PAUL WILSON:

OK, welcome. Let's start again. As I mentioned, the next session is 
for reports from the RIRs. Firstly, APNIC is going to present - in the 
person of Son Tran - the joint statistics report, the global summary 
of IP address and other Internet resource utilisation across all of 
the RIRs. Then we'll be welcoming Richard Jimmerson from ARIN, German 
Valdez from LACNIC, Paul Rendek from RIPE NCC and Adiel Akplogan from 
AfriNIC in that order for the RIR status reports. That will take us 
through for at least the next hour and there'll be time for open 
discussion and open mic. In fact, there's half an hour set aside for 
open discussion so, just depending on the level of the length of 
presentations and the number of questions we have, there is plenty of 
time to talk, to discuss after that so think about your questions and 
contributions between now and then, please.

We'll be having lunch at 12:30. I'll hand straight over to Son and 
that is the RIR joint statistics report.

SON TRAN:

Thank you, Paul. Paul Wilson already introduced me so I'll go ahead 
with the global statistics information. So let's look at the total of 
/8 variables involved in IPv4 and the total consumption that we have 
already used. We have grouped them in several groups. For example, 
any IP address that have been distributed before the RIR or during 
InterNIC time, we group them in the central registry and the 
multicast, experimental and all the IR until 31 December 2003 and 
anything beside that, we put them under IR reserve, this includes all 
the private IP addresses. So we look further into the trend of the 
allocations for globally. We can see that, during the dotcom boom 
that the total IP address consumption is very high in 2000 and 2001 
but it's stabled out in 2002 and 2003. So the total in 2000 and 2003 
- you can see the consumption is about 4,000 in 2003 and 5,000 in 
2003. You can see the trend of APNIC in blue here. We expect that the 
trend will grow in 2004. If you look at the percentage for the last 
five years, ARIN have the most IP addresses from the IANA, which is 
34%, followed by APNIC and the RIPE NCC.

Just remember - this is just from 1999 to 2003. Going further, we also 
look at the trends of the AS number allocations to our members from 
the four RIRs. There seems to be a slowing in the trend of AS 
utilisation globally, especially in APNIC and the rest of the RIRs as 
well. And, in percentage terms, ARIN have the most allocations or 
assignments, followed by RIPE NCC, then APNIC. If you look at the 
IPv6 total allocations for the four RIRs in August 1999 when we 
started allocated IPv6 address space. In 2003, it seems that the 
total trend is going up but, in IP region, we tend to be slowing down 
a bit, if you look at the blue here, compared to other RIRs, 
especially with ARIN and the RIPE NCC, there seems to be an increase 
in the number of allocations.

And, if you look at the percentage terms, then RIPE NCC have the most 
allocations followed by APNIC and ARIN. If you look at the top five 
countries around the world that are receiving the allocations for 
IPv6, in ARIN region, you have the US, of course, with 73 allocations 
followed by, in AP region, Japan, 64 and the rest is from Europe, 
which is Germany, Netherlands and the UK. And, as you know, AfriNIC 
is not officially recognised as an RIR.

This is the total addresses that we have in the region. In IPv4, most 
of them come from ARIN. Similarly also with AS numbers and also with 
IPv6, the RIPE NCC have allocated one in Tanzania and ARIN have 
allocated four to South Africa. If you wish to analyse the statistics 
of the IPv4 and even IPv6, you can go to either IANA website, where 
you can see which blocks of IP addresses have been allocated. That's 
it for me. I'm happy to answer any questions that you might have or 
any comments. If not, then I will hand back the microphone to Paul.

PAUL WILSON:

Next up is Richard Jimmerson from ARIN.

RICHARD JIMMERSON:

I'm Richard. Maybe the most pertinent important information for the - 
a bit about our activities, our policy developments in the region and 
our on-demand training and our coming year. The activities I've 
listed are some of the activities that we’re involved in that are 
outside of the normal day-to-day registration activities. One of them 
is ERX. We've been working in close coordination with the other RIRs 
over the past year or more for this and we'll continue this for the 
upcoming year. Also services over IPv6. We've been working with two 
providers in the US to get a native v6 to them. We have one more 
coming, in fact, next week it will take place. And in moving to the 
new facility we'll be able to get v6 there as well. Once we have all 
that in place, we're going to be turning up our services over IPv6, 
that includes the website, FTP, any other type of services there and 
also Whois.

