, we all can’t be available all at the same time, having that diverse background to fill in our strengths where we need to, because policy is so diverse, is a pretty good reason why 15 is a good magical number.

I would say let’s keep the same size and let’s see what happens. Thank you.

John Curran: Thank you.

Now going to ask the same question of Kat Hunter. Kat, is the current size of the AC appropriate for the current and expected level of policy?

Kat Hunter: The current size is good. Please, please don’t give us less. In addition to the policies that we handle, there’s also three working groups that work very hard on creating policy, going over the PDP and going over the Policy Experience Reports as well.

Even when we’re a little light on policy, there’s always, always something to do. I think the current number is good.

John Curran: Thanks.

I’ll ask the same question of Amy Potter. Amy, is the current size of the AC appropriate for the current and expected level of policy?

Amy Potter: I think that Kat is absolutely correct about there’s always work to be done. And having 15 people on there allows us to tackle a lot of different things at once.

I also think that this sort of ties back into the previous question, because having that large of a body allows us to have a wider set of skills and expertise and insight into different areas.

And I think that’s something that helps us to develop better policy.

John Curran: Thanks for the answer.

I’ll pose the same question to Rob Seastrom. R.S., is the current size of the AC appropriate for current and expected level of policy?

Rob Seastrom: I believe it is. 15 allows for diversity of thought and background without being unnecessarily cumbersome.

John Curran: Let me move right ahead. Wow, I barely got the clock started on that answer. Very concise and clear.

Moving ahead, next would be Alicia Trotman. Same question. Is the current size of the ARIN AC appropriate for the current and expected level of policy?

Alicia Trotman: Thank you. I do agree the AC size is appropriate. The docket shrinks and expands constantly. And as Kat would have mentioned, there are other duties that the AC performs. Let’s say members of the NomCom working groups. Even mentoring. So, there’s always work to be done.

John Curran: Okay. Excellent. Thank you.

And then the final ARIN AC candidate, Chris Woodfield. Chris, is the current size of the ARIN AC appropriate for the current and expected level of policy?

Chris Woodfield: So, when evaluating what size a body should be, two of the inputs that go in are: A) the expected workload, particularly among a set of volunteers. Everybody has a day job, too. And a large enough group that allows for, again, diversity of backgrounds and representation.

The other direction you need to make sure that the body is of a manageable size and is not so large that it can’t deliberate and can’t get work done. To answer Jeffry’s question, one of the ways the AC is able to manage – Robert’s Rules of Order plays a very big role in the AC meetings. So, I don’t think the current size of the AC is problematic. I’m not aware of any inappropriately heavy workloads among members. I don’t think that during my previous time in the AC things were unmanageable.

I could see the value of increasing the size if doing so will provide a greater, again, diversity, diversity of its membership. If that allows the AC to bring in backgrounds that don’t currently have representation. But I would not advocate doubling the size. I think you could add some people, but –

John Curran: Okay. Thank you very much.

I’m now going to move on to our next question. We might end up with a slightly livelier set of answers here.

So again, starting at the top of the order with Jeffry Handal. Our fourth question is: Does the design of the ARIN Nomination Committee favor insiders? Jeffry?

Jeffry Handal: I would say no. I’m an example of it. I’m a total outsider. That’s why many of my answers were “Hey, I have no clue, I’m starting out. I’m fully disclosing things I know, may not know about how ARIN works.”

I’m one of those people moving from not active to active. Things like that. The fact that I’m here and speaking to you as an outsider, I don’t think there’s any insider things going on. But that prompted me – one more thing, that prompted me to take a look at how the committee is built. And I did notice that there are some overlaps where, if you have Board members being part of the NomCom committee and stuff like that. So that may be a misinterpretation from people, things like that. But no.

John Curran: Okay. Thank you.

I’m now going to move on to our next ARIN AC candidate, Kat Hunter, and I ask the same question. Does the design of the ARIN Nomination Committee favor insiders?

