ARIN 51 Public Policy and Members Meeting, Day 3 Transcript - Wednesday, 19 April 2023 [Archived]

Opening Announcements

Hollis Kara: Welcome back to the final day of ARIN 51. I hope everyone has been enjoying the meeting thus far. And I’m so glad you’re back with us today.

One more time, let’s get a big round of applause for our Board of Trustees, Advisory Council, and NRO Number Council representatives for all the hard work they do for the ARIN community.

(Applause.)

Super speedy reminder run-through; you all have heard this song a couple times already so feel free to sing along. Again, chat is for — chatting, thank you. Didn’t know there was going to be audience participation.

And for questions and comments, we use Q&A and raising the hand. Everyone, whether they’re approaching the mic in the room or virtually, should lead off with their name and affiliation because we need to capture that for the transcript.

Again, virtual participants, if you are having trouble finding anything or connecting to the stream or Zoom’s giving you trouble or whatever you need, we will have the Virtual Help Desk open until 9:30 this morning and it will be open on our break again just a little bit later on.

In person, again, happy to have you join the Zoom so you can chat with our virtual attendees, but do please make sure, when you’re connecting, that you’re disconnected from audio and fully muted.

Reminders, the producers, both on stage and on the back riser, will help to coordinate discussion to make sure that we get the virtual participants fully involved as well. Bill and John will be looking to us for some assistance with that.

Again, clearly state your name and affiliation when you start your comments. And please do make sure that you are staying on topic and following our standards of behavior.

We are recording and livestreaming, which is awesome. You can catch all my bloopers. They will be preserved forever. And slides are available on our website at the meeting materials page as well as live transcripts, which are running right now.

Again, one more time, a big thank you for our sponsors: Charter Communications, IPv4.Global by Hilco Streambank, and Google.

(Applause.)

We’ve got lots of interesting reports this morning, starting with everyone’s favorite, and followed by the Board report, Advisory Council report, the Number Resource Organization update, ASO AC update — yes, those are two distinctly different reports — and an Internet Number Resource Status report before we head to break.

And then we’ll come back with updates from our services departments as well as the regional policy report from Eddie since we didn’t let him talk yesterday. He doesn’t get to escape coming up on stage.

We’ll finish the day with an open microphone, and then we’ll let you all free to enjoy Tampa until it is time for your departure to wherever you joined us from.

And with that, I’d like to welcome Nancy Carter up to the stage for the fun-nancial update.

Financial Report

Nancy Carter: In no other place is the finance report this exciting.

So good morning and, finally, it’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for, the ARIN Treasurer’s Report. I’m happy to be here in Tampa to present to you in person.

So as I share with you regularly, I could not serve as the treasurer without the help and support of the ARIN staff and my colleagues on the Board of Trustees. I want to thank especially the Financial Services Department for their continued commitment to evolving financial services and to developing meaningful and fun reports.

Thank you to Brian and the entire FSD team. Collectively they’re the team that makes my job as treasurer super easy. And thanks also to Alyssa for keeping the Finance Committee so well organized.

Today, I’m going to update you on the activities of the Finance Committee since last October. I’m going to review the 2022 results, including the financial position, highlights of our investment portfolio, our operating results, and then finally we’ll look at the net assets.

So as you can see, the CFO and I continued to keep the Finance Committee very busy. We’ve met four times since I reported to you in LA in October. We’ve continued to provide oversight of the financial results of the organization. We’ve monitored our investment results in conjunction with our investment advisors. We’ve made approved changes to the portfolios. We’ve met with auditors. And we’ve reviewed the results of the 2022 financial audit.

We rely heavily on the work and professionalism of our investment advisors and our audit firm. Their dedication to our results and compliance requirements and their capacity to communicate with the Finance Committee has been very much appreciated by the members of the FinCom, especially as we onboarded two bran-new committee members this year.

I’m going to move on to the financial position. This chart, which is kind of like an eye chart, shows you ARIN’s financial position at the end of December 2022 compared to the same period in 2021. We ended the year with an $800,000 decrease in total assets. The most notable change in assets is, of course, the decrease in investment values. This is not unexpected given the tough market this past year. And I’ll speak a little more about that later.

In 2022 we added the new right-of-use assets due to the implementation of new lease accounting requirements, which Brian will explain during his presentation. It was a bit of a rock, paper, scissors thing, and Brian won that competition.

In the liability section of the statement there are a couple of items to note. The major change was related to the new lease accounting requirements. Those new requirements resulted in lease liabilities being added to the statement and our previously reported deferred rent being removed from the statements.

The liability section also reflects an increase in deferred revenue. This change is caused by the increase in annual fees billed during 2022 as a result of the fee harmonization program.

And finally, overall the statement shows a $5.4 million decrease in net assets reflecting both an operating loss and the investment loss incurred during the year.

So I turn your attention to the ARIN investments now. This chart shows the end-of-quarter investment values going back to the end of 2019. As discussed during last year’s member meetings, 2022 was a tough year on ARIN’s investments.

Total investments at the end of 2022 were 31.4 million, a decrease of 3.8 million over the year. The Long Term Reserve Fund ended the year with $27.6 million, you can see that in green, and the Operating Reserve Fund ended the year with $3.8 million, which is the red.

The good news is we’ve seen a bit of recovery thus far in 2023. The total investments were up by half a million dollars in the first quarter.

In collaboration with our investment advisors, we continue to maintain a long-term view of investments. We believe that a well-diversified portfolio, consistent with our attitude toward risk, will allow our investments to recover losses over time.

Even though, as the slide says, there was nowhere to hide in 2022, ARIN’s diversification strategy helped avoid potential larger losses, as you can see on this chart. The Finance Committee recently met with our Fiducient Investment consultant to discuss our plan for 2023. So we’re basically staying the course, and we’ve implemented only minor changes to the portfolio’s asset allocation strategy.

So I’ll move on to operating results, if the button would work. Don’t let this operating deficit alarm you too much. The operating deficit is an accounting measure. Our billings for the year were on target, and cash actually increased over the course of the year.

Here we can see total revenues to the end of December 2022 compared to 2021 and to the budget for the year.

For registration fees, changes in both initial and annual registration fees were expected. The budget variance on registration fees was due to revenue recognition assumptions, which is like what the accountants do to our statements, and it’s not a reflection of our service billings.

2022 brought new revenues from Org create and recovery services. The budget was based upon prior year activity and the new charge for these services drove values below what we had anticipated or budgeted.

Revenues are important. But they represent the recognition over time of amounts billed. So let’s take a look at what we actually billed in 2022, where we can see the impact of the fee harmonization changes.

These are the billing results for IPv4 and IPv6 registry service renewals for the first year of fee harmonization. It’s another eye chart. The amounts billed were approximately $350,000 more than budget.

Other registry services billed in 2022 totaled more than $2 million. There were billings for initial number resources, which totaled $1.1 million. Billings for transfer services were a healthy $713,000. And finally we had new service categories for 2022, which included Org create/recovery charges, for which we billed $156,000, and Premier Support Plan, for which we billed $35,000.

So in total, 2022 service billings were almost $27 million, about $300,000 more than we budgeted.

So we’ll continue talking about the statement of activities, but we’re going to switch to operating expenses.

The total year-over-year increase in operating expenses is about $3.3 million. This might seem like a lot, but it’s very close to what our expectations were for the year. Salaries and benefits account for $1.5 million of that increase. The 9 percent increase that you see in salaries and benefits is driven by a 6 percent increase in employees. We moved from 87 to 92 over the year. And there’s a 3 percent increase in salaries.

The return-to-normal travel and meeting expenses accounts for another $1.4 million of the increase over 2021.

Overall budget variance is very small. But there were favorable and unfavorable variances in several categories. The main ones that I’ll talk about are engineering variance, which is a result of the new accounting policy releases. And that policy also drives the below-budget variance in depreciation and amortization.

Unplanned NRO AC meeting, a meeting of the RIR Finance and Legal teams, the Member Meeting and various registration fees are driving the meeting expenses’ budget variance.

And professional fees are more than budgeted due to legal expenses ARIN incurred to support AFRINIC and the Regional Internet Registry environment in 2022.

So because salaries and benefits drive the changes in ARIN’s operating expenses so dramatically, here’s some information on the ARIN team. In 2021 the average number of employees and the budgeted number of employees was 87. In 2022, the average number of employees over the year was 92, while the budgeted number was 94.

In 2023, we see an increase in the head count number of employees budgeted to 99. So the second graph on the right hand side of that chart shows you the average departmental numbers.

And finally, we’ll take a quick look at ARIN’s net assets and liquidity. The decrease in net assets that I mentioned earlier puts downward pressure on our net asset coverage measure. The number of months of operating expenses covered by net assets, that you can see in the far right column, has decreased to 11 months due to that decrease in net assets.

Despite the decrease in this measure, ARIN’s financial position is still strong, as indicated by a combined total of cash and investments of $34.3 million.

Thank you, and I’m happy to answer questions.

Hollis Kara: All right. The queues are open for any questions of Nancy about the Financial Report. Virtual participants, please start typing. And folks in the room, please feel free to approach the mic.

Andrew Dul: Andrew Dul. Thank you, Nancy. Wonderful to hear about how we’re doing, as always.

Two thoughts. One, there’s been some notable bank failures in our environment in the past couple of weeks slash months. I was wondering if ARIN felt like it needed to make any changes given perhaps a realization about that kind of thing.

And the second one was, what percentage of revenue does ARIN anticipate the new transfer recipient fee being as a part of total revenue for 2023?

Nancy Carter: So, I will take a shot at the first answer and then I’m going to call a friend on the second answer.

So the first question, it’s almost like you were at our Finance Committee meeting on Sunday and at the subsequent Board meeting on Sunday. It’s something we talked about obviously, and we have some strategies in place to manage that.

It’s definitely something that we’re very aware of and so we’re taking measures to manage our cash accordingly. So thank you.

Andrew Dul: I assumed you did, but I wanted you to say it

Nancy Carter: No, thank you. It’s a good question.

And I’m not sure which friend I’m calling. I think it’s Brian.

Brian Kirk: Hi, Brian Kirk, CFO for ARIN. The transfer processing fee revenues is expected to be about a million dollars. That’s what we budgeted. So, that’s about 3.5 percent.

Andrew Dul: Perfect, thank you.

Nancy Carter: Thanks, Brian.

Kevin Blumberg: Kevin Blumberg, The Wire. Nancy, these are the most beautiful slides I’ve seen from a financial presentation in years. You’ve really expanded in some areas and given great visibility and transparency to areas I hadn’t even considered in slides. So thank you. These are wonderful, wonderful slides.

Back to the transfer fees, though. My question is, I know that you raised it to try to cover and offset the costs. Is a million dollars, which Brian just brought up, does that even scratch the surface in terms of the cost of handling transfers within the ARIN region?

Nancy Carter: I’m going to call on my friend John Curran. Thanks, Kevin and thanks for your compliments on the slides. It’s not me, but there’s a whole team behind those beautiful slides. Thank you.

John Curran: So you’re asking inherently a business judgment question, okay, about the suitability and what the total risk envelope is. And the problem is that we don’t have a good track record in assessing that risk.

And, also, each transaction has its own unique, colorful history that affects that. So we have to make a judgment as to where is a good place to start. This has been our initial take on it.

Kevin Blumberg: Absolutely. I’m not asking for perfection. You could be off by 50 percent and I’d be happy with that. But if you’ve allocated 10 people towards handling transfers on a full-time basis, that’s more my question.

John Curran: No, this is truly – we do have increased cost for transfers to do due diligence. But this is also a little bit to handle the possibility that we may make a mistake. There’s a possibility that, in looking for records, there may be a dispute or there may be a transfer that was approved decades ago that probably shouldn’t have been, but we’re now the inheritor of the registry.

We want to be in a situation where if someone was harmed under those circumstances, but didn’t know it because no one cared about the address blocks and now comes back to correct it, we have some possibility of doing that.

Kevin Blumberg: So the transfer fee is more than just…

John Curran: The processing costs. Right. There’s a risk mitigation in there that we’re taking in now.