Hijacking has been a big issue in the ARIN region as of late. It's 
caused a lot of extra work for the ARIN staff. We had modified many of 
our internal systems to help us counteract some of the unauthorised 
changes being made to the database and we're still working on some of 
those changes internally. And stronger authentication.

We've been speaking to the ARIN authority about that. We're on 
schedule to have the release and in production by the ARIN meeting in 
April of this year. And also CRISP, working with the other RIRs on 
CRISP as well and we're going to be giving more attention to that. 
We've been talking to folks about website improvement. One of the 
things that most people are interested in visiting the website are the 
statistics. Not the raw statistics but the statistics you can see in 
a graphical format.

We're working on changing those as well to make them more user 
friendly. Template translations. We translate our templates in French 
and Spanish to meet the needs inside of our region. And we've started 
translating other documents. The Internet evaluation process. We've 
posted that in French and Spanish and in anticipation of the upcoming 
meeting in Africa for the AfriNIC meeting. We've also obtained 
translations in Arabic and Swahili. Right now in the APNIC region and 
the RIPE NCC region, you've got document numbers, ARIN's never had 
that. We've never used that before. We're putting together a policy 
catalogue, which will have paragraph numbers on it and it will make it 
easier to reference people. Whether they're looking for policies or 
coming into request changes or to propose new ones.

And also now NANOG-ARIN joint meetings. We've done two now. We're 
going to continue doing that. The next meeting is an ARIN stand-alone 
meeting. But the third quarter meeting will be with NANOG. We had set 
up a training curriculum where we'll travel to sites inside of a 
region and provide training. We weren't getting a whole lot of 
attendants at those training sessions. One of the things that was 
requested of us was to put training together and put it online. We've 
done that over the past year and we will be showing other interactive 
type of training that people have been using. We think it's pretty 
successful.

Recent policy proposals, we've had four that have been ratified. 
Micro-assignments for multi-homed networks. These are 
micro-organisations that are multi-homed. They'll be able to justify 
a /22. This has been ratified by the board through the process, 
however it has not yet been implemented. The ARIN board of trustees 
is establishing a new fee category. We will implement that policy. 
It's expected that some time after March when there's a board meeting 
that that will happen.

Six months supply of IP addresses was ratified. That has been the case 
in the past that Internet service providers were only allowed three 
months on a recurring basis. We would give them more space. When the 
community proposed that would be extended to six months for 
established providers. Also, ARIN is one of the few RIRs that a 
maximum allocation size. And it was proposed that the maximum be 
removed and it has been removed. IP addresses allocate IP address 
allocations for the Africa portion of the ARIN region.

There was a proposal submitted by the members of the community inside 
the ARIN region on continental Africa. What they proposed was that the 
minimum allocation size for the Africa proportion of the ARIN region 
be reduced to a /22. That was reviewed through the process by the 
community and it was evaluated by the AC and worked its way through 
the process and it was ultimately ratified by the board of trustees. 
It should be implemented here very soon.

Three are pending right now. Experimental Internet resource 
allocations. There's final testing prepared. That's going to be... 

Resident customer privacy. Pending ratification there as well. After 
the last ARIN meeting, the community had come to a consensus on this 
as judged by the ARIN Advisory Council. They went to the board of 
trustees for a recommendation of adoption. The board then went back 
to ask for clarification and the AC has returned that clarification 
and the board will be meeting about this at the next meeting. 

Also distributed information service use requirements. Clarification 
was requested but in looking that clarification that was requested the 
ARIN Advisory Council made some changes to the council. That should 
be going out very soon. Three that were carried over from the 
previous meeting that will be discussed in April are IPv6 policy 
changes for acceptable use. The last two weeks we've had four new 
policy proposal submissions.

Unique IP addresses for private networks. There was some talks in the 
SIGs this week about that. Someone in the ARIN region has submitted a 
proposal stating ARIN will issue IP addresses for certain instances 
of private use. Also, purpose and scope of ARIN Whois directory. This 
is a proposal that's being offered in the ARIN community. That's very 
closely where what's recently been ratified in this region and is 
going through implementation procedures right now where it would make 
the reporting of reassignment information to the database optional.

Use of HD-Ratio for IPv4 allocations. This has been introduced for a 
second time in the ARIN region. It did not achieve the consensus 
needed. But this text is almost word for word the same proposed in 
this region some time ago. That's going through for another review in 
the ARIN region.

Defining utilisation of IPv4 addresses. A member of the community has 
asked for a review of what utilisation means and how it's applied to 
request for address space and they want to have community discussion 
about that.