Kat Hunter: I think the potential is always there. But I think the NomCom has always handled itself fairly professionally.

I do think if we were going to change anything, right now if someone is not chosen as a candidate, they don’t know why. I think more transparency there would be probably fairly helpful. I think Ron da Silva had mentioned that earlier.

But as a whole, I think, as mentioned earlier, I don’t think the NomCom really tries to pick insiders only.

John Curran: Thank you.

I’m going to move on to the next ARIN AC candidate. That’s Amy Potter. Amy, does the design of the ARIN Nomination Committee favor insiders?

Amy Potter: I think there’s likely always some benefit to be known by the people that are making these kinds of decisions. Whether it’s on the NomCom or in the election process or really any situation in life.

I would be lying if I said I didn’t think it helped in some way to be known by the people making decisions. That being said, I don’t necessarily think that some of the current issues we’ve been discussing, a matter of insiders versus outsiders. I think that we need to have clearer criteria being applied and I think we need more transparency.

But I’m not going to sit here and lie to you and say that it doesn’t help to know that people that are doing it.

John Curran: Thank you.

I’m going to move on to our next candidate, who is Kerrie Richards. Kerrie Richards, does the design of the ARIN Nomination Committee favor insiders?

Kerrie Richards: Thanks for that, John.

John, I didn’t get to answer question number three, so I’m just going to give it a couple of seconds if I’m permitted. If that’s okay.

John Curran: Wait. You didn’t get question number three?

Kerrie Richards: I didn’t.

John Curran: Let’s rewind, on question number three, Kerrie, I’m very sorry. I have a lot of checklists but I’m not perfect.

What’s your thoughts on the current size of the ARIN AC? Is it appropriate for the current and expected level of policy?

Kerrie Richards: Thanks, John. So, yes, I think that because the role on the AC is a voluntary one and the docket, depending on trends, depending on how close we are to a meeting, depending on various factors, policies are coming in on a regular basis.

So, I think docket management, the size of the AC is great. There are also other activities such as monitoring what’s happening in the other regions, working groups and some of those other things that we need to keep an eye on.

I think it makes good sense to keep the AC at the number that it is right now.

John Curran: Excellent. And that’s very good to hear from you on that. I’m very sorry. Somehow I overlooked it in my list.

Let’s move on to the question that I was posing to you so we can catch up. So, the next question is, Kerrie, does the design of the ARIN Nomination Committee favor ARIN insiders?

Kerrie Richards: Thanks for that, John. I don’t think it favors insiders. So, I’m from the Caribbean.

I was more active. So before becoming active again in 2017 in the ARIN community, I was active, say, in 2013. And being from the Caribbean and not seeing much representation at the table up to 2017, I would have considered myself an outsider.

But because of transparency, because it – looking from the outside in – it didn’t feel as though there was any sort of favoritism of any kind. When I said yes in 2017, I said it based on that. And I’ve not been let down at all.

I think the NomCom puts together the slate based on published criteria. And I think the only part of that whole process that may be needed is the feedback.

John Curran: Excellent. Very good. I’ll ask the same question of the next ARIN AC candidate, Rob Seastrom. Rob, does the design of the ARIN Nomination Committee favor insiders?

Rob Seastrom: So, I’ll note that the two people who were not selected by the Nomination Committee this year would absolutely look like they were insiders to a disinterested external observer, while saying that the lack of transparency that’s baked into the way that the NomCom operates makes it impossible to say with any degree of certainty whether it does or doesn’t.

I have faith in the community’s ability to make good choices. I believe it would be an improvement if all candidates were required to go through a petition process and acquire a number of votes in support for members in order to make it to the battle for the general election.

Recognizing that meeting the minimum required number of candidates has been a challenge in prior years, we absolutely need a NomCom for the purpose of recruitment, if nothing else. Regardless, anyone who has gone through the trouble of volunteering to stand for election, filling out the extensive questionnaires that are held forth for them ought to at least be afforded the courtesy of a clear explanation of why they were not accepted onto the ballot if they are not.