Kevin Blumberg: The last question then was I saw you’re down to 11 months, approximately. And is that sort of reaching the minimum threshold for ARIN? Is that something you’re looking to increase back up over time?

Nancy Carter: Certainly something that we’re looking to increase back up. Our threshold was right about 12 months, and so the investment losses drove that down a bit. So we’ll work to get that back up again.

Kevin Blumberg: Thank you.

Nancy Carter: Thanks, Kevin.

Hollis Kara: And I do not see any questions coming in from the virtual attendees. So thank you, Nancy. Appreciate your report.

(Applause.)

All right, and with that, he’s already on his way up here, Bill Sandiford is joining me on stage to give the Board of Trustees Report.

Board of Trustees Report

Bill Sandiford: Nancy is sure a tough act to follow and this is quite boring in comparison, but we’ll go for it.

Good morning, everyone. A little thinner crowd today.

All right. I’ve got a relatively brief report here. I only have two or three slides broken down into a few areas, fiduciary, financial, and policy matters. I’ll just speak very briefly to each bullet and then be happy to take any questions that come up.

A lot of the stuff that’s on this slide was just previously addressed by Nancy. But it’s a summary of some of the financial matters that the Board took into their consideration. Sorry, financial. I’m always confused as to what’s — there’s two monitors and they’re different. That one. Right.

We approved the new transfer processing fee this year. This was actually something that came from you guys. It came from the community. It was a member of the community that came forward and made the suggestion, and staff investigated it. And we percolated the idea through and then it came to fruition.

Other obvious financial matters, like approving the budget.

The third bullet is one that sometimes newer people in the community ask about. And our policies on the Board state that the organization can only incur expenses that are in an approved budget. But often members of our team are signing contracts for venues a year or two years in advance. So we have to put a special measure in place to allow the treasurer to approve stuff that’s a future commitment that’s not even budgeted yet.

Like we do every year, we adopted the auditor’s report and the financial statements, some small updates on the Financial Committee charter. And right up until two, three days ago there’s a new Investment Policy Statement that’s been approved and is going on the website, if it’s not there already, which knowing our staff, it probably is. They’re so great.

More routine stuff here. Fiduciary matters. Things like adopting minutes of the meetings, confirming the election results, all stuff that’s mandatory and required as part of our bylaws. We revised our strategic direction statement over this past year.

Obviously, we elected and confirmed a bunch of new Board officers and committee chairs, updated some standing rules in how we operate, updated a bunch of Board charters this year for the different committees, the different committees of the boards and what those committees do and what their tasks and their mandates are.

We made some changes to the Travel Qualified Policy, which for those of you might remember it was a policy that came in coming out of COVID that had a bunch of parameters by which ARIN was willing to sponsor, staff and/or volunteer travel. And with the pandemic now reaching the tail end, if not already over, it was time to update that Travel Qualified Policy. So we did.

And then, of course, we adopted the revised PDP.

Policy ratifications, we like to take credit for this and say it’s something that the Board did, but really this was you guys, this was the community that took these policies through the process, bottoms up, take them to the AC. And ultimately they came to us to ratify at the end of the day. Again, we like to take credit for it, but this is really your guys’ work, not ours.

And that’s it for me. So with that, happy to take any questions that anybody may have.

Hollis Kara: All right. Do we have any questions in the room for Bill or coming in from online? We’re gonna give them just a second to type. Anyone in the room, please feel free to approach the mic if you have a question for Bill.

Nope, looks like all’s quiet.

Bill Sandiford: All right, that’s good. All right, thank you, everyone.

(Applause.)

Hollis Kara: Thank you, Bill.

This is turning into a race to the podium. Are y’all sick of me?

Leif Sawyer is on his way up here to give the Advisory Council report, so let’s hear from Leif.

Advisory Council Report

Leif Sawyer: Thank you. Good morning, everyone.

As Hollis said, it’s the Advisory Council Report, beginning of the new year. We have some new faces on our Advisory Council. If you’re in the room, stand up. If you’re virtual, say hi. And big round of applause for everybody here.

(Applause.)

I hope you’ve all had a chance to stop our AC members and get to know some of them, because they’re going to be around, and we want to make sure that they’re supporting you the best way they can.

But in the background, we have a lot of staff members here who are helping us. And they don’t often get recognition as well. So thank you to all of our staff that make us able to do our jobs.

(Applause.)

We lost a pretty important guy just a month ago. Yeah, he went on to some greener pastures. He’s still alive. I just want to make that clear.

(Laughter.)

But Sean Hopkins, if you’re out there virtually, hi, thank you so much. I was in Ireland when he said goodbye. So this is my personal goodbye to Sean. Thank you, Sean.

(Applause.)

And our new Policy Analyst, Eddie Diego, stand up, man, wave, say hi.

(Applause.)

We are breaking him in. He hit the ground running. And thank you, Eddie. And this afternoon’s going to be a fun time.

So we’ve had some working groups that you’ve heard about as well. Our Number Resource Policy Manual and the folks on that one continuously working to improve that policy manual to help everybody here manage your Number Resources.

Public Policy Experience Working Group. Again, they’re going to take the feedback from this meeting and try and improve things again for you.

And the Policy Development Process Working Group here, they just wrapped up. We disbanded them. Maybe in a couple more years, after we get some feedback from the new PDP, we’ll bring it back and see how things go. But thanks to all of them. They did a great job.

Our council is 15 advisory members from all over the region, from the Caribbean, Canada and the contiguous states. We have terms of between one year and three years, depending on the election cycles. We try to elect an average of five members a year.

Sometimes we lose a couple more than that, and we scramble. So because it’s your voice, and we’re coming on election season, get out there and if you’re interested in joining the Advisory Council or if you know somebody, come talk to me, come talk to anybody on the Advisory Council and we’ll get you set on the path.

And that’s my presentation. So if you have any questions, feel free to come to the mics.

Hollis Kara: Mics are open if anyone in the room or online has questions for Leif.

Leif Sawyer: Oh, Mr. Blumberg, the Wire.

Kevin Blumberg: They get me every time. Kevin Blumberg, The Wire.

There wasn’t an opportunity during the policy blocks, but I think it’s worthwhile suggesting to you. Omnibus got brought up as a negative. The last time we ran somebody over with an omnibus was seven, eight years ago.

Leif Sawyer: Right.

Kevin Blumberg: I would suggest to the Advisory Council they take a fresh look. Our policies have stagnated over the years. We’ve made minor changes here and there. And sometimes taking a step back and saying, what was this entire section for and starting over, cleaning up, because I think the community is ready to fresh start. I think that there’s a lot of cruft.

And the way you’re doing it with all of the policies, the way you’re doing now, is a lot of time commitment. It’s a lot of head space for people to understand very nuanced changes. And I think we’re well beyond that. I think the infighting relating to individual sections of four.X, as an example, just aren’t there anymore.

And maybe taking a holistic view of some of the sections in the NRPM, and doing that a little bit more robust cleanup where you’re not just reordering the words or cleaning up the sentences, but just completely evolving may be appropriate.

Leif Sawyer: Great. Thank you for your feedback. And just to let you know, that has come up. And our working group, NRPM Working Group, is actively looking at some major changes. Anybody else?

Hollis Kara: Not seeing any questions from online.

Leif Sawyer: Thank you very much.

Hollis Kara: Thank you, Leif.

(Applause.)

Just as a point of process, so folks are aware, we’re running a little bit ahead of schedule right now. So what will end up happening is we’ll pull presentations forward from after the break to fill time until we reach the break and see where we land.

All right. So now everybody knows. Thank you, thank you.

And next up, an NRO update from John Curran, who is currently serving as chair of the NRO Executive Council.

Number Resource Organization Update

John Curran: Good morning, everyone. I’m John Curran, president and CEO of ARIN. I’m also the NRO, the Number Resource Organization, has an executive council. The executive council is made up of the CEOs of each of the RIRs.

The chair of the council rotates through us. And this year is my year. So I’m also the chair of the Number Resource Organization. I’m here to give the Number Resource Organization update.

Let me start in. The NRO’s goal is to be the flagship and global leader for collaborative Internet Resource management as a central element of a stable and secure Internet. In short, they’re the function by which the RIRs collaborate.

Founded in August 2003. Addendum signed in July, 2020, which includes agreements between the RIRs not to take action that would violate uniqueness; to take effective measures to promote the system; to publish registry entries publicly to enable global Internet operations; and to cooperate in the provision of a consistent, effective global system.

In 2022, the NRO reviewed its strategic plan. We reaffirmed our mission and vision. The mission to coordinate and support joint activities of the RIRs and to promote Joint Internet Numbers Registry.

The executive committee, as I already said, is made up of the CEOs, and we rotate through the roles every year. There’s a permanent secretary hosted by APNIC. German is the executive secretary for the organization. And Laureana is also support for the organization.

Three new programs to be implemented in 2023 as part of the NRO structure.

People may realize, each RIR has its own RPKI program. Each RIR has its own government engagement program, its own cybersecurity program. And there’s strengths to this. It makes sure that each RIR is responsive to its members and its governing Board.

There’s a weakness to this, which is that we can head different directions. ARIN’s RPKI program has many unique attributes compared to the other RIRs.

One of the things we’ve heard back in surveys and in meetings is that you folks would like the RIR system to act as more of a system rather than the aggregation of five distinct RIRs. And so to that end, we’re bringing in program managers for these three functions to try to set overall goals and objectives across the RIR system and help keep us informed of the direction we take and the particular implementation choices in these areas.

So the coordination is part of the NRO budget. There’s no new resources. These programs will use the resources in the RIRs. But hopefully, over time, when we roll out, for example, a new feature for RPKI, I’d like to say in two years from now that new feature should appear at all of the RIRs on a similar schedule and not have one RIR implement a feature and the others not lag or implement it in a way that’s substantially different. So trying to get a little more consistency in the system.

General operations of the NRO is about a $582,000 budget. That’s the secretary support. The meetings, the communications, the travel of the Advisory Council that we have. The NRO Number Council is called the ASO AC and we’ve already heard some about that. You’ll hear more later right after me by Kevin. The travel support for that. And Internet governance support to a number of organizations.

We also, through the NRO, do the contribution, the RIRs do, to ICANN. And this is $823,000 a year. It’s been $823,000 a year since ICANN’s inception. And we make that through the NRO and then all these expenses are prorated across the RIRs.

And we have a Stability Fund where, as someone mentioned earlier, we’ve all collectively pledged about $2.6 million. If an RIR were to need financial support for some reason it could draw on the Stability Fund.

The distribution of the costs is based on the relative size of the RIRs as measured in Registration Services revenue for 2022 — APNIC, ARIN, LACNIC and RIPE. That’s the distribution formula that’s used to allocate costs. We don’t allocate to AFRINIC because of its current governance situation.

The NRO EC has closely monitored the AFRINIC situation. We’re engaged pretty frequently in providing support to AFRINIC when requested. Also regional stakeholders and getting involved in working to solutions the issue. And we’re looking we’re now trying to encourage regional organizations working in Africa to make sure that they’re engaged, aware of what’s going on so when there’s finally an election that there will be active participation. So encouraging renewed engagement on that front.

Global number stats are produced by the NRO. And you’ll have John Sweeting come up a little later and give those. And that’s just the — so you have an overall view of the RIR system.

We do a Comparative Policy Overview, which is looking at the various policies in each of the RIRs and trying to compare them and figure out what’s different and the same. And that’s very helpful when doing policy development and trying to keep us all working in a similar framework.

We have an IANA Review Committee. So when an RIR requests a new block of ASNs or new block of IPv6 space, it goes to the IANA.

We have an IANA Review Committee, which reviews the performance of the IANA under the agreement we have with it. We have an IANA Number Services Agreement, and the Review Committee looks at the requests made, the timeliness of those, reports back to the NRO EC as to whether or not the IANA is doing its job on a timely basis.

You can see the Review Committee minutes in their report. The IANA does a great job. So that’s never a problem. But we do have a Review Committee that includes members of the community.