That will be discussed in the coming months and at the ARIN meeting. 
This is some of the training we put together as a result of some 
feedback that we receive from the community. First we've got the 
registration process flow charts. For each of the requests type of 
procedures that we have with ARIN, you can look at flow chart like 
this and step your way through the process. Stepping through this 
process, see the forms you need to fill out. Get additional 
information and things of that sort.

Also, for computer-based training, we have ARIN database templates 
that have been in place for almost two years now. There is a lot of 
feedback from the community about Whois. We need better instruction 
on how to use Whois, how to get the information from it. This was 
anywhere from home users with firewalls running on their computers to 
law enforcement agency and like of that sort. Both of them have been 
pretty successful in 2003 for web hits for ARIN database templates we 
had just over 18,000. And we had over 25,000 uses for Whois of that.

And the next ARIN meeting is going to be in Canada in Vancouver, April 
18 to 21. We'll be discussing all of these policies that I've listed. 
If you're inclined to go to the ARIN region and attend a meeting, 
you're welcome. So thank you. If you have any questions I'll be glad 
to answer them.

PAUL WILSON:

Thank you, Richard.

GERMAN VALDEZ:

Thank you, Paul. I work in the LACNIC region. When I make the 
presentation for LACNIC, I'm going to show you a brief slide about 
statistics, then about the policy that we are working in LACNIC and 
the last part of my presentation is going to be about some projects 
we are working on through the region.

Well, LACNIC is serving 29 territories in Latin America. We also serve 
some countries in the Caribbean, for example LACNIC has Cuba, 
Dominican Republic. We are working right now in two /8s, as shown in 
the presentation on global statistics. As you can see, 45% is 
distributed in Brazil. The second main market in Latin America is 
Mexico. The rest of the IP addresses is sharing with the rest of the 
countries in Latin America. A little more than 100,000 /24s have been 
distributed in our region until December 2003. This slide shows how 
we were working until the end of 2003. This shows, in the first 
quarters of 2002, we were working in cooperation with ARIN, We made 
the transition of responsibility of the Internet resources from ARIN 
to LACNIC. In 2003, we started working fully operational. As you can 
see, there has been an increase in the number of /24s that has been 
allocated in Latin America. This slide shows the number of allocations 
we have made in Latin America since LACNIC is working. There is also 
an increase in the last year, in 2003. Talking about the distribution 
of ASN. Again, Brazil has the big piece of cake of this graphic, 25%. 
Then it's Mexico, Argentina and Chile and Colombia are the next ones 
with ASN allocations. This is the amount of ASN allocation for the 
last two years.

There has been a decrease in the number in the last year. Talking 
about the IPv6, we have a small amount of allocations of IPv6 in 
LACNIC, only 11 allocations of IPv6. The graphic also shows a number 
of allocations, four, that come from the time when ARIN were serving 
LACNIC region, so that's the four allocations we are looking to move 
to the LACNIC IPv6 space. Talking about our membership - until the 
end of the last year, we have almost 160 member. The exact number is 
158. As you can see, over half of the membership is made of small 
ISPs. They have allocation under a /19. Also, this amount is made of 
medium ISPs in the LACNIC region. So the market in Latin America is 
based more in the allocation for small ISPs.

The membership distribution in LACNIC region have a highlight in 
Argentina. They have the majority of the membership in Latin America. 
The evolution of the membership since the first allocation that ARIN 
made to Latin America organisation in '98. As you can see, from 2001 
until the end of 2002, the membership almost duplicates this amount. 
Taking account 2002 and 2003 as the years when LACNIC has been serving 
the LACNIC region.

OK, that's about it for statistics. Talk being policy, we had some 
interesting policies in 2003. We had two meetings, one in Santiago in 
April and the last one was in Cuba in Havana. We adopted new policies 
there - a bulk Whois copy distribution of the database, IPv6 
microallocations and multihomed end-user microallocations. Those were 
adopted at LACNIC IV in Santiago in Chile. The last proposals were 
adopted for the LACNIC community is that we are doing now on 
experimental allocations, that's happening right now.

We changed our policy, of IPv6, the allocations of IPv6 allocations in 
Latin America will change according to the rest of the RIRs and also 
we have modification of the multihomed end-user allocations for that 
meeting. This policy has been approved. We passed the last comments 
and the board has decided to implement it and the implementation will 
start on March 15, two weeks from now.