John Curran: Very good. I’m now going to ask the same question to Alicia Trotman. Alicia, does the design of the ARIN Nomination Committee favor insiders?

Alicia Trotman: Thank you. I don’t think it does. However, the events from the results for the Board of Trustees candidates this year, it does show that the community does require changes to be made, specifically in transparency and feedback for the candidates.

I do think the NomCom, they followed the guidelines and the criteria that are given to them and maybe that needs to be looked at. Thank you.

John Curran: Thank you very much. And then last candidate for the ARIN AC, Chris Woodfield. Chris, I’m going to ask you the same question. Does the design of the ARIN Nomination Committee favor insiders?

Chris Woodfield: Thanks. I’ll note that one of the challenges of being the last panelist here is that you’re doing a lot of “what they said.”

I personally don’t think that the NomCom is favoring insiders. If I look at the makeup of, specifically the AC, looking at the makeup of the AC and the current makeup of the candidates slate, I feel pretty comfortable that there’s no inappropriate – no inappropriately subjective decisions being made, as far as forming the slate.

That said, as many noted, the lack of transparency that’s baked into the NomCom process, for those that are not aware, the NomCom members are expected to sign an NDA and cannot disclose who – how many nominees have come in, who have been rejected, unless the nominee itself discloses that. And personally speaking I’m not aware of any AC nominees that have not made it onto the slate. But the structure and that lack of transparency that’s baked into the policy today can absolutely lead to the perception of that.

Let’s also keep in mind that the NomCom is charged with recruiting candidates as well as vetting candidates, which could be seen as leading to an unconscious bias towards a candidate that a NomCom member has actively had to recruit.

One idea I would like to put forth is a public report of the number of nominees that have come in versus the number of nominees that have been put in the slate. You can respect privacy. You don’t have to name names or specific reasons, but – or at least keep them very broad, broad categories of reasons why certain numbers of candidates haven’t been put on the slate. So, coming to an ACSP near you. Thanks.

John Curran: Thank you very much. Okay. We’re now on our final question. I’m going to tell the candidates you will have about a minute and a half. We have a little bit of time. So, you should take a little more if you need it on this final question.

And we’ve actually seen this final question before. It was posed to the ARIN Board candidates earlier today.

So, I will – Chris, are you ready? We’ll reverse the order in your favor and you don’t have to paraphrase as much. We’ll work up the list backwards on this question. You have a minute to a minute and a half.

The question is: Should the NRPM distinguish between the practice of IP address leasing and the practice of LIRs charging for IP addresses associated with their services that require the use of addresses? Example, cloud and network providers. Chris Woodfield.

Chris Woodfield: So, I’ll echo something that – this is the same question that was posed to the Board candidates. It is not the AC’s job to directly advocate for shortened policies or not. It’s the AC’s job to evaluate the community support for that policy and help guide the community in the pursuit of better understanding of the level of community support and guiding modifications as needed to the policy based on community feedback.

That said, I will admit to having personal opinions as a community member. I think that this practice, if officially endorsed and baked into the NRPM, can raise some worrisome side effects when it comes to the dynamics of the market. I personally feel that organizations that are not operators that exist purely to own and lease space can acquire a certain amount of, dare I say, market power that could distort the market and raise the current market prices of IP address space even further, which could have a cyclical effect of making it more difficult for operators to acquire space, just forcing them into leases.

I think that if the community were to support this policy of this style there would need to be some pretty strong guardrails to make sure that we can stay equitable, make sure that this policy does not have the side effect of removing the ability of smaller players from participating in the IP address market and from running their businesses.

We all have the same goal here; we want to run our businesses, small and large, as successfully as we can. And I worry that such a policy could make that more difficult for a substantial number of our community members.