The IANA Review Committee members, listed there. You’ll see staff from each RIR and a community member from each RIR.

The ICANN Empowered Community. Wow, let me try this one. So all of the functions of ICANN, including the IANA, at one point were being done under the auspices of the US government. A few years back we went through the IANA stewardship transition, where the US government let go of its final nominal contract with ICANN and said instead, each of the affected communities — the IETF when it comes to protocol parameters, the RIRs and their stakeholders when it comes to the numbers registry and the DNS community when it comes to the root zone and the TLDs.

Each of those communities will contract with ICANN, and ICANN will be responsible to them instead of responsibility to the US government. This is the US government letting go of its vestigial control of the Internet. This is an exciting times. A lot of people discussed the merits of that.

When it was all said and done, one of the things ICANN ended up establishing, the community basically said, this is a necessary thing for the transition, is that there’s a function by which the various organizations that use the number registry, the name registry and the protocol registries, we sit on a function called the ICANN Empowered Community.

And what it is is it’s a very nominal body that has the ability to review and ratify changes to ICANN’s bylaws, budget, strategy, operating plan. Also has the ability to spill the ICANN Board of directors or remove a director.

It’s an oversight body. And we basically, as things come out, we look and make sure they were done according to the process in the bylaws. So you will see we have a procedure for our community, for what we do when ICANN asks us to approve something through the Empowered Community.

We have a procedure for how we send that to you. We have a procedure how we send rejection items. There’s items where we have an opportunity to reject something like the adoption of a budget. And we have a procedure for review of direct removal actions.

And so all of those are published. You might see every now and then, ICANN has done this action. We’re notifying the community. If any of you think that the procedures have been violated, please request and let us know and we’ll open a petition to have that considered by the Empowered Community.

I’d like to say I don’t need extra structures in the Internet governance world. On the other hand, the community insisted upon this above ICANN. And the good news is it’s there. And the other thing is it’s not been needed. Every action in ICANN has been in accordance, so we’ve never had it. But it’s the ultimate community escape valve to make sure that everything remains faithful to its procedures.

You can find on the NRO website the ASO procedures from the Empowered Community.

That’s it. That concludes my presentation on the Number Resource Organization. I’ll take any questions.

Hollis Kara: Mics are open. Approach the mics if you’re in the room. Or start typing if you’re online. Give them just a moment. Doesn’t look like wait. No, we do. Sorry.

Scott Johnson: Scott Johnson, SolarNetOne.org. Pursuant to the NRO strategic plan implementation, I believe these are all good moves that are being made. But I just wanted to make the comment that I believe it is very important to recognize and retain the not dilute the multiply redundant architecture of the RIR system.

John Curran: Right. Thank you very much. Agreed.

Hollis Kara: All right. Seeing nothing else, I think that’s a wrap. Thank you, John.

John Curran: Thank you.

(Applause.)

Hollis Kara: Are you ready, Kevin? Okay. Kevin’s ready. Next up we get, from the flipside of the equation, an ASO AC update. And that will be given by Kevin Blumberg, who is one of our ASO Advisory Council members.

Address Supporting Organization Address Council

Kevin Blumberg: Good morning, Kevin Blumberg. I’m the appointed representative from the ARIN region on the ASO AC. That’s in the ICANN side of things.

I’m going to do a little bit of an explanation here and correct John and Hollis. It’s not the Advisory Council. It’s the Address Council.

Hollis Kara: You’re right. I’m wrong. I’m sorry.

Kevin Blumberg: It’s all good. I figured John will correct me on some stuff as it is.

(Laughter.)

So the one issue that we have is lots of acronyms. I’m going to try to unpack some of that during this presentation, make it a little bit more easy to understand because our function, while — may seem a little complicated, it’s actually very simple. So we’re going to walk through all of this.

Okay. So we’re called two different things in two different worlds. In the ICANN fora, we’re called the ASO AC. In the regional areas we’re called the NRO NC. There was talk many years ago during our last review to combine them. It actually was found to be more complicated to unpack all of the documentation. So we’re the same thing, fundamentally. We just — it’s easier to go by this.

So, we are the, again, in the RIRs, the NRO Number Council, and we’re advisory in many respects.

We are tasked with a couple of different important roles within our specification. The first is global policy. And we’ll talk a little bit about global policy in a bit.

The second is the appointment of two directors to the ICANN Board. There is an appointment to the ICANN NomCom, as well as we have an MoU between the NRO and ICANN, which allows for, as an example, the ICANN Board to request advice from us related to numbers, et cetera.

So there have been times where we haven’t done global policy but we’ve been asked for clarification about a global policy from an advice point of view.

We’ve been involved in the IANA transitions. We’ve been involved in a number of areas related to those things.

I want to speak about global policy for a minute because there’s a misconception that global policy is related to two regions wanting to do something. So the interRIR transfer policies that we have in the ARIN region and APNIC, et cetera, RIPE, is not a global policy. It’s a coordinated policy between the regions, but it’s not a global policy.

Global policy is very specific to IANA/PTI — we viewed them as IANA before; they’re now PTI — and the RIRs, how space is given to the RIRs and how the RIRs give space back. Whether it be a numbers or ASNs, it is what are the parameters for, as an example here, if ARIN needed a third block of IPv6 to be able to give out to its members, what are the requirements? That is what the global policy is for.

It is a very limited scope when it comes to global policy. It’s in its own section in the Number Resource Policy Manual. And it’s just there for that interaction between the two. So that’s what the ASO AC is responsible for.

We meet monthly via Zoom. We have, it was a little different with COVID obviously, but we try to meet once a year at the first ICANN meeting, in person.

And last year we actually met at the RIPE meeting in Serbia as well.

We’re 15 members. Right now we’re down two members from the AFRINIC region. We’re normally 15 members — two elected, one appointed.

And here’s the list of everybody. This year, Hervé, who is actually in attendance, is our chair. And Ricardo and Nicole are the vice chairs.

There’s some really great things that we’ve done within the ASO over the years. As an example, the chair cannot be from or the vice chairs cannot be from the same region as each other. So we fry to spread out the load because we all have our own experiences from our own regions that benefit the overall running of this group. So we try to spread things out as much as possible.

And so as an example, the vice chairs cannot be from the same region as the chair. I was the chair last year, as an example, I cannot run again as vice chair this year. There needs to be a break and let other people do things.

So it’s a great group of people, a really good group of people. Myself, Nick and Chris are from the ARIN region. If you are interested — and this is a long term process — if you are interested in participating and being on the ASO AC, there is a decent amount of work, not a ton of work, on a month to month, year to year sort of basis until we spool up with something, whatever that may be.

Whether it’s advice to the ICANN Board related to an issue, or global policy, it doesn’t come along very often. But when it does, we do spool up to be doing a fairly decent amount of work.

So this year I believe is the appointment position but if you are in the numbers community, we are always looking for more people to be on the ASO AC. Come speak to any of us if you’ve got questions about it. But it’s a long term thinking process. And, Louie, you could always consider again — or at least the hat.

(Laughter.)

Yes, by all means do reach out to us and do look at the website as well. It gives a lot of information. We’re very transparent on the website and we’ll talk about that.

So we have a thing, somebody called another acronym the PPFT. The PPFT is basically one of us from each region that’s responsible for tracking all of the policy that’s going on and making sure if there’s anything related to global policy or may be viewed as global policy to then bring that back to the ASO AC for us to investigate and to go through the processes that need to go through.

Transparency, and this is very important, all of our meetings are opened. There’s a very limited set of things that we have closed. Mostly that’s related to the ICANN Board nominations, where we’re making decisions and going through private information. That is closed.

Otherwise we have, since the last review, was it six years ago now — we’ve opened up pretty much everything. You can attend our meetings. You can see our Mailing Lists. You can come to the meetings in person if you would like. They’re all there.

They’re minuted. We put those documents on — we had informal meetings in ICANN in Cancun last month. Those notes got put on the web as well. We’re trying to open up as much as possible and show what’s going on. And if you have questions about how we do things, that’s the place to look.

So our current appointments for the ICANN Board. Alan Barrett is Seat 9. And his term is until, I believe it’s to October of 2024, which is when the new term starts. And Christian Kaufmann recently seated. He’s still 2025. Brajesh Jain is currently at the ICANN NomCom representative. He’s term limited. So we’ll get to that in a minute, but he can’t actually be on the NomCom again until he times out and has a couple more years.

So we have the NomCom appointment, and you may have seen some emails to ARIN Announce about this. We’re currently open right now for nomination, if you’re interested in the NomCom. I’ll be honest, it’s a lot of work. It’s a significant amount of work.

But if you enjoy being on NomComs and contributing to the greater community, I believe they seat eight of the ICANN board members. You’re required to attend ICANN meetings and participate in the NomCom.

It is a significant amount of work, but we do need somebody who has a good understanding of the numbers community and the history of the RIRs. So when you’re looking at candidates, you have your NomCom hat on and you’re looking at all the things that the NomCom is interested in. But when something just doesn’t feel right or feels right, whichever it may be, you have your experience from within the RIR communities, and that’s why we’re there.

So if you’re interested, it’s all on our website. Short form, just go to ASO.ICANN.org. And if you are interested and want to have more information, any ASO AC member can help with that. But like I said, it is, unfortunately, it’s a decent amount of work.

Recent activities. We are doing a significant amount of work on our operational procedures. Just like the NRPM work and the policies that go here, we’re doing similar complete refresh. We have a lot of historical procedures that are just not possible.

During COVID, post-COVID, they were designed in a world of absolutes that just don’t exist anymore. So we are doing significant refreshes to remove out hard coded numbers, to remove out complexities and to give more freedom to be able to do the right thing rather than what is hard coded in an operational procedure.

The great thing about techies is we like to write lots of syntax. The bad thing about techies is sometimes we overcomplicate things for ourselves. So we’re taking a fresh look at the operational procedures and removing out the techiness, I guess you could say, and make it easier to understand and read.

Thank you. That’s it for the ASO update today. Were there any questions?

Hollis Kara: Feel free to approach the microphones, or start typing if you have questions for Kevin.

John Curran: I’d just like to say thank you for your presentation. It was very complete.

Kevin Blumberg: Thank you.

(Laughter.)

John Sweeting: John Sweeting, with ARIN. I’d just like to say thank you for your presentation. It was very complete. It was very interesting. I think it’s one of the most complete reports we’ve had on the ASO AC.

(Laughter.)

Kevin Blumberg: So to speak to that, I’d actually like to thank all of the ARIN staff who help us in producing these reports as it’s actually important.

Leif mentioned the changeover, going from Sean Hopkins to Eddie. Sean makes our lives easier. Eddie will make our lives easier in the ARIN region. In the global, as part of the council, we have German and Laureana.

We can’t as volunteers get this work done without the staff involvement. We have that on ICANN side as well.

Moira Johnson: Moira Johnson, SolarNetOne. I was actually wondering if you have any questions or concerns?

Kevin Blumberg: Do I have any questions or concerns? No. Ultimately we can provide advice to the ICANN Board. We get, like I said, asked that very rarely.

We have a new group of ASO AC members overall. It was actually interesting to see that there is, from an institutional knowledge point of view, I’m one of the older people now on the ASO AC. So it will be interesting to see the next time.

I’m actually — I think we’ve got one of the best groups of the ASO AC members together today. But it’s going to be interesting to see a fresh group without necessarily all the institutional knowledge that has existed for the next thing.

Hervé Clément: Hervé Clément, chair of the ASO AC. To continue the thanks, thank you for your years of chairmanship of the ASO AC. And so as I have the mic I want to underline a suggestion you made about the NomCom. And so it’s still possible to be a candidate to appoint for this position. So I say that to this committee, but the same for all the community.

So be appoint and be interested in the NomCom activities. Thank you.

Louis DeVictoria: Lou DeVictoria, ARIN 51 fellow. I do want to make a comment to thank you to give the visual explanation of the breakdown. We had a great discussion in the hallway about it. I understand there’s two things, but they’re the same thing.

But it did help to clarify the role that the ASO has in the broader community and the challenges. So thank you.