Continuing with the policy, we are under a review of the policy 
process. This discussion has been held in the last two LACNIC meetings 
and is going to continue to LACNIC VI. Also, we have a proposal for a 
new policy in lame delegation. We are still discussing this policy.

We had a proposal of global policy approved. This one passed the IANA 
to RIR allocation of IPv4 address space. We have a page where you can 
follow all the processes of the policy discussion at LACNIC. It's 
important to say that the web page of LACNIC is fully supported in 
English, Portuguese and Spanish and Portuguese and Spanish are the 
main languages in Latin America.

And finally, we have a policy list where all the policy discussion is 
held. We have 235 subscriptions. We are receiving 65 new subscriptions 
during 2003 and, according to the domain names or the e-mails that 
are subscribed to the list, 20 out of 29 economies of LACNIC are 
present in this list. We have a new policy in 'Internet resources 
Experimental Allocation'. We're not allowed to make any allocations 
for experimental needs. Also, we changed the initial allocation for 
IPv6. We have three new requirements for the policy.

The first one is that a document, a detailed plan for services and 
IPv6 connections to be offered to other organisations, clients. They 
announce a single block in the Internet interdomain routing system, 
aggregating the total IPv6 address allocation received, within a 
period no longer than 12 months. And the last requirement is offer the 
IPv6 services to clients physically located within the region covered 
by LACNIC within a period no longer than 24 months. We had these 
requirements and we removed two from the original policy. The 
requirements to be removed were plan to provide IPv6 connectivity to 
organisations to which it will assign /48s and we also removed the 
plan for making at least 200 /48 assignments to other organisations 
within two years. This policy was widely discussed in the LACNIC 
community and they decided to make these amendments. We tried to 
share also this information in our global policy list. So this policy 
applies starting in March 15.

LACNIC is also organising training sessions in Latin America last 
year. We have six training sessions - Buenos Aires, Montevideo, 
Santiago, Chile, Bogota, Colombia, Merida, Venezuela and La Havana, 
Cuba. We offered these training sessions about Internet management to 
142 people. Also in the LACNIC meeting, we offer some tutorials about 
BGP, advance DNS and IPv6. We take account of the number of people who 
participate in our tutorials. We counted more than 200 people who 
participated in some kind of training from LACNIC.

LACNIC is - have some important projects also for 2004. We have some 
priorities. Our top priorities is working with other RIRs in common 
projects, like ERX/joint whois and common policies. Also, we are 
working in accounting tracking system for LACNIC. We just end the 
project to have all our web page templates and the management of our 
system completely in English, Spanish and Portuguese. We accomplished 
this in January. We are operating on authentication in LACNIC's 
system and web-based templates. We are making some modifications to 
our voting software. We already use the voting system, electronic 
voting for the election of the board of directors of LACNIC that were 
held last meeting in November. We are working also in LACNIC meetings 
in webcasting. So we expect to have webcasting for the next LACNIC 
VI.

By the way, you are fully invited to assist in our next meeting. It's 
going to be Montevideo from 29 March to 1 April. This is the web page 
of the meeting. You are, of course, more than invited to go. As APNIC 
is doing in its region, LACNIC is also worried about the development 
of the Internet in more general cases. For that reason, this is 
working together in the sessions. The next meeting for LACNIC is going 
to be in conjunction with important associations in Latin America. 
One of them is LACTLD. We are also working with ECOMLAC, which is one 
of the member founders of LACNIC. It is an Association of ISPs in 
Latin America. We are organising all of our activities together with 
the Open Policy Forum. We are organising a forum about IPv6.

This is the first time in a meeting we organise IPv6 in Latin America 
to this level. One of the reasons to have this forum is also to 
discuss IPv6 for Latin America. We are going to organise also a 
round-table about Internet governance. I feel we are taking care of 
that. We are invited people from the civil society and governments to 
be part of this round- table. And also a strategic vision workshop in 
Internet number resources. We are trying to visualise future 
business. We are working in a number of projects in Latin America, as 
APNIC does in Asia region. We have some partnerships with other 
institutions. For example, we have this project, FRIDA, the FRIDA 
project. It's about small grants to projects that are involved with 
the development of IT technologies and we are going to administrate 
funds, $500,000, provided by IDRC, the Institute for Connectivity of 
the Americas and ISOC.

