______________________________________________________________________ DRAFT TRANSCRIPT Annual Member Meeting - part 4 Friday 25 February 2005 4.00pm ______________________________________________________________________ PAUL WILSON I think we should make a start again. I'd like to start by asking you to indicate - could you please raise your hand if you did fill in the survey form about the meeting? (Pause) Thank you. Just hold your hand up for a little while. SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR Say again? PAUL WILSON If you have completed the survey form regarding the meeting, please raise your hand. OK, thank you very much. I have to confess that was a bit of a trick for the sake of our documentary. We've got some staff who are working on a documentary about the APNIC meetings and they let me know a few minutes ago that they hadn't managed to get some film of the consensus process with hands. So, sorry for the slight...deception there. LAUGHTER But, as for the survey form, if you have completed it and you haven't handed it in, please do so now because we're about to draw the winner of the prize. Is there anyone who has completed it but hasn't handed it in yet. GERARD ROSS This isn't a trick? PAUL WILSON This isn't a trick, no. Sanjaya, you have some forms. Can you bring them down the front please. Sanjaya? ANNE LORD He's getting some more. PAUL WILSON We'll add these to the box here and I'd like to ask for a volunteer to draw the prize. I'll ask Sanjaya to drop those in, mix them up and make a quick selection for us. The next presentation is going to be from myself about the issue of ICANN, NRO and related developments. Before I do that, I'll ask Nurani to do the job. Would you mind mixing those up and drawing us a winner. (Winner is drawn) And the winner is Fujisaki-san. APPLAUSE Thank you very much. You've won a couple of bottles of wine so please enjoy them, by yourself or with your friends. Thank you very much. Thank you, Nurani. Thanks a lot. Let's move along then without further ado. I'd like to give you an update now on the set of issues. As I mentioned before these are important activities, which would occupy myself, certain members of the APNIC Secretariat and certainly the APNIC EC for quite some time now. Not only do we have ICANN, which has been with us for a few years now as an extra overhead of our operations in some sense. We've also more recently had to deal with the phenomenon of the WSIS. And this, while not an operational activity and not an activity that provides a direct tangible benefit to the benefits, unfortunately, it's something that's a real cost, it's something that we've had to get quite actively involved with. Now, I'd like to give you a bit of background. Many of you may have seen this in previous meetings but I think it's important to be clear on the various components of the structure that we're referring to here. The Number Resource Organization is one of those acronyms that you're hearing quite a lot lately. It was formed in October 2003 by the RIRs. It is a sort of a coalition of the RIRs. It is an organisation that carries joint activities of the RIRs. This is something which the RIRs themselves voluntarily decided to establish simply for those joint activities to provide us with a formal banner and a formal vehicle for cooperative activities and, as you're probably aware, the RIRs have been involved with active cooperation for many years in various areas - technical activities, information sharing, joint representation, all of these things have been carried out quite actively as I've mentioned but in an informal manner. And it seemed, a year or so ago, it seemed to the RIR boards that the time had come to formalise the joint activities under one formal banner and so that is the NRO, the Number Resource Organization. It was formed by an MoU, a memorandum of understanding, between the RIRs in October 2003. It's not yet incorporated but there is active discussion on incorporation with one candidate location being actively examined now, that being Uruguay, the country of location of it's - of LACNIC of course and that, for various reasons, is a very suitable location, yet to be finalised as the final incorporation location but that is likely to happen certainly during this year. The point of the NRO is the joint activities, as I've mentioned, to provide a single point of representation for the RIRs and RIR system, for any interested parties to make contact with the RIRs as a system, as a whole. It's also for interaction with external parties, so we may have formal relationships with a number of different bodies but primarily the first one with whom a formal relationship has already been established is ICANN. So what the NRO has done is provided a single point of contact, a single umbrella body for the RIRs, which can establish a formal relationship with ICANN and that formal relationship exists in the form of the Address Supporting Organisation, which is the policy structure within the ICANN framework for address policy coordination and development. And so that - it's no coincidence that the NRO has come along at the same time as the ASO renegotiation was finalised and established. It was certainly anticipated that one of the activities, one of the formal activities, of the NRO would be carry that relationship in ICANN. Now the NRO is established. There's a website, you may well have seen it, but you're encouraged to have a look at that (refers to slide). I think it provides a good selection of information about the NRO, including the joint communiqus, various published documents that have come out from the NRO, particularly in relation to ICANN, WSIS and other issues or other forums of global extent and interest. The status of the NRO right now is that I've mentioned the incorporation which is coming up but, under the NRO MoU, we have an Executive Council, which is the body with executive responsibility for NRO activities. That, under the MoU, is comprised of the CEOs of the RIRs and, within that EC of the NRO there are positions and, for 2005, the chair is Axel Pawlik, the secretary is Raul Echeberria and Ray Plzak is treasurer. I'm the other member of the EC and Adiel Akplogan is also - it's been decided that AfriNIC should have provisional membership of the NRO and Adiel is an active member of the NROEC. The NRO has a Secretariat, which rotates among the RIR members each year. Year it's LACNIC. Last year was RIPE NCC. This did a sterling job and you can see evidence of that in the website in particular, which I guess is the ongoing legacy of that contribution. I'd like to say thanks to the RIPE NCC for some very hard work last year as a Secretariat. The NRO has some coordination groups to carry particular activities. The Engineering Coordination Group is comprised of the RIR chief technical officers. They meet as a committee to discuss issues of a technical nature, for instance, joint whois development and numerous technical activities. The Communication Coordination Group comprises RIR communications staff and they deal with releases and communiqus and that sort of activity which is also a critical area for the NRO. Current activities - support of AfriNIC has been a high priority for all of the RIRs for quite some time now and it's very good, as I think you'd agree and have heard - that it's paid off in terms of some real progress from - on the AfriNIC front, not that we're taking credit for that because, of course, it's involved much more hard work on the part of the