Kevin Blumberg: Thank you. Mr. Hat.

Louie Lee: Louie Lee, Google Fiber, Louie’s hat and Louie’s hat’s hat. Past member of the ASO AC.

(Laughter.)

Is the group looking at quorum requirements in light of possibilities of not having a full 15 member

Kevin Blumberg: Since it’s all in the public notes from Cancun, I can say that the quorum and voting system is being simplified.

Louie Lee: Thank you. And thanks for a very complete presentation.

(Applause and laughter.)

Kevin Blumberg: I will actually add that there’s one set of slides that is missing that we noticed. We actually usually had a slide for all of the attendance records for the ASO AC. It’s on the website. We actually keep all the historical, for transparency, all the records related to attendance.

So if you’re ever interested when you’re voting for somebody the next time around and they’re re running, you can actually now see what their attendance was and how much they were contributing to the body on a general basis. So thank you.

Hollis Kara: All right. Thank you, Kevin.

(Applause.)

For the record, I too appreciate a complete report. I have no idea what that was about, but I’m not about to be left out of it. Just sayin'.

(Laughter.)

Next up, I’d like to welcome my boss, John Sweeting, to run through the Internet Number Resource Status Report.

Internet Number Resource Status Report

John Sweeting: And run is the correct term because I’m going to go through this very quickly. You’ve seen all these numbers in the different RIR presentations over the week.

I do need to make a comment. I withdraw my thanks for the very complete report since Kevin himself admitted it wasn’t complete.

(Laughter.)

And with that I’ll start off.

The Internet Number Status Report, prepared by all the RIRs. We quarterly send all of our stats into German, and German generates, puts them on the website and puts them into this presentation.

This is a static slide that doesn’t ever change because this is the distribution – well, it hasn’t changed in a long time. This is the distribution of all the 256 /8s from IANA and where they are today and who has the majority o f them.

Now, not all the /8s — the /8s aren’t in each of the regions completely. There’s a bunch of /8s that are shared among the regions. And the majority holder of that individual /8 is the one that actually manages the reverse and a few other things.

This is the total number of IPv4 addresses managed by each RIR. Interesting to note, for ARIN, it’s really — half of that is legacy space. We’ve actually come a long way, though. We used to be 50/50 probably five, six years ago. We’re now 70/30 that are under agreement and are no longer considered legacy, not under an agreement. Some of them are considered legacy under an agreement with the LRSA.

This is the available space in each RIR. And though you see zero there at ARIN, there is space available. But that space is only space for the Wait List that comes in each month when we do our process of reclaiming space, revoking space that hasn’t been paid for, that’s been abandoned really.

IPv4 space issued by each RIR. As you can see, this is for the last 10 years. It was a lot in 2014. And it has dwindled down to very little to where you almost cannot see it on the chart.

That’s it for the IPv4 stats on ARIN, on the space that’s in the RIRs. Now we’ll go into the transfers, but we’re not including any merger acquisition information in these transfers. These are all specified transfers.

The number of transfers per year, as you can see, it grew, grew, grew. It went down a little bit in 2022 for almost every region but mostly RIPE. RIPE went down quite a bit really.

This is the number of transfers and this is the number of addresses transferred by year. As you can see, I believe that’s ARIN in the orange and that’s ARIN in the orange. The number of transfers per year, ARIN isn’t quite at the peak of that.

RIPE has a lot more normally, number of transfers. But then when you start looking at the space, ARIN leads the way mostly in that. And I don’t know if that’s a good thing or bad thing. It just means the transfers are actually much bigger blocks that are getting transferred.

This is a representation of the number of IPv4 transfers between the RIRs. You can look there. You can see ARIN transferred 474 to APNIC, 25 to LACNIC and 565 transactions to RIPE.

This is the number of the IPv4 addresses transferred between the RIRs. There’s been 19, and these are in — I would guess that’s got to be /32s — 19 million IPs from ARIN to APNIC, .0271 to LACNIC and 17 million to RIPE.

Coming into ARIN, 1.136 from APNIC, .051 from LACNIC, and 3.076 from RIPE. Again, that’s mostly all related to the large pool of legacy resources that ARIN had in its region.

That’s really part of what’s helped ARIN get to the point of having a lot more space under agreement because a lot of the space we transfer out of the region is space that was never under an agreement.

It might have been put under an agreement for, like, one day so that they were able to make sure that we had the right people that were supposed to be transferring it. And then the next day it gets transferred.

So, I wouldn’t be really alarmed by that. That just shows that, hey, we’re the ones that had the most space that wasn’t being used over the years.

IPv6, I really don’t like this slide, but what it’s trying to tell you is that we have that /3 that’s global in unicast. And out of that there’s a /12 that’s in the IANA reserve. And then there were some little pieces, before they came up with the global policy of doing /12s, they were given out smaller blocks. And that’s out of that /12 IANA reserve there.

But then once they started giving the /12 that’s what’s up in the little box up there. AFRINIC, APNIC and LACNIC have received one /12. ARIN and RIPE are the only RIR that have gone back to IANA for a second /12.

This is the IPv6 allocations issued by the RIRs annually, since 2014.

This is the total size of IPv6 and /32s that each RIR has allocated.

RIPE has allocated quite a bit of IPv6 and then APNIC and then ARIN, LACNIC and then AFRINIC.

Assignments issued by RIRs. For ARIN, it’s from now on it’s always going to be zero because ARIN does not do assignments anymore. We only do allocations. But you can see the assignments that we did do up until 2022, when we changed that policy.

This is the total size of assignments that have total space that, in 48s, that each RIR has assigned. And I’ll note that it shows that ARIN has assigned that much space, but it won’t show up as assigned any longer in Whois or in the ARIN database. It’s all been converted to allocations.

This is another slide. So, I just want to, because somebody is probably going to get up and say, “Hey, when are you guys going to change the slides; it’s really hard to read those ones with the lines on them and stuff, this one here and also the IANA chart.”

We have a new format for the slides that we have just agreed to in the Registration Services Coordination Group, but we have to get the approval of the NRO EC before we can start using that slide deck. So, there should be new format for the slides coming very, very soon.

AS numbers, it’s another breakout here. This one still shows the 16-bit and 32-bit breakout. Maybe when we get to the question time, if anybody has any opinion on it, the RFCG, we’re looking at just getting rid of that and just showing it as AS numbers. We feel that time has probably come. But we would like input on it if you have any.

This is another one of the charts with the graphs with the lines in it. And the lines are the 32-bit and the solid is the 16-bit. And we’d like to just present this as AS numbers and have solid lines.

Same thing with this, total ASNs assigned by each RIR. No surprises. Nothing new. Here’s the reference for these statistics. And thank you.

Hollis Kara: There we are. Microphones are open. If anyone has any feedback for John on his question regarding the representation of ASNs in the slide deck, that would be great, as well as any other questions. So please feel free to approach the mics or start talking.

John Sweeting: Go ahead, Scott.

Scott Johnson: Hi. Scott Johnson, SolarNetOne. Pursuant to the /8 distribution slide, I was wondering if the schedule registry entry there represents the legacy notation class E address space, or I’m not sure what that represents.

John Sweeting: The ones that show the Central Registry reserve, yes, that’s the reserve space.

Scott Johnson: Thank you.

Hollis Kara: Awesome. Checking to see if we have anything online. Doesn’t look like it. Nope. Nothing online. And he’s running away. Thank you, John.

(Applause.)

We’re going to pull one more presentation forward before I let you go to break. Next up is Eddie Diego.

(Hollis adjusts slides.)

That is not correct. There it is. Oh! There’s Eddie. It was different on that screen… Every once in a while I think the confidence screens might be a little bit possessed.

Eddie, do you want me to get out of the way? No? I’ll talk a little bit more, then. Eddie is here. He’ll go through the Regional Policy Update, and then we’ll be heading into break. Let’s all welcome Eddie to the stage.

(Applause.)

Regional Policy Update

Eddie Diego: Good morning, everyone. I’m Eddie Diego, ARIN’s new Policy Analyst. First, I just want to say thank you for all the kind words you guys have had in your presentations and in the hallways. I was not expecting that, and I really appreciate it. So thank you very much.

I’ll be going over the Regional Policy Update for new folks or folks who just want a refresher.

The RIR system has five Regional Internet Registries that all have their own separate yet similar community-driven Policy Development Processes. So I’ll be going over some of the current draft policies, call to proposals in AFRINIC, APNIC, LACNIC and RIPE NCC.

Starting with AFRINIC, essentially I’m glad Leif mentioned Sean. There has essentially been no updates since Sean’s last presentation at ARIN 49 in Tennessee. The only real small minor update since then has been the addition to Abuse Contact Policy Update Draft 8, which is a version update that simply extends its validity in order to allow for Board ratification. I would like to mention and thank Alfredo for his RIR update yesterday, he went into more detail on some of the policies that were implemented. If you missed that presentation, I would encourage you to take a look at that video once it’s available or take a look at the slide deck.

APNIC, similar, thank you, Karla, for your update yesterday. Quick recap. APNIC had three policy proposals that reached consensus just a little over a month ago at APNIC 55.

Currently still under discussion is Prop 149, which would change the maximum delegation for an initial IPv4 allocation from /23 up to a /22. And registrants that have less than a /21 would also be able to register an additional /23.

Moving over to LACNIC. Thank you, Alfredo, for your update yesterday. It was very thorough. The only thing I would add is a new policy was just submitted, or a proposal, rather, was just submitted last week on April 12th, Consensus Clarification, which is a proposal that would further define the definition and interpretation of what a consensus is in their policy manual. So that’s still open for discussion.

Lastly, RIPE NCC, thank you, Marco, for your update yesterday. All three of RIPE NCC’s proposals were just submitted this year by their various working groups. 2023-1 completed additional discussion. It would reduce the Internet Exchange Point IPv4 assignment default size from a /24 to /26. This would lengthen the lifespan of that reserve, special reserved pool.

Also completing its initial discussion is 2023-03, Voluntary Transfer Lock. That’s essentially a Policy Proposal that will allow current registrants to prevent their resources from being transferred out for a certain period of time.

Currently still open for discussion until May 2nd is 2023-02, minimum size for IPv4 temporary assignments. That would set the default size for temporary assignments to a /24.

References. And if any of you want to learn more about the current policies or policies that were just completed, you can go directly to each of the RIR’s websites here. The NRO has a Comparative Policy Overview that has a high-level overview of all the existing policies across all five of the RIRs on their website.

And that was quick. That’s all I had.

Hollis Kara: Awesome. Does anybody have any questions for Eddie?

John Sweeting: Hey Eddie, this is John Sweeting with ARIN. I don’t really have a question, but I want to thank you very much for stepping up. Sean got a new opportunity and left the company very quickly. He had two weeks or he would not be able — he could only give us two weeks or he would not have been able to accept that opportunity. And we were looking at, oh, we have a meeting coming up. We have the AC and all their policies we’ve got to get straightened out.

And so we looked around inside ARIN. We opened up an internal, and Eddie stepped up and volunteered to take on that challenge. And I think he’s going to do great. I think this was his first presentation at an ARIN meeting ever. So you did a great job, Eddie. Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

Hollis Kara: Awesome. And actually I’m a big liary liar, we’re going to do one more presentation before we head to break. So I’m going to — whoops, can I get the services deck if I keep clicking? I jumped ahead.

Alright now we’re back to break. Not really. I’d like to welcome Joe. He’s going to give the Customer Experience and Strategy Update.

Customer Experience and Strategy Update

Joe Westover: Thanks, Hollis. So I will keep people from their break apparently. My name is Joe Westover, I’m the Director of Customer Experience and Strategy. I’m just going to jump into this.

I think this was originally outlined as a services update. This is a little bit of a head fake. This is going to be a little bit more of an update on department and staffing.

So a little background. Back in 2019, John, the CCO office was established, which brought a renewed focus into ARIN about how we can realign departments. With limited resources, as folks know, if you look at budgeting and otherwise. During that time, for the past three years, I helped John build and refine a department that we kind of labeled as the CCO office, which is a little ambiguous for a whole lot of reasons, because, like, what do you do? You’re in the CCO office. And we would explain a lot of things.