This funding is for 2004 and 2005 and there is a call for proposals 
for next March. We are worried for the promotion of the Internet 
development in the region. We just elected two board members in last 
meeting. We elected Raimundo Beca for three years. We also closed the 
fiscal year with very good results. We consult with an audits company 
who reviewed the numbers. They gave a favourable opinion. The Annual 
Report has been published in our web page and it will be covered in 
our next meeting in Montevideo. That's it. If you have any questions
I'll be happy to answer. I would like to thank APNIC staff for 
inviting LACNIC and I also would like to congratulate APNIC for the 
wonderful meeting you have now in Kuala Lumpur. I'm very glad to be 
here. Thank you.

PAUL WILSON:

Thank you. Thank you very much for those kind words German. Questions? 
In that case, Paul Rendek from NCC. OK, Adiel, are you ready to do 
AfriNIC? Maybe we'll move on to your report while we sort this one 
out, if you're ready. I'm sorry about this. I guess we've been 
relatively trouble-free so far. Something had to go wrong. Sorry, 
Paul. I guess it is RIPE NCC this is Adiel from AfriNIC to provide a 
status update.

ADIEL AKPLOGAN:

Thank you. Just a brief update status of the on AfriNIC activity since 
last year, where we gave the status of our activities. So, since, we 
have achieved some steps and I will briefly talk to you about where 
we are and what is our near future plan. So, as we presented the last 
time, we are in the transition processes from the three different 
registries now to AfriNIC to have an RIR for the African region. For 
six months, two staff from AfriNIC were trained at RIPE.

They are finished their training now and are being relocated in South 
Africa, where AfriNIC will be running from. To organise the operation 
centre in South Africa, we had a workshop in Pretoria two weeks ago 
with the hosting entity there to try to finalise some important 
points about the operations. So the agreement for start-up funding of 
AfriNIC, budget issues, refine the budget and tell what is on the 
operation, what is not on the operation, what is administrative, etc, 
the legal and administrative issues. As you know, AfriNIC activity is 
shared around the continent. We have four locations. The headquarters 
and the secretariat will be in Mauritius, the operations in South 
Africa, the training initially will be done from Ghana and we have a 
disaster recovery centre which will be in Cairo. So doing the 
workshop in Pretoria will define what will be done from Mauritius and 
not be included in South Africa budget, etc, etc. We also started 
working with CSIR technical staff to finalise the network 
infrastructure for AfriNIC. We are facing a very big issue there, 
which is the bandwidth. The bandwidths are very expensive, so we need 
to design the network so that we can find a way to get a bandwidth or 
using in the most efficient way. We are still working on the outreach 
program.

As you know, we released AfriNIC News, which is giving an update to 
the members about our activity. We are now working on the release 
number two, which will give us more detailed update on AfriNIC 
activities. Now, what is the structure of AfriNIC today? It consists 
of a board of 30, which is composed of six people elected from the six 
different regions in Africa. So one from West Africa, one from Central 
Africa, Indian Ocean, Southern Africa, Northern Africa and Eastern 
Africa. All of them are supplied by one person, so the board is 
composed of eight persons with four which are the more active and 
they are supplied by four other persons. So we have after that a 
project manager which is coordinating all the activity during the 
transition plan.

We have also one engineer which was trained myself at RIPE, which is 
Ernest, who was presenting here last year. We have also an interim 
secretariat which is formed of people from different countries in 
Africa. We have also some working groups and committees from among 
the board and also the community. I will talk a little bit about the 
policy working group, the ARC which has been put in place to work on 
the application to ICANN to be recognised as an RIR.

OK, now, on site, what is happening? AfriNIC has been incorporated in 
Mauritius last month as a not-for-profit organisation. We are now 
working on office set up and how to help managing assistant to work 
on some administrative issues there.

We already have an office in Pretoria. The office is in the CSIR 
building. Everything is already there and Ernest and I are working 
from there. We are working on connectivity and finalising some legal 
issues about the staff working there. The office in South Africa - 
some pictures from South African office and Ernest there in the 
office. So we are starting moving and then having some conference. 
I've just come from Mauritius to talk to the authority about hosting 
AfriNIC. The nice building there is where AfriNIC will be located in 
Mauritius. It is not finished yet as you can see from the picture that 
I took. There is the place in the office where AfriNIC will be.

So also there is something going on and we agreed, we got an agreement 
from the local ISP association to host AfriNIC during the period where 
the building will be completely finished. That will be somewhere in 
May.