John Curran: Thank you, Chris. I’ll ask the same question to Alicia Trotman. Should the NRPM distinguish between the practice of IP address leasing and the practice of LIRs charging for IP addresses associated with their services which require the use of those addresses? Example, cloud and network providers? You have a minute and a half. Go right ahead.

Alicia Trotman: Thanks, John. I feel like this is a trick question here. I would say this comes down to a lot of different issues, and it has been discussed thoroughly on PPML. And some of the factors I would bring out is access to services for other – for the use of others.

This could lead to the ease of bad actors having access and even tracking the use of IP space from bad actors. I would say we have to – as an AC member you have to balance the pros and cons and you have to clarify the implications of such a policy to the community. But I would say, to answer this question directly, I would let the community decide.

John Curran: Thank you very much. I’m going to ask that same question of Rob Seastrom. R.S., should the NRPM distinguish between the practice of IP address leasing and the practice of LIRs charging for IP addresses associated with their services which require the use of IP addresses? Example, cloud and network providers.

Rob Seastrom: Thank you, John. Given how many Board members have pointed out that this is out of scope for the Board, I feel compelled to point out that it’s in scope for the public policy process.

While acknowledging that the AC’s role is to develop policy proposals based on community consensus, not to guide it or force through our own thoughts, this question clearly asks for my personal opinion, which is that codifying the practice of leasing out address space and counting that as in-use for the purposes of qualifying for more space is a step away from goodness, particularly in terms of registry accuracy and transparency.

That said, it is many years since free pool exhaustion. Aside from the waiting list, there’s no other place besides the transfer market, where prices have gone up over the years, to get address space. I’m sensitive to needs of small and financially-constrained organizations and the necessity of a pay-as-you-go model that could be supported by a leasing agency regime, ability to pledge number resources as collateral for a loan in a way they could be recovered by the lender in the event of a default, or other mechanisms. I’m particularly interested in creative approaches to this problem that encourage greatest Whois database accuracy.

You, the community, know where to find me. And I welcome nuanced opinions and thoughts on this matter. Thank you.

John Curran: Thank you, R.S.

I’ll now move on to our next ARIN AC candidate, Kerrie Richards, and ask the same question.

Kerrie, should the NRPM distinguish between the practice of IP address leasing and the practice of LIRs charging for addresses associated with their services which require the use of those addresses, such as cloud and network providers?

Kerrie Richards: Thanks, John. And thanks for that question. And that question sounds as if it needs a bit of tweaking to put through as a policy. And that’s what the AC does. We shepherd policy.

And putting through a policy like that would mean that it would get a chance to gain further clarity, as well as being ventilated in a structured way finding community conversation. And that’s what the AC and that’s what the shepherds are here to do. I think the question comes from a place of maybe commercial frustration when entities need to move quickly and with few hurdles.

But I think that with the work we’ve done with the NRPM working group, this is possibly something, a moment or a point of clarity, that may need to be examined. But as I said, it needs to go through the proper processes and it looks as if it could potentially be coming to the docket soon.

John Curran: Thank you very much.

I will now ask our next candidate, Amy Potter, the same question. Amy, should the NRPM distinguish between the practice of IP address leasing and the practice of LIRs charging for IP addresses associated with their services which require the use of those addresses, like cloud or network providers?

Go ahead, Amy.

Amy Potter: Sure. So, at present I’m not convinced that it would be wise or that it’s even necessary to codify this kind of distinction in the language of NRPM. I’m open to having my mind changed on the matter. But it’s really going to depend on the specifics of the Policy Proposal being presented and the language being used.

So far I haven’t seen any language that I would support as a member of this community. But as others on this panel have mentioned, our role on the Advisory Council is not to impose our will on the rest of the community, it’s to evaluate whether or not there’s community support, whether a proposal is technically sound, and whether or not it’s fair and impartial.