As of January 1st of this year, we took that group and we defined it as the Customer Experience and Strategy Group. It’s really designed to shape customer service strategy, ensure delivery of ARIN services meets needs and preferences, and really focus on larger strategy development to ensure that’s in alignment with the customer and the needs of the community.

This has been a bit of a combination of things. We kind of repurposed and galvanized an existing team, but we did just recently invest with the Board’s support, John Curran and John Sweeting’s support, two additional positions.

The first one, which I think is critical, is a new business process manager position. I think this is really integrating my background is really heavily focused on processing quality. And I’ve really have been hoping and looking and striving and asking frequently to on board a little more structure into ARIN.

And we were fortunate enough to have that opportunity. As of two or three weeks ago, Regi Alcancia, he’s off in the corner over there, was hired as a new business process manager. And we’re really going to focus on a number of areas. Architecture and development of business processes. Design/development. Implementation. Process quality and compliance.

Process discovery is something I’m very fond of, and I know there was some information that came up here before referencing cost recovery.

So I’m hoping that as part of this process not hoping I know we’ll do it is to provide more precision in cost recovery efforts which will again help guide internal operational efficiencies, recommended changes to service deliveries and whatnot.

The second position we just recently hired is a certification program manager. This is Marty McLaughlin. He’s remote. He’s only been here for two weeks but he’s listening as we speak.

The idea of this is to design, implement and maintain a certification program across ARIN services. Those could include ARIN Online, RPKI, et cetera. I think these things exist out in the wild here and there, but ARIN has made a commitment to developing that program and offering that you can stay tuned for, for what that looks like.

Just want to take a brief moment to kind of introduce the team. Just going to put a little names to faces. Unfortunately, Marty is a little new. We didn’t upgrade him from his nondescript emoji there.

But you have Regi. Jon Worley, people know. Eddie Diego, you’ve all seen and heard from. Prabha Bhattarai, she is someone that was a transfer from an existing customer service group in RSD, and will be focused on member services.

Historically I’ve done a lot of the 2022 fees responses myself. We have a new [email protected] email, for anybody who has questions about the fee cap sunsetting. She’ll be helping me monitor that. So we’re really putting a focus on the member, the tracking of, and how we can incorporate that back into other areas.

Jason Byrne. Amanda Gauldin, you heard from her earlier. And Jason, obviously he does a lot of the election stuff. A little bit behind the scenes, but there’s a tremendous amount of work going on there.

Areas of focus really quick. This is not all-encompassing obviously. I think the newest one would be the process excellence and continual improvement in service delivery.

We work in data governance, fraud prevention, which is a fun one and has been a topic of conversation here quite frequently. The Premier Support Plan, obviously, other member support activities.

Giving away a little bit with the Trusted Facilitator Program, I’ll get to that in a moment.

Fellowship, community grant, speaking engagements and outreach. Focusing with the Caribbean. There’s a whole lot of that going on. This has been a very, very busy year for outreach. I think it’s been very valuable and the feedback we’re getting to affect some of these internal changes. And then obviously election support and public policy.

Just quick, we all know what the Premier Support Plan is. I think most people do. If they don’t, it’s provided automatically to Registration Services plans with 2XL and above.

Last August, we did open this up for folks who didn’t meet that size category. And we have had a pretty strong uptick and it’s a good relationship with the community. And again that feedback mechanism.

Just going to regurgitate, you get analyst, priority service, not that you couldn’t bug us a lot and get the priority service anyway sometimes, but it is there. Direct technical services liaison. That would be Brad Gorman and others.

Again, if you didn’t yell loud enough, you probably could get that too. 24/7 on call support. We have a focus group that’s quarterly with Mr. Curran.

And I’ve been encouraged, because there was a little bit of a slow uptick in the beginning, but we’re getting a lot of good participation on that call. And then obviously the waived transfer request fees for source. Hopefully that’s not the only reason people are doing it.

I just want to announce today, as of today, every three years we do a Customer Satisfaction Survey. That is open today as of right now. You might start seeing some general announcements go out.

Kevin, maybe not on your end. You can ignore those. But it is out there. That will run through May 10th.

And again, it’s going to mirror questions of the past. It’s still in that 15-minute category which I know is not everybody’s favorite thing to do for 15 minutes. But I do encourage people to do it because it does help us assess changes we can make and understanding where we can do better.

Reading through here. It’s just ‘14, ‘17, ‘20. I ran this in 2020 when I first came on, within the first few months, I almost forgot all the questions when we were reviewing over the last few months.

But going through it, I do like it. And I think with four successive surveys, I think we can really put that together to get some good trends and do some good things. Especially since we now have our business process we’re focusing on. We can use that to direct resources we did not have available to us in the previous three times.

Now, the Trusted Facilitator Program. So some may or may not know, as of February 3rd we suspended the STLS and facilitator programs and are developing or have developed a new Trusted Facilitator Program which will launch on June 1.

The differentiator with this and there’s a couple high -level items on the next three slides and I’ll be done is there’s some very stringent qualifications to form the foundation of the program.

These are broken up across three slides. It’s one big list but no one wants to see a slide like that. This would sound probably fairly typical, some of these, of the normal vetting of an organization to get resources. But obviously you need to pass some kind of government consolidated screening list.

We want representatives of the company that are approved. They have to meet certain verifications there also. And that’s just a we’re a real person, and again it’s very similar to what’s going on elsewhere with some of the normal vetting.

On top of that, they must demonstrate general liability insurance, furnish evidence of third-party background checks. Provide indemnification protection for ARIN, at least three customer references. Certify their compliance with the facilitator qualifications on an annual basis. And we’ll define moving forward what that annual certification looks like. And abide by and agree to terms outlined in the facilitator’s code of conduct. That will probably be the very first item that someone will have to agree to. And obviously legally registered entities in good standing within the ARIN region.

And finally, but not least, at the end of this process there will be a fairly robust application process to go through it where staff will review and ensure that you can get to the next step in the program, assuming that happens. There will be a final certification and this might be people in the hot seat, I don’t know but you’ll have to sit with the general counsel and the chief customer officer and be subjected to a final interview on video. I don’t think there’s phone-only, John. It’s in video, in-person would be even better to go through it.

So I don’t want to speak for John Curran or John Sweeting, but I do think this is a good thing. It will help with the credibility and the confidence that customers and members might have when utilizing a trusted facilitator.

On that, that’s all I have.

Hollis Kara: Wonderful. The microphones are open for questions. And just one minor correction, if I may. The customer survey will be opening this afternoon after the meeting closes. So you will see that posted on the website and be getting emails through ARIN Announce as well later today.

But for right now, if anybody has any questions for Joe, feel free to approach the microphone.

Kevin Blumberg: Sorry, Joe. Kevin Blumberg, The Wire. So the good, I had three tickets with ARIN in 2022. And the turnaround times were very good.

Years have gone by where people were complaining about service delivery when it came to tickets, and I’m not a penguin, I don’t get any of the special treatment, and it was really good.

There’s one area you talked about it in terms of how you want to have processes and procedures, et cetera. There’s a lot of serial work that gets done when it comes to tickets that could be done the easiest one is the trifecta of ASN, v6, v4, one ticket, one approval, one amount of work.

And it’s right now a minimum of two, if not three, tickets that need to go in and get handled in a certain order.

So I hope that those types of things can be combined. I know with transfers there’s sort of multiple steps you have to follow. And some of those can be combined or at least better compacted down.

While, again, the timing of it was really good, the more you compact, the easier it is for both the subscriber, the person asking the question as well as I’m sure your staff, on your side, in terms of getting things done.

Joe Westover: I’m thrilled to be able to do this. I could geek out on the side with you, Kevin, but we’ll be doing that’s one of the items we’ll be looking at in really almost ad nauseam detail down to the process level, the value of each process step, the time it takes to do it, the internal financial cost it takes to do it, automation options.

And we’ll be using that data, data driven, plus there’s some other stuff in there, to eliminate waste; to provide specific requirements to our engineering teams; to automate things that didn’t need to happen; to combine flows; to standardize workflows so that it carries across multiple streams, whether it be v4, v6 or transfers.

I’ve been around long enough, I do know there’s a lot of overlap out there. I think there’s a lot of opportunities. It’s just taking the time to go through and do it and the resources. And we now have that. So I’m very encouraged. Thank you.

Hollis Kara: All right. And Joe, we do have one comment from our virtual attendees.

Beverly, do you want to go ahead and read that for me?

Beverly Hicks: Tom Bonar, TDS Telecom. As an IPM specialist I’ve done several tickets for IP transfers or just general questions. Thank you so much for fast response rates. I saw greatly improved response times from 2020 to 2022.

Joe Westover: Fantastic. Thank you. And I think we can do better.

Hollis Kara: Awesome. Are there any further questions for Joe? All right. Seeing none, I think you’re done. Thank you, Joe.

(Applause.)

All right, now we can take a break. If you folks would please kindly rejoin us at 11, we’ll have department reports and an Open Microphone to wrap up the day. Thank you very much and we’ll see you in just a little bit.

[Break]

Hollis Kara: We’re going to get rolling and finish out our day with some departmental updates. We like to do these in the spring. We don’t generally have time at our fall meeting. But we do like to take an opportunity because we are accountable to you as a community to let you know what’s happening inside of ARIN and going on behind the scenes and how we run the show.

So to start us off, I’d like to invite our chief human resources officer, I’m still getting used to that title, Erin Alligood, to give us an update on human resources and administration.

Departmental Reports

Human Resources and Administration

Erin Alligood: Good morning, everyone. I’m glad you came in from that wonderful snack or break.

As Hollis indicated, I’m Erin Alligood. I’m ARIN’s Chief Human Resources Officer.

So first, I’d like to introduce the Human Resources and Administrative team. I’m grateful to be working with these individuals as they support the needs of ARIN.

I’ll start with Lori Gheitanchi, who is our facilities and travel manager. Lori’s been with ARIN for almost four years. As her title indicates, she manages our facility located in Virginia and secures all travel arrangements for the ARIN employees.

And she also manages our relationship with our travel agency.

You might remember that we were actively recruiting for an HR generalist this time last year. I’m happy to introduce Natalie Harold, who was hired in May of 2022.

Natalie’s responsibilities include payroll and benefits administration, recruiting, onboarding and other miscellaneous HR projects that we have planned throughout the year.

Many of you have already met our next team member, Melissa Montgomery, our volunteer support specialist.

Melissa is actually working registration here at the meeting. Make sure to go over and say hello. Melissa provides outstanding travel and administrative support for our ARIN volunteers to include the Board of Trustees, the Advisory Council, the ASO AC or NRO NC I never know which one to say so I’ll say both and even booking travel for our ARIN Fellows.

And acting as our receptionist is Mindy Engstrom. Mindy has done a wonderful job helping us with our office events, receiving and distributing our mail assisting with calendaring items.

I’m going to pause on this slide, to recognize one of our previous team members, Denise Alston. Denise was our receptionist for eight years. And during the height of the pandemic, Denise was assisting our software integration team within the engineering department with various testing projects and analysis.

Denise also received her bachelor’s degree during that time. As a result of her outstanding work, Denise transitioned to engineering as a junior software integration analyst. We certainly miss having Denise in our department but are so proud of Denise’s new opportunity.

How do we support ARIN? You can see here our team handles a wide variety of responsibilities. This includes all facets of human resources and other responsibilities include travel administration and office and facilities management.

So moving into some of our projects from last year. 2022 was another busy year for us as we onboarded several new hires in various departments at ARIN. You might remember from my last presentation, at ARIN 49, we were planning to officially reopen the ARIN office in July of 2022 as pandemic conditions improved, moving into a hybrid work environment.

I am pleased to report that we completed this project and employees have been reporting into the ARIN office on a more regular basis.

To share some further background, when the pandemic hit in March of 2020, ARIN was very responsive and moved all employees to working from home and continued to do so through part of 2022.

During that time, employees had the option to go into the office under our limited reopening program, which we introduced in the summer of 2020, and essentially this provided guidelines for office use during the pandemic.