OK. After that, we also start working on our policies. As a new RIR, 
we have to design our own policies which will be, of course, based on 
all the existing RIR policies but more fits the reality and the 
economic reality of Africa. So we - so they are volunteering to 
constitute policy working group and we’ve got people that are really 
willing to help for building the first set of AfriNIC policies. So 
those are the members of the policy working group. You have four 
members from the community and three - two from the staff and one of 
the BoT. You can participate in this policy discussion. The discussion 
list is open and current. It's policy-wg@afrinic.org. You can 
subscribe and give your point of view on our newly building policy 
process. To help the work of this policy working group, we've designed 
a policy development process, very simple, that will help to move in a 
very simple way and to have on time all the necessary policies needed 
for AfriNIC to be running.

So the development process is in six points. The policy is proposed on 
the mailing list. The discussion on the mailing list for about 30 
days. We put the proposal on table during the public meeting and the 
first public policy public meeting will be AfriNIC-1 meeting in Dakar 
in May. If we reach consensus, then the last call for comments will be 
sent back to the mailing list. If there is no consensus, then we will 
send it for more changes. If there is consensus, it will be on 
mailing list for 15 days and then it will be ratified by the board of 
trustees. It is a very simple process that will be improved, of 
course, time by time, but that is how we are planning to move with it 
now.

So activities for 2004 - we have the upcoming AfriNIC-1 meeting, which 
will be a member meeting with a public policy meeting from 23 to 24 
May in Dakar, Senegal. This will be current with AfNOG which is the 
African Network Operators Group meeting.

The board is planning two face-to-face meetings this year, the first 
in May 2004 in Cairo. We don't already have all the details about this 
meeting. And then another one, of course, during AfriNIC-1 meeting. 
There is also a regional RIR meeting planned by ARIN and RIPE NCC in 
our region to talk about AfriNIC process and also the new policy.

We are also planning three to four regional trainings in the last 
quarter of 2004. Why? To train LIR about our new policy, our new 
procedures waiting for our activity to start. So we can help them 
seeing the difference between what they are doing now with the RIR and 
what AfriNIC will be doing. So that is plan for the last quarter.

The new website, AfriNIC has also launched a website which is 
www.afrinic.net. Maybe you know the previous website which is 
afrinic.org. The new one is afrinic.net and more organised. You can 
go and give us any comments about it. At the last one, we also 
continued building our relationship with the other RIRs. We attend 
most of the RIR member meetings to update the community about our 
progress. We had a one-week workshop with ARIN in January. We also 
start having monthly teleconference board meetings since November and 
this is supported by ARIN. Every first of the month, we have the 
teleconference for the board to discuss AfriNIC issues. The website is 
temporarily hosted by RIPE today, waiting for AfriNIC to be up and 
running. We are also working with RIRs to organise some policies 
related to AfriNIC, like the minimum allocation, for example. That 
was done in ARIN region, was also proposed in RIPE region and the 
discussions are ongoing on that. There is more other activity ongoing 
with the RIRs and AfriNIC which show that we are still moving and 
working to become a formal RIR. We are also still getting support 
from the local community and, on the new website, on the support 
site, you can see letters we got from many of ISPs in Africa. This is 
the list of some of them, but the letters are there and you can see 
and read them. That's all about AfriNIC up to date. If there is any 
questions or comments.

PAUL WILSON:

OK, thank you, Adiel. Paul Rendek is back to try again. Do you have 
something else to say, Adiel? That looks good. It's up there.

PAUL RENDEK:

Hello, there. My name is Paul Rendek. I'm from the RIPE NCC. I'm going 
to provide you with a short update on activities that have taken place 
at the RIPE NCC. Unfortunately, our director Axel Pawlik could not be 
with us today because of a prior arrangement. We're all proud of him 
because he's just obtained his pilot's licence. We thought we'd show 
you a picture of what Amsterdam probably looks like to him.

In the area of policy updates, this will cover activities up to the 
last RIPE meeting in January. We have implemented a minimum allocation 
policy. This was done on 1 January and, up until two days ago, we 
have allocated 15 /21s. Ongoing policy development - the RIPE 
community is busy updating the current policy development process. 
This is an exercise that I believe took place in this region as well. 
I've been informed by our chairman of the address policy working 
group that he's been gathering materials and he will be making a 
proposal for input and suggestions to our address policy working 
group list. We've received another proposal for special assignment 
policy from the TLD DNS operators. They perceive the current policy 
does not meet their needs so they have brought forward a proposal. 
I'm sure there will be discussions on our mailing list about that.