And if those criteria are met, I’m more than happy to support something moving forward. But I think that this is – the way this question is presented gets into some bigger questions about what ARIN’s role is, what it should be, and I think that’s a question to answer. And there are some tricky legal issues that might tie into that. And we need to be aware of that as we’re working on any sort of specific attempt to embed this into policy language.

John Curran: Thank you very much.

I’m going to now ask our next candidate for the ARIN AC, Kat Hunter, should the NRPM distinguish between the practice of IP address leasing and the practice of LIRs charging for addresses associated with their services which require the use of IP addresses, example cloud and network providers?

Go ahead, Kat.

Kat Hunter: I definitely feel bad for Chris Woodfield going last because now I’m in that position and a lot of what I was going to say has already been said.

I do absolutely agree that this is going to end up being a community decision. We don’t really go into this for or against something. But I think overall we need to just be careful when we’re looking at this because there’s a fine line of ARIN forcing business practices.

I personally think that this could create some issues with the portable addresses, creating a mess in the registry if we’re not careful. And trying to track down who owns what is already a problem. But I think overall it’s going to be up to the community to decide.

John Curran: Thank you for that answer.

Now I’ll go to our final candidate to respond to this. Jeffry, you started out our panel, you get to finish our panel.

So on the question, Jeffry, should the NRPM distinguish between the practice of IP address leasing and the practice of LIRs charging for IP addresses associated with their services which require the use of those addresses, such as cloud and network providers.

Go ahead, Jeffry.

Jeffry Handal: Thank you. So when I first saw this question so many thoughts popped into my mind. So, I’m going to try to organize them out loud. First, it prompted, “Hey, there should be an investigation in order. Is it only affecting IPv4 versus IPv6? Is it coming from small businesses? Large businesses? What’s going on?” So a market study is definitely in order. We can’t just, say, give our opinions and stuff like that. So I’m hoping, as Miss Kat alluded earlier, there’s ad hocs, hopefully there’s staff support, these are things we could probably do on the side to figure out how to influence and get the community’s involvement.

Another thought is we don’t want policy to get in the way of stifling innovation. What I mean by that is there are complete business models out there, entities that work off of leasing and providing these addresses, we don’t want to put them out of business.

This may provide us an opportunity to again do a market study. How many businesses are we going to affect? Is it going to be detrimental? Are we going to kill the cloud providers and ISPs? We have to be very careful what we do and how we think about this one.

Last but not least, why not invent – and maybe this prompts us to think about new ways or new ways of engaging with the community. How can we turn those folks that are trying to lease or acquire addresses and become end users, why not? How can we do that? How can we use these cloud providers to do that?

This might be a way to innovate a little around ARIN and set the example. So at the end, we have to think about it and get some data to make a decision, follow the scientific method.

John Curran: Thank you, Jeffry.

That concludes the questions for the panelists. I’d like to thank all the panelists for participating. No one can hear me clap, or I guess you can only hear me clap.

All of the ARIN AC candidates who were able to participate, very thankful again to them that they were able to be here. The Board of Trustees candidates who participated earlier in the panel.

And I hope the folks found this ARIN 48 Candidate Forum to be informative. I’ll now turn it over to our host to close the session.

Closing Announcements and Adjournment

John Curran: Anything to be done? Nope. That’s it. Thank you, everyone. Thank you for our Network Sponsors, which is USI and Lumen. And remember that this is now the segment of our meeting which we’re holding now as the Candidates Forum. We held the PPML last week.

Next week is the ARIN Hybrid Members Meeting. It’s the 4th of November. It will take place live from Minneapolis immediately after the NANOG meeting, from 10 AM to 2:30 PM Central Time.

Please participate. If you can be there in person, we’d love to have you. If you are going to be there virtually attending, that’s great to hear as well. And I think that’s it.

See you on November 4th. Thank you all for attending our ARIN Candidates Forum. So long.

[Meeting adjourned at 3:01 PM]