But given that conditions during the pandemic were improving, we started to work towards a general reopening of the office. As part of our reopening plan, we took into account feedback from our employees by conducting an employee survey on what the employees were looking for as we reopened.

We also conducted a workforce study with an outside consulting firm to determine the optimal future work environment for ARIN. Based on these two data points, ARIN moved into a hybrid work model, with most positions being designated under the hybrid schedule.

Since our reopening last year, in July, our team specifically has been hosting small events every month or so to promote interconnections between our employees. During the pandemic, similar to other organizations, we really missed seeing one another in person.

So we are making sure that we put in that extra effort to get together more at the office to further build those connections.

Also, in 2022, we conducted our annual mandatory harassment prevention training for all employees and volunteers and will continue to plan for this training going forward in the fall of each year.

So moving into some of our employee statistics. Fully staffed, ARIN is just under 100 employees, of which over 50 percent represent a tenure of five years or more. Notably, we have one member of our team who is celebrating 25 years with ARIN. At this time I’d like to recognize Michael O’Neill within the engineering department who reached this amazing milestone just last month. Let’s give Michael a round of applause.

(Applause.)

Michael’s likely back at the office tuning in on line. So hopefully he heard that shoutout from us. So congratulations to Michael.

As you see on this slide, we continue to enjoy an average tenure at over eight years. This statistic has stayed the same number probably for the last three to five years.

But as always, ARIN continues to actively staff and identify new talent to support the evolving needs of our community and organization as a whole.

So on this slide, you’ll see ARIN’s value statements. I’ll just read them for you briefly. We are passionate about our mission. Service to our members, customers and the global community. Our people matter. And we are accountable.

We thought it was important for you as members of our community to see what ARIN strives for as employees and an organization.

These value statements are a part of our everyday work here at ARIN and they’re even tied to our 90 day, six month and annual performance discussions.

These statements are even posted throughout our office in Chantilly, Virginia, as you see on this picture.

Also included in this picture on the left side is our Strategic Direction Statement, which is set and approved by ARIN’s Board of Trustees. We post these throughout the office as a reminder of our overall goals and direction company wide.

So what do we have planned for the remainder of this year? As ARIN nears 100 employees, we’re preparing for the required filing of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Component 1 filing. I’m glad I just got through that bullet point.

(Laughter.)

Also, in 2023, we are planning to conduct a voluntary audit of our 401(k) plan. Proactively conducting the self audit will prepare us for when the audit will be required as our plan participants increase over time.

For some further details on our 401(k) plan, our participation rate is over 90 percent due to ARIN’s very generous employer match of up to 9 percent.

The trustees of the plan are Richard Jimmerson, ARIN’s Chief Operating Officer; Brian Kirk, ARIN’s Chief Financial Officer; and myself, as Chief Human Resources Officer.

We also have been working actively on enhancing our succession plan to ensure that we have appropriate continuity and career paths for potential future leaders at ARIN for our key roles.

Similar to other meetings and conferences within our community and I think Edward McNair actually pointed this out that NANOG does as well, on Monday’s presentation ARIN is looking to add an ombuds representative to further enhance the experience and/or support participants during the ARIN meetings.

And as I mentioned earlier, we will be continuing to require a mandatory harassment prevention training for all employees and volunteers this fall and then going forward.

And also later this year we will be adding diversity, equity and inclusion training for all employees and volunteers. And this is a beginning phase of an overall internal project that we will be focusing on as the year progresses.

These are just a few highlights of what we’ll be working on. And thank you for your time. And if you have any questions, please let me know.

Hollis Kara: Any questions for Erin, please approach the microphones or start typing. Otherwise, I think we’ll move on to our next presentation.

All right. Seeing no questions. Thank you, Erin.

(Applause.)

And the race to the podium is on.

Next up I’d like to welcome our Chief Financial Officer, Brian Kirk, to give our Financial Services Report.

Financial Services Department

Brian Kirk: Thank you, Hollis. Good morning, everyone. My name is Brian Kirk. I’m Chief Financial Officer. And I’m one of the employees in Erin’s slide that was on the far right, zero to five years. I just celebrated my three-year anniversary last month.

And what I’ve learned over those three years, one of the most important things I’ve learned over those three years, is that this is a very complicated industry and that I still have a lot more to learn.

But my job is made a lot easier by the team around me. And that includes not only the FSD team, the Financial Services Department, but also the people from all the other ARIN departments that help support what we do in FSD.

And again, not only them, but the volunteers and the community members that we work with. It’s just one big team, and it’s really an enjoyable place to work.

Today, I’m going to talk just shortly about the Financial Services Department. And in doing that, I’m going to reintroduce the Financial Services team. I’m going to talk a little bit about the core Financial Services activities. And I’m saving the best for last. That is ASC 842, which is a new accounting for leases that we had to adopt, we were lucky enough to adopt in 2022. So be ready for that.

So the team at FSD is shown on this slide. On the accounts receivable or the billing side of the house you have Tammy, who has been at ARIN for quite some time.

She’s supported by Tanya, who does most of the billing work. Amaris does most of the collection work. So she’s out there day to day chasing down the community members who are choosing not to pay for a while.

Amy processes all the customer payments that come in from the community. And Cathleen is the newest member, and she kind of floats around and supports the whole accounts receivable team doing whatever she needs to do to fill in to get things done.

And I want to thank Cathleen for actually joining us here at ARIN 51 and helping support the registration desk.

In addition to Tammy’s team, we have Ray, the accounting manager, and Melissa, the senior accountant. They do everything in accounting that is not related to billing or accounts receivable, basically general accounting work and the accounts payable activities.

Jumping into some of the activities that the FSD department transacts. These are not all the work that we do, but this is what I would call some of the core, main core activities. And, first of all, it’s supporting the members.

You can see on this slide each quarter the number of calls that the team answers. And keep in mind the team is actively doing their other jobs, their other work, while they’re answering these calls when they come in.

So in 2023, we had just over 3,000 calls that were answered. That’s a little bit of a spike over 2021. Most likely because of the price changes that the end users found on their 2022 invoices due to the fee harmonization change. That’s really what caused that spike up. The team is available to answer calls from 9 AM to 5 PM, andin addition to calling, you can reach them at [email protected].

This next slide shows the number of invoices that are prepared each month. So each bar here is a month in the year 2022. For the full year, you can see that we billed over 30,000 invoices. Seems like a lot when I look at the size of ARIN. So it’s a lot of work to get done.

Luckily, just over 24,000 of those are prepared in an automated fashion, basically the renewal invoices that you receive.

And then in addition to that, based on tickets and other transactions, we bill over 6,000 manual invoices each month — or, not each month, each year.

So after we bill, of course we’re happy to receive payments. So this slide shows the month-to-month customer payments that were received in 2022. The total for the year was just over $26 million. And you can see how that was distributed across the three methods. Credit cards were used to pay for 44 percent of the receipts. Checks were sent into the lockbox at the rate of 30 percent, and then, finally, ACH and wires represent 26 percent of our payments.

While we’re happy to receive credit card payments, there is a cost to that. And just from a transparency perspective, just wanted to let you know that ARIN paid about $400,000 to the merchant services companies for, the credit card companies, for those credit card payments.

So now we talk about money going out. This chart shows the disbursement activity from 2020 to 2022. There was actually a fairly large spike in 2022 from last year. So we went from 900 disbursement transactions to over 1,200. And that is purely a reflection of the return to travel after the pandemic.

Most of that increase is related to either reimbursements to ARIN employees or the volunteers who are traveling on behalf of ARIN.

Before I move on, I want to say an important thing. I want to really thank the FSD department for the work in these core areas. We just completed our 2022 financial statement audit. And I’m happy to say that we received a clean opinion and that the auditors did not require any adjustments to the financial statements that we presented to them.

But that couldn’t happen without the activities that I just showed over the last couple of slides getting done in a timely and accurate manner, because these are the transactions that produce the financial statements.

So without getting that done accurately, we wouldn’t be able to produce the accurate financial statements. So I really appreciate the FSD team for their work and actually everybody in ARIN for helping get that done.

Looking at some of the things that happened in 2022, when we offer new services, the FSD team has to react to that. These are two of the services that were new in 2022, the Premier Support Plan, and not that the Org Create and Org Recoveries were new, but it was new that we started billing for them.

And we billed over 2,600 invoices related to Org Create and Org Recovery. So that’s a significant number. If you remember, my previous slide said that our manual invoices were just over 6,000. So this 2,600 invoices related to Org Create or Org Recovery were a major portion of that and really increased the amount of work in the FSD billing area.

But they handled it. And it worked great coordinating with the RSD and the CXS team. So happy to say that that was a success.

Something else that was implemented in 2022 were a few changes to revenue recognition process. And we automated the accounting for that, which makes the monthly closing process much smoother, much quicker, and more accurate. So that was very helpful.

Automation is something where we continue to look at, and Joe talked about it in his presentation a few minutes ago. It’s very important to him and it’s very important to me that we continue to work together to try and automate and coordinate the activities that have to happen between RSD and FSD to make your transactions more efficient and try and help get them done faster.

And finally, we did make a change to our merchant services. We changed the gateway service provider. That partner is now Cybersource, which is part of Wells Fargo. And in addition to changing the gateway provider, we added the ability to pay by ACH and eCheck.

And I want to recognize there the work that the engineering team, that was a big change. It was actually bigger than we were anticipating. So there was a lot of work, a lot of discussions. And they did a great job.

Now the fun part. So the reason I wanted to put this in my presentation is because if you go to the financial statements once they’re posted on the website, you’ll see a fairly significant change on the statement of financial position. So I just wanted to explain a little bit why that is.

Nancy mentioned it. And it’s related to accounting for leases. And you can see here that it’s Accounting Standards Codification 842. And the real reason that the accounting thinkers wanted to implement this change is to provide more financial transparency to the readers of financial statements.

Before this change, the amount of payments related to lease agreements that organizations entered into was not on the face of the statement of financial position. It was reflected in footnotes.

What they basically did is said, okay, when you enter into a lease you get a right to use whatever you’re leasing, in our case, I can say, it’s the office space. So you put that on as an asset on your financial statement. And to balance that off, you put, on the other side, the liability, the amount of payments that you are obligated to pay.

For ARIN, what that meant is that at the end of 2022 we had right-of-use assets reflected on our statement of financial position of almost $3 million, and that’s broken out in between finance leases and operating leases. In a like way, to offset that on the liability side, you had finance leases of $400,000 and operating leases of almost $4 million.

So the right-of-use assets will reduce each month each year as the leases expire. And the leased liability amount will reduce every time we make a payment for that on that contract.

There was no real material effect on the statement of activities because our lease didn’t change and the amount of money we were paying didn’t change. It was just reflecting a new way of accounting for it.

So if you — not ‘if,’ because I know once they’re posted you’re all going to go and look at them.

(Laughter.)

Once they’re posted, you see, when you see those assets and those liabilities in the 2022 column, there’s not going to be a number in the 2021 column. So just wanted to explain that. And that was probably a little bit too much.

And that’s it.

Hollis Kara: Thank you, Brian. Does anybody have any questions for Brian? In the room, please approach the mics. Online, please start typing.

Andrew Dul: Andrew Dul. First question is about the invoices. You noted that there’s like 6,000 manual invoices every year. I would have wanted to see that trending down over time, that less and less manual invoices are being done.

So is that a thing you’re embarking on or am I missing something about the manual nature of generating invoices?

Brian Kirk: You’re not missing anything. And it’s something that Joe and I are talking about and have been talking about. And it’s another reason I’m excited about the new position, the business process manager, because we’ll be working hand in hand with them to hopefully automate the billing processes as part of the ticket and not have to have my team actually create the invoice. It needs to be done automated.

Andrew Dul: Second question in terms of the merchant fees on credit cards. Do you have a breakdown as to whether what they come from small-dollar transactions or large-dollar transactions for most of the credit cards?

Brian Kirk: I don’t have the breakdown offhand, but there are not that many large-dollar transactions.