And there was another proposal made from the African region for a /22 
minimum allocation for the registries that we have in the African 
region. This is similar to what Richard Jimmerson explained happened 
in the ARIN community. They have had it implemented. It's been 
proposed in our community and there will be further discussion on our 
mailing list.

I'm happy to report that our response times are good and, because they 
are stable, we have been able to put resources into other areas of 
registration services to provide better services to our membership. 
For example, we have developed a wizard for non-portable address 
space requests and we have also made it possible for one user account 
to be logged in to as many LIRs as they have accounts for. And I've 
provided you with a picture here of the wizard that is in our LIR 
portal. This is, of course, equivalent to the APNIC - MyAPNIC service 
in this region.

Training services - for 2004, the RIPE NCC plans to hold 80 courses in 
its region. The blue areas of this picture show you the countries that 
we plan to visit for Q 1 and Q 2 of 2004. As you can see, I've listed 
here the different types of training courses that the RIPE NCC 
offers. The bulk of these training courses will be LIR training 
courses and these are equivalent to the IRME training courses offered 
in the APNIC region. Some news on the development front in training - 
we are investigating new methods and formats of training together 
with APNIC. This is part of the RIPE NCC's definition of its long-term 
training strategy and one of the goals that we hope to achieve by 
this is to extend our training reach.

Membership liaison - if I can just jump back to a membership survey 
that was taken in our community in 2002, our members brought forward a 
concern that they felt that they wanted the RIPE NCC to represent - 
to be more visible to them in legal areas or pockets of our region. 
So the RIPE NCC has actually begun a new activity called the RIPE NCC 
Regional Meets. These meetings are held in various pockets of our 
region. They are meant to focus on issues specific to the local needs 
of any of these particular areas. These meetings will last about two 
to three days. The reason for the length here is that we will also be 
providing some variation of our training courses during these regional 
meetings. The launch of this - of the first regional meeting took 
place in December 2003 in Dubai. I'm pleased to report that we had an 
excellent turnout.

I think I can say we managed to assemble 120 network operators from 
the Middle East area, from various countries within the Middle East, 
and I was told by them that this was one of the largest turnouts they 
had in any one meeting from that many countries from their meeting. 
We received some feedback from this meeting and we plan to employ this 
feedback in the forthcoming meetings that we have coming up for 2004. 
Forthcoming meetings are in Moscow in June and in Nairobi in July.

In the area of RDNS, a restructure plan for reverse DNS was presented 
at the last RIPE meeting. The project is designed to simplify the 
management of reverse DNS delegations and this is expected to be 
completed some time this spring.

The RIPE NCC is one of 13 operators of the root server system. In this 
area, we are carrying out a project of K-Root server anycast 
deployment and recently a third node was deployed at the DE-CIX in 
Frankfurt. More nodes are planned. However, we are in different 
stages of negotiation with potential hosts. And these are mainly 
throughout the RIPE NCC service region, but we have actually seen 
some interest outside of our region and the dnsmon prototype service 
was also launched. This service monitors the health of the prototype 
server and is available at dnsmon.ripe.net.

There has been general housekeeping done to make the RIPE Whois 
database work the way people expect it to work. We have also addressed 
security issues, for example better protection for hierarchical 
objects. Another improvement to the database security is the addition 
of secure certificate authentication. Our members will be able to 
update the RIPE database using the LIR portal or the regular web 
updates pages as well as traditional mail updates using the strong 
authentication method. We have also researched how well a number of 
common mail complaints handle secure certificates and these findings 
are published on our website.

In the area of routing registry, we have tested RPSLng functionality. 
We try to keep this prototype server up to date with the current 
Internet draft.

In the area of RIR coordination, all of the Regional Internet 
Registries are working quite closely together to support the 
establishment of AfriNIC. ARIN has given us this /13 block of 
addresses from which the RIPE NCC now makes all of its allocations to 
the African networks. The RIPE NCC has also hosted two hostmasters in 
2003, Adiel and Ernest joined the RIPE NCC for a period of six months 
in 2003. They have since returned to Africa as Adiel has pointed out 
but we continue to work quite closely together with them. The RIPE 
NCC will also attend the AfriNIC-1 meeting in May of 2004. As I 
mentioned earlier, the RIPE NCC will also be working together with 
APNIC on training development.

And, for 2004, the ASO secretariat is hosted at the RIPE NCC. One of 
the responsibilities of the ASO secretariat is to keep the policy 
comparison overview up to date. So we will be working together with 
the other registries and we plan to publish an updated version of this 
document by mid-2004.

The RIPE NCC is also hosting the Number Resource Organization 
secretariat for 2004. Together with the other RIRs we have launched a 
website which is available at www.nro.org. And there has also been an 
NRO engineering coordination group formed. I won't go into any more 
detail on the NRO, because I believe that Paul Wilson will be touching 
on ICANN/NRO later in the afternoon. 

Finally, I'd like to announce our upcoming RIPE meeting which is RIPE 
48. I have actually been lucky enough to spend the last several weeks 
in this region of the world which is nice and warm. I'm sure that all 
of our RIPE NCC staff are ready to welcome in spring and I think we'd 
also like to welcome all of you to our upcoming RIPE meeting in 
Amsterdam from 3 May to 7 May. Finally, I would also like to point out 
that our RIPE chairman is here in the room. He's attending APRICOT 
and this APNIC meeting and he's sitting over there. Rob, can you 
stand up and let yourself be known. He is the chairman of RIPE. If 
you have any questions about RIPE, I'm sure he would be happy to 
answer those for you. Is there somebody from RIPE NCC who can answer 
the question.

Q.

Is monitoring DNS on reachability or monitoring the content?

JOAO DAMAS:

It's monitoring the health of the service. The monitors have 
distributed selected servers from different points of the network and 
whether they are reachable or not and what visibility they have.

PAUL WILSON:

Are there any other questions for Paul or for any of the other 
presenters? No. OK, well, I'm sure we all found those reports very 
interesting and we should express our appreciation to the presenters, 
all of whom came quite a long way to be here and fill us in on those 
updates, so thanks a lot.

APPLAUSE

OK, that brings us to the end of the morning session, 15 minutes early 
or so. Are there any questions or suggestions or contributions that 
anyone would like to make?

GERARD ROSS:

We've got a website survey that's being passed around as well and we'd 
appreciate any feedback you've got on that. If you place your survey 
forms in the box on the table outside, I will have a little draw this 
afternoon and one of the people who puts in a survey will win a 
sensational prize. You'll love it.

PAUL WILSON:

That's part of the survey that I mentioned earlier where the 
Secretariat is trying to find out the best ways to approach further 
development of the website, trying to find out what are the good 
goods and the bad things about the website. Not only will you get a 
prize potentially, but you'll also - even if you don't win, you'll 
have the satisfaction of knowing that you contributed something 
useful.

GERARD ROSS:

Everybody wins.

PAUL WILSON:

That's right. Everybody wins. You'll contribute something useful to 
the APNIC website, so please do take a minute to fill in that form. 
Before we break for lunch, I'll just explain the afternoon's agenda. 
We've got until 2.00pm for lunch and that lunch will be served, I 
believe, in the usual place for lunch. OK. I'm wrong. The lunch is 
just next door, actually. So that lunch will go until 2.00 pm and 
then, after 2.00 pm, we've got the usual set of SIG and BOF reports 
from the usual sessions held at the APNIC Open Policy Meetings over 
the last couple of days. The chairs of those SIGs and their 
representatives will be talking and reporting back from the DNS NIR 
database, IPv6, Address policy, Internet Exchange and routing SIGs. 
This is the standard set of SIGs which are held during each of the 
APNIC Open Policy Meetings. They were quite well attended at this 
meeting in spite of competition with the APRICOT program. It was good 
to see the turnout and there was some interesting discussion in all 
of those sessions. So the chairs will be reporting back and there 
will be time for questions about any of those SIGs. Also, 
particularly, in the case of the Address policy SIG, there are 
specific consensus decisions which were made in that SIG and those 
consensus decisions are to be endorsed by choice at this meeting. So 
each of the actual policy decisions will be put to this meeting as the 
Members Meeting for an endorsement by the APNIC membership and that's 
part of the policy process. So just remind you to be prepared, 
please, to listen to the reports, to try and understand the policy 
proposals which are being presented and hopefully to endorse those 
outcomes. If not, to ask questions, and make an informed decision.

There'll be a coffee break in the mid-afternoon. There'll be after 
that an Address Council update from Kenny Huang, who's on the Address 
Council, one of the Asia Pacific elected members of the AC. I will 
present an update about the ICANN NRO, ASO, WSIS processes. We'll 
have time for open mics as well for any discussion, questions or 
suggestions before we have the results of the EC election process and 
also an announcement about the next meeting or meetings. So, unless 
there's anything else, I will adjourn the meeting until after lunch 
and thank you very much for your attention and participation. Thank 
you.

APPLAUSE