Andrew Dul: Okay, they’re mostly small-dollar transactions. Thanks.

Kevin Blumberg: Kevin Blumberg, The Wire. I’m hoping that Wells Fargo is less than three and a half percent. Speaking to that it seems a little high in today’s age.

To that, as a Canadian, so not in the US, I do not have the ability to pay via ACH or eCheck or many of the options that you have, I have wire transfer, which is a very painful way to pay, especially an international wire transfer, and credit card.

If there is any talk of looking at recouping some of your $400,000 in fees, I would like you to very seriously consider the impact to countries that are not able to use your free options for paying or low-cost options for paying. Firstly.

And, secondly, have you investigated, as an example, having a Canadian bank account that allows in US dollars or Caribbean bank account in US dollars that allows organizations to be able to pay in a much more easy way. EFT in Canada as an example, for bank-to-bank transfers to accounts. Is that something that you’ve considered?

Brian Kirk: We are looking at finding a solution to that problem. I’m not necessarily right now a fan of opening up a bank account in Canada because that creates a connection to Canada that we might not necessarily want from a tax perspective.

But we are investigating multi currency accounts within the United States that might help us solve this problem.

Kevin Blumberg: Probably won’t help the issue of getting it, because at the end of the day it will probably be a wire transfer still. So as long as the credit cards stay the way they are, at least for the internationals, then it’s really not a problem. And I think you’ll find that most people will just pay that way.

Second is more of a trend that I’ve seen in our industry, and I’m curious if ARIN is suffering from a billing perspective on this, which is organizations wanting you to become a supplier and go through their supplier portals and their payment scenarios. Is that something you just say, yeah, thanks but no thanks, and pay the bill? Or is that something that you’re having to address and manually deal with all of these supplier portals that are being requested of you?

Brian Kirk: Surprisingly, we don’t get a lot of those requests, but when we do we answer the first way you said. We say thanks but…

Kevin Blumberg: Thank you.

Lee Howard: Lee Howard, IPv4.Global Hilco Streambank. I just want to say thanks for the education on ASC 842. I don’t think that was too much detail at all. That was great.

Brian Kirk: You’re welcome.

Hollis Kara: I don’t see any questions coming from online. I think that is everyone. Thank you, Brian.

(Applause.)

All right, and next up to the stage, I’d like to welcome Lisa Liedel, our director of Registration Services, to give the Registrations Services Report.

Registration Services Department

Lisa Liedel: Good morning, everyone. I’m Lisa Liedel, Registration Services Department.

First, I’d like to start by just talking a little bit about the team, the folks that do all your tickets and talk with you on the phone, do your chat.

So we’ve kind of broken up into two different groups now. We have a transfer services team. It’s headed up by Misuk Kwon. And she’s got some staff that report to her, Alyson, Jenee, Marco.

And then Reese Radcliffe heads up our core services-type functions. And Emily, Henry, Jamcy, and Mike report to Reese Radcliffe.

Mike and Reese are actually here. They’re working the Help Desk. If you haven’t seen them or talked to them, step out and say hi. They would love to see you.

And we’re currently looking for additional head count. As you know, we’ve had some folks leave the RSD and go to policy and down to the CSX group. So we’ve got open head count for that.

So what we actually do is we are here to answer calls, questions, talk to you about policy, get you through ticketing requests, setting things up in ARIN Online. And that’s via phone, chat, tickets, that type of thing. And we’re happy to help you with that any time of the day, seven through seven, and when your tickets come in we’ll work those within the timeframe allotted.

I guess I kinda moved ahead of my own self here. But we actually work on all the tickets for AS numbers; IPv4, IPv6 addresses; all the transfers that you do; your mergers, acquisitions; market transfers; inter-RIR transfers.

We also work on data accuracy information for you. So with helping you set up IRR and RPKI, making modifications that you might need. And any Whois data that might need to be updated. So you need to change out point of contacts, update addresses, that type of thing.

So a little bit of the statistics. So ARIN currently serves 39,000 organizations. And of those, about 7,000 are general members now. We have 9,800 that are service members. And our uncontracted legacy customers are around 14,000. But we also have some ASN-only customers and that’s around 7,400.

The IPv4 coverage, the RSA coverage by 24s, again kind of broke it out by legacy, whether they’re under a standard Registration Services Agreement. So we kind of see these trending up as well. When transfers happen, the standard RSA gets to be a little bit higher.

So this is our RSA coverage. It’s increased by about 13 percent since 2015. And we attribute that mostly to transfers and now RPKI, since you need to be under a Registration Services Agreement for that.

The Waiting List. I know you’ve all seen this many, many times. But we’re kind of seeing it just kind of grow again. We’re hitting that point where we really don’t have a lot of v4 that’s coming back in to us that could be reissued. And this morning it was 571 organizations on the Waiting List. We did a distribution in April, so that helped it go down, too.

And these are our reserved pools for microallocations for critical Internet infrastructure, Internet exchanges, and then the IPv4 to help facilitate v6 deployment. So they’re all looking pretty steady, pretty healthy. I think we’re still on good track there.

And then our profile, our IPv6 profile, and I know I say this all the time, but just because we say they only have v4 or IPv6 does not mean they don’t have something from a provider.

This is just what they have directly from us. So we see about 9,000 organizations have only IPv4. And another almost 1,700 have just IPv6. And then about 6,000 that have both IPv4 and IPv6.

And these are networks, IPv6 networks created. And this just kind of goes to show we do have ISPs out there that are giving IPv6 to their customers. So we see this just keeps trending up, which is really good.

And this is the number of 24s transferred by year. We see the 8.2 or the merger acquisitions, the market transfers for 8.3 and then the inter-RIR transfers for 8.4.

And this is the size blocks that have been transferred. And it seems like we have this pretty nice little pattern going on every year, year after year. So we seem to transfer more /24s and then 16, /16s kind of spike up there pretty high too.

And just a little bit of the statistics about RSD. We’ve actually responded to 5,800 phone calls. So it’s really nice. Staff does love to talk with you all. Always feel free to call in. Our queue time is maybe 13 seconds max.

And we do chat between the hours of 10 to 4. So if you log in to your ARIN Online account you can do a chat with us. We’ve done 2,100 of those. We’ve added about 700 requests to the Waiting List and 1,400 requests for Autonomous System numbers. And then 961 requests for IPv6.

Transfers are pretty good, pretty healthy at 2,500 of those. That includes M&As and market in inter-RIR.

And we’ve got a bunch of other tickets that still come in through the old hostmaster that we address every day, as well as Ask ARIN tickets and requests for bulk Whois and that type of thing.

And we also help at meeting events such as NANOG where we have a Help Desk. Registration Services group will provide that support as well.

Just a little bit about our chat and our phone volume over the years since 2020. And it looks like we’re probably trending to be close to 2022 for this year.

And that’s all I have for you, unless anyone has any questions.

Hollis Kara: Thank you, Lisa. Do we have any questions? Please feel free to approach the mic or start typing if you are online with us today.

Kevin Blumberg: Kevin Blumberg, The Wire. Lisa, big shoutout to your team. Really big shoutout. In 2015, when I thought of RSD, the first word that came to mind was frustration. And you have been phenomenal. Your team has been phenomenal.

It feels more like near-real time versus the way it was before. So you’ve really, the whole team has changed, I think, the perception of the community in terms of how the Help Desk helps as the key term.

One question. At the end of the year there’s the legacy changeover that’s going on where there’s some end-of-life things going on there. And I saw on the slide you had the old slide of here’s all the Orgs that have a v6 only and v4 and v6.

And a lot of that is historical. It’s there because of ways of working around “I want to keep stuff legacy, but I want v6 so I’ll create a second Org,” things like that. Is 2024 and beyond, are you considering helping organizations consolidate into one Org ID, their space ?

Because right now there’s all these disconnects with Orgs that were created because of policy reasons or services reasons. I had some stuff in end user and some stuff in ISP. All of those have gone away. Is that something that you’re considering helping organizations try to consolidate?

John Sweeting: John Sweeting with ARIN. That’s a big part of what our new business process manager, program manager will be looking at in the customer experience team. We’ve been talking about this.

There’s a lot of legacy things in there, though, that they’re not legacy addresses but legacy systems and the way ARIN bills and that’s the reason for some of the separations of the different Orgs and everything.

But we’re absolutely looking at that very, very hard because that’s probably one of the biggest complaints/questions we have from customers is, why do I have to have two different Org IDs to have that fee cap, and then I get billed twice, and if I miss one of them, then I’m in trouble and I get revoked, and I gotta come back in and do all — so that’s absolutely one of the high-priority issues we’re looking at.

Kevin Blumberg: Thank you.

Hollis Kara: All right, and I do see we have one comment from online, Lisa.

Beverly Hicks: Tom Bonar, TDS Telecom. Just to mirror what Mr. Blumberg said, when I took over the IPAM at TDS, my predecessor stated, ‘Don’t be surprised if an acquisition ticket could take up to six weeks.’ But I see it more like days. So thank you so much to your team.

(Applause.)

Lisa Liedel: Thank you.

Hollis Kara: We love to hear it. Thank you, Lisa.

All right. Where are we? Next up, we’ll have an update from our director of communications, Hollis Kara.

Communications Department

(Applause and laughter.)

Hello. Sorry, that was a little weird. But on brand.

Okay, thank you. It’s been great having you here. I’d like to give you an update on all the things that communications does above and beyond and a little bit including this meeting, these meetings.

Welcome to the Communications Report. Now being communicators we like to find interesting ways to represent ourselves. So I’d like to introduce you to the team.

This is us. We’re awesome. Ashley and Melissa and Christina and John and Beverly are all here supporting us this week. And Craig and Desmond are back in Virginia. Hopefully you’ll get a chance to meet them at an upcoming meeting, but these people do so much work in so many areas to keep the communications going. And I am so thankful for all their hard work and their adorable avatars.

So, what are we doing? I’m going to talk a little bit about our key deliverables, the new 2023 IPv6 campaign, what’s coming up on our training forecast, what’s happening in the ARIN Consultation and Suggestion Process, a little bit about what we’re doing in social media and on the blog, as well as internal collaborations and ARIN events.

So we’re kind of busy. We have a lot of milestones. We’ve done our annual refresh of our key messages. That’s something that we do annually with the other executive staff to kind of help make sure that we are ready to address key issues when we go out and are presenting at different venues.

We also have our annual report, which hopefully will be published very, very soon. It’s almost ready. We’ll have it for you. And we’ll be announcing when that’s available.

We have started our campaign for the Legacy Fee Cap expiration outreach and education. Basically what we’re doing is we are contacting all customers that have what we call a mixed organization status, where they have some resources under contract and some legacy and are reminding them of the upcoming fee cap expiration, as well as doing our best effort to make contact with the organizations that are purely legacy orgs, with the clear understanding that sometimes contact information for those folks isn’t as accurate as we might hope.

We’re also doing some broader community campaigns. You’ll be seeing announcements on a quarterly basis, just updates and reminders that that deadline and opportunity is coming to a close, to take advantage of the legacy registration resources agreement fee cap. That was a lot of words not in the right order, but you know what I’m talking about.

We’re also preparing to do a bit of a site audit and updates across the website. We find ourselves often very busy adding new services and information, and we don’t often have a lot of time to go back and clean house and reorganize the drawers and dust the closets. We’re going to try to be doing a little bit more of that this year.

Part of that is working to launch our new Vault. The Vault has been available for a long time. It is basically where we move content that isn’t subject to update, historical records, things like that.

We’ve been kind of paused on moving content into that space because we want to refresh it and get everything in the same publication format, which is way more information than you need. But it’s going to look cool, and we hope to have that done sometime this year.

Now, what are we doing with v6? We used to have a very active and some would call it aggressive campaign to get folks to deploy IPv6. That kind of fell to the wayside a little bit over the last five years or so. And it has come back up as something that we really need to bring back into hard focus with the community.

So we’ve launched our IPv6: Let’s Grow campaign, and mad props to Christina for her cool logo and marketing design for our new materials, along with Ashley. We’ve got our new materials together. We’re using these promotional points at events. And you can probably still grab a sticker if you want one; we have them here at registration. And we’ve also launched a new business case study blog series and social media campaign around Let’s Grow. So I hope that you’re joining in with us on that.

Training focus. So we have built a fairly solid on-demand training catalog over the last few years. Unfortunately, things change, which means that sometimes you have to go back and rebuild your training catalog. With the launch of the new Policy Development Process, we’ll be recreating new materials and a new webinar, which will be coming up soon. Stay tuned for more news on that, which will be announced when registration is available.

And then, again, also, as you’ve heard repeatedly, we’re making a lot, a lot, a lot of improvements to our RPKI interface, which means that we’re redoing a lot of training content and materials around that. So you’ll be seeing refreshed and revised and updated versions of our 101 and 201 RPKI courses a little bit later on in the summer.

We’re also working very hard on continuing to improve our customer service. We’ve had a welcome program for new customers called Optimize that’s been in place for the last few years that’s been delivered live on a quarterly basis.

We are trying to move into something that is more ready delivery and on-demand that can be passed on to customers as soon as they become part of the organization and community, and we’re hoping to have that out sometime a little bit later this year.

We’re also working with our Registration Services Department to see where we can help them in improving documentation materials and training, on-demand training items, micro learnings I think is the term I’m looking for, for customers as they’re going through processes.

Okay. Everybody’s favorite. The ARIN Consultation and Suggestion Process. This is one of our key feedback mechanisms, both for you to tell us things you want and for us to ask you questions about things that we’re considering.

Last year was a very busy year. We had six consultations, which is pretty close to a record number, I think, in the 15 years I’ve been here. We had three related to governance. Is that right? Six total. Is that math right? And others related to 2FA. There were six. I feel like I’m missing one. Doesn’t matter. I’m distracting myself.

Anyway, we ran those consultations. Got some feedback. Made some changes related. And we also had a very busy year with suggestions. You’ve been a little quiet so far. I’m almost afraid to say that. But last year we had 30 new suggestions that were accepted for future prioritization, which means they become part of a list of things that we regularly refer to when we’re looking for what gets pulled into development.

19 were closed over the course of the year, which is pretty okay. Seven we did have seven that were declined as being out of scope. Seven that were completed. And then two that were already in progress.

So we just acknowledged, yes, that work was pending. And three that were referred to the Board. And probably, I think all of them, yes, did cycle through into consultations either by the end of ‘22 or earlier this year.

So far this year consultations have been a little more quiet. We had some feedback on 2FA, other potential enhancements. So we went back out to the community and got more input on that, as well as a consultation on potentially offering ARIN content and translation.

Suggestions have also been a little bit quieter so far this year, as I said. We’ve had a few, two, so far that have been accepted for future prioritization. And then we’ve had four that we were able to close following the January 3rd deployment. So that’s good.

We don’t often talk about what we’re doing in social media, but we’re actually quite active there and trying to make sure that ARIN as a brand is maintaining its reputation as being trustworthy and authoritative in our topic space. Nothing wild and crazy.

But we are seeing that folks are engaging with us more, which is good. And our audience is growing.

One of the things you’ll notice that stands out is we’ve had a huge increase in video views. And a lot of that is due to the fact that we’ve added a new tool to our toolbox called Lumen, and it’s allowing us to create lots of cool new videos to present information that often appears in announcements in a short form video format, and we’re using those widely on social media to great effect.

Right now, the main topics that people seem to be interested in, when they’re looking for things related to ARIN, are items, anything related to IPv6, information about our Fellowship Program, as well as information on RPKI.

We had a busy year with the blog last year, with 54 posts. Again, top topics being related to routing security and IPv6.

We actually have a blog post that came out in January that was a recap of our top 10. So if you haven’t had a chance to read any of our blogs, that’s a good place to start, if you want to get up to date on things that were happeninglast year. We do also have a subscription option available now, if you want to know when we’re publishing. We try to have a cadence of at least once a week.

And so far we’ve had 15 posts, 16 after yesterday, hmm, this year. And we have re energized the IPv6 case study series that’s focused on making the business case.

Big thank you to Matthew Wilder for stepping in and helping us with coordination and recruiting for authors for some of that content.

It’s really good stuff. Don’t forget to read it.

And, of course, as always, teamwork makes the dream work. We are working very hard to improve our relationships and collaborations internally. We’re working with the engineering department to help make sure that release documentation and training is as clear and effective as possible for staff use.

We are working with Customer Experience and Strategy to support outreach events, programs like Grants and Fellowship, the upcoming Customer Satisfaction Survey, which you’ll be seeing your invitation to respond to later today. So lots of work there.

And then we’re also starting to work more with Registration Services Department. Not just on training for customers but also on ways we can help them improve their internal training for staff as well.

We will be having ARIN on the Road events this year. If you are local to the Denver area, we will be there May 18th. We’d love to see you. These are one-day events that are kind of a quick and dirty ARIN 101. We’ll also be having one in Rochester, New York, in September. So we’re looking forward to those. Totally.

And we do hope that you will make a point to mark it on your calendar and save the date to join us at ARIN 52, which will be held back-to-back with NANOG immediately following their meeting on the 19th and 20th of October. And that’s where we’ll be holding elections and all kinds of other cool things. So hope to see you there.

And with that, thank you very much for your time and attention and your participation this week.

Any questions?

(Applause.)

Here he comes. I thought I was going to get away.

Kevin Blumberg: Sorry, Hollis. Kevin Blumberg, The Wire. The ASO AC has presented to the Fellows at ICANN over the years. And I know that the mentors on the ARIN Advisory Council put in a lot of time. I know that staff put in a lot of time.

We would be. I don’t think there’s a problem with this happy to either do a pre-done video for you about the ASO and our roles and things like that. Or do a live session beforehand. To me, the Fellows coming in with as much information as they can in advance is obviously ideal.

So if there’s any way that the ASO or NRO NC can help from the ARIN region in terms of helping the Fellows have a better understanding, happy to do that.

Hollis Kara: Thank you. That’s an awesome idea. And we’ll be in touch.

All right. Anything else? I think we’re good. Thank you so much, everyone.

With that, we’re going to move into our Open Microphone, and I’ll have John and Bill come back up for that. And I hope you guys have lots of comments and questions.

Open Microphone

OPEN MICROPHONE

Bill Sandiford: Thanks, Hollis. Open Microphone time for the third and final time of the week.

Microphones are now open, in the room and remote. We’ll start on the right side.

Peter Harrison: Peter Harrison, ARIN Board of Trustees. There’s a group of people that I work with on the ARIN team seasonally that I really would like to commend. These are the members of the ARIN Community Grant Program: Amanda Gauldin, Hollis Kara and Joe Westover.

The quality of the projects that we saw as a result of the actions of this team have been very evident in this conference. So this has been an iterative approach in which I’ve been involved in it from a very, very long time.

So there have been some things we’ve done that are very obvious, improvements in the tools, et cetera. But there are some other things that have been done that have been really, really transformative.

At the moment, you don’t get automatically reenrolled into the system. If you’re selected a second time, you won’t have a third opportunity unless there’s a cooling-off period, which is very similar to term limits.

You have to make sure that your budget is meaningful; that what you’re planning on doing is cogent and very well researched. We want to make sure that you have data to back it up.

And most importantly, we want to make sure that the information that you have matches the mission and vision of ARIN.

Now, this has created a situation where we have much more competition in the ideas that come in. And with more competition, we have higher quality.

The other thing that this means is that we have increased diversity of opinions and ideas, and this is important for the Board. There are many different ways in which we get communications from the community. We get it from the mailing lists, the various meetings that we have, the dinners, and various other methodologies.

But this is the one area in which we get feedback from the community that is of a strategic nature. And the reason for that is because you wouldn’t be accepted in the first place if you didn’t have an idea that is impactful to the mission and vision of ARIN.

This is very important to the Board in the execution of our fiduciary duties. As the chairman of the ARIN Risk Committee, this is very important to me as well because we’re constantly asking the question: What could ARIN be or not be in the future?

If you have an idea that is related to ARIN’s mission and vision, I strongly suggest that you apply to the ARIN Community Grant Program. The importance of it is so evident that we want to have really good insight into the direction that ARIN should be going and may not want to go.

Once again, big shoutout to the team members, Amanda, Hollis, and Joe, and I wish you all the best in applying for the program this year and next because of its great importance to the community and ARIN as a whole. Thank you.

(Applause.)

John Curran: Thank you, Peter.

Bill Sandiford: Thanks, Peter. All right. Center microphone.

Doug Camin: Doug Camin, CCSI and ARIN AC. I just wanted to make some recognition to the Fellows that were here this time. I think we had a really active group. And they were really fantastic. So just give a little hand for them being so active.

(Applause.)

Dustin Moses: Hi, Dustin Moses, Intermax Networks, ARIN 51 Fellow. Just wanted to come back and say how wonderful it is to be a Fellow. And I think I can speak on behalf of all the other Fellows, how important we feel that ARIN has brought us along on this journey.

There’s a bunch of people we’d like to thank from the ARIN staff, including AC members who are volunteers. There are a couple of ARIN AC members, Advisory Council members, that have just been really helpful in our understanding of the processes and procedures. It’s been a great.

And then I have to also thank the community here. I’ve had so many unique and enlightening conversations. They really cannot be done, and it’s so important that the membership and the Fellows get to talk to you because it is just, there’s so much knowledge in this room. And we’re just so thankful to kind of be part of the process. And it’s all a big community. So thank you, everyone.

Bill Sandiford: Thank you.

Anything online?

Hollis Kara: Not so far.

Bill Sandiford: All right.

Scott Johnson: Scott Johnson, SolarNetOne. I just want to thank the staff and all of the Advisory Council, the Board members, and congratulate you on a very tremendous meeting this time.

Also, what a wonderful group of Fellows you’ve selected. Keep up that great work.

John Curran: Thank you.

(Applause.)

Bill Sandiford: Last call for the microphones or comments online.

Hollis Kara: Nothing.

John Curran: That’s a wrap.

Bill Sandiford: Hearing and seeing none, I think I’d be remiss as well a lot of people have thrown some commendations out. But I’d like to personally recognize Hollis and her whole team.

Hollis sits up here on the stage the entire meeting. We have opportunities to get up and run around. She has to sit up here the whole time and enlist Louie to herd cats and get people back in the room. I wanted to give a shoutout to Hollis and the entire communications team, and Beverly who runs stuff in the back. The men in black at the back. The Clarity team and the camera guys that make the remote participation and the audio.

I think John can tell you, we’ve been a part of a lot of speaking engagements over the years in different places, and there’s some that are really bad from an events handling standpoint. And the team that we have here taking care of the meetings was topnotch in terms of preparation and everything that goes into a meeting. So thanks, Hollis, to your team and to everybody else that was involved. We couldn’t have such successful meetings without you.

Hollis Kara: Thank you. Appreciate it.

Bill Sandiford: All right. That’s a wrap, guys. We’ll call on Hollis to close it out.

(Applause.)

Closing and Adjournment

Hollis Kara: Ready to tie a bow on this thing, guys? Let’s go. Thank you for joining us. First of all, one last big thank you for our sponsors, Charter Communications for the network, IPv4.Global by Hilco Streambank, bronze sponsor, and Google for our webcast. So thank you to all our sponsors. Big round of applause, please.

(Applause.)

It is very important for to us hear back about your experience at this meeting. So please do take a few moments to complete the survey. You’ll receive a link after the close of the meeting.

Everyone who chooses to do so will also be eligible to win an iPad Air in a survey drawing that will be held later next week. So please do tell us how we did.

And please do save the date for ARIN 52 in October. One last thank you before we leave to my fabulous tech team who has kept things running so smoothly throughout the week. So thank you to the tech riser.

And one final reminder, for those that are joining the Caribbean Roundtable this afternoon, that will start at 12:30 upstairs. So you know who you are. And with that, ARIN 51 is done. Please enjoy the sunshine and thank you so much for being here with us over the last few days.

(Applause.)

(Meeting concluded at 12:10 PM)