people directly involved but the RIRs have given quite substantial logistic support, also financial support, during 2004 there was a $100,000 contribution from the NRO. That was split according - among the RIRs according to a formula which divides our financial responsibilities and contributions. That was a substantial contribution, very strongly needed by AfriNIC at the time in order to continue their - to proceed with their establishment of processes. Other activities include some communications in liaison in particular. The Working Group on Internet Governance, which I'm going to address in a little while, published working papers some time ago concerning various Internet governance issues and the NRO provided responses to that. That was an important activity, especially in of course to the working group's papers on IP address management. The ICANN strategic plan is also another public comment review process which is just coming to a conclusion now. Each of the RIRs made open - calls for open comments and the NRO acted as the coordinator for assembling those comments and providing some feedback to ICANN. OK, as I mentioned, one of the activities of the NRO for which it was additionally designed was the ASO MoU. That was also sign in the last year. It replaced an existing ASO MoU, which was established in 1999. That was with the establishment of ICANN we put together the original ASO. The new MoU and the new ASO, which is now in place, is reformed in various ways with ICANN's reforms and improved in a number of ways but functions largely in the same manner. So I think in terms of its outward appearance of functioning it is fulfilling the same role within ICANN as the original ASO and that is the - that is the point for collection of global policies and submission of global policies to ICANN for the ICANN policy process. Now, I'd like to move on to WSIS. The WSIS is another thing entirely. It was established as UN, United Nations, summit. It's one of a whole series of UN meetings on a global scale which have been going on over the last decade or so on numerous issues, like environment, population, numerous issues of international development. WSIS is particularly - it stands for the World Summit on the Information Society - and it's oriented towards and it is aimed towards - the focus is the use and deployment of information communications technology - known as ICTs - around the world, particularly the impact of ICTs on all sorts of social and economic development around the world. So it's of an extremely broad scope. It involves hundreds, if not thousands, of people from all over the world discussing ICT-related issues such as content, crime, digital difficult side, e-commerce, how to build capacity in a training and economic sense for the use of ICTs, how to finance the development of ICTs, particularly in developing countries, bridging the divide and so forth. It's got a very broad scope. But the particular element within that scope that is of concern and substantial concern to the Internet community is Internet governance. And that is a term which was injected or appeared in the WSIS process during the first phase, where some governments and individuals from different sectors raised some apparent concerns about Internet governance, about how the Internet is seen to be managed, for instance, by ICANN within the ICANN framework and not just ICANN and the ICANN framework but in terms of issues such as interconnection of IP networks, security of IP networks, numerous diverse governance issues, specifically related to the Internet. So we've gone from the very broad scope of the WSIS on ICTs in general to concerns about the Internet in particular and, within that banner of Internet governance of course sits the ICANN issues of names and numbers and so on so, in some way, we are potentially directed as stakeholders in this WSIS process. And, as time has gone on, the potential impact of the process on us - the stakeholders, the constituencies of the RIRs - has become more apparent and, in some sense, more pressing. There are some clear agendas and clear motivations amongst sectors of participants in the WSIS which would possibly see a very radical change in the existing model of Internet administrative coordination, including ICANN, potentially including the RIRs and this, of course, is something that is at least of concern to those of us in that who are stakeholders in that area, if not of serious concern, depending on whose outcome or whose motivations might finally be met by the WSIS process. WSIS is in two phases, so the first phase concluded in Geneva at the end of 2003. The second phase concludes at the end of 2005. And what we saw out of Geneva were, after a lot of debate and a lot of meetings and expense, was an outcome which comprised two documents - there was a declaration of principles and a plan of action with a result of WSIS phase I. Those documents are extremely general and cover all of the issues, the entire scope of the WSIS. They're intended to provide general and specific guidance to the UN and to governments across all of these issues. These documents are certainly non-binding and there are notable governments around the world who are in the habit routinely of ignoring the outputs of UN processes. But, on the other hand, these outputs are extremely influential on many governments and are likely to be seen as the new - they're likely to be seen as the authoritative description or the authoritative declaration and the authoritative plan in terms of WSIS and ICTs in general. The declaration of principles of WSIS Phase I identified Internet governance in one paragraph out of 57 or so. The plan of action specifically called on the UN, on Kofi Annan as the UN Secretary-General, to establish a special group on Internet governance. It was quite clear at the end of Phase I that Internet governance was an issue in many minds. The issue itself and the concerns had no general agreement. So the solution was to form a working group with all the stakeholders and sectors and regions of the world. And the task to this working group was set up to firstly - and it seems quite a trivial exercise but it's far from that - to design what 'Internet governance' actually means, then to identify the stakeholders, the interests, the issues related to Internet governance. And that's what this working group is currently tasked with, currently working very hard to achieve. In November 2004, the membership of the working group was announced. There are seven Asia Pacific-based members of the working group. There is, fortunately and interestingly for us, one member of the RIR community - one of the RIR CEOs, Raul Echeberria, who is on the working group and that is a significant outcome of a lot of our efforts during the time of establishment of the working group. In February of this year, the working group, having had its first meeting, released a whole set of draft issues and papers on various aspects of Internet governance and one of those was an issue paper about the management of IP addresses and domain names, those two issues being dealt with a single paper. The NRO, as I mentioned, has completed a set of comments about the WGIG paper on IP addressing and domain names and submitted those. The second meeting of the WGIG happened only last week and these meetings are closed, there are some open sessions of the meetings but it's not yet - the full outcome of that meeting of the WGIG aren't yet clear. One thing, interestingly, that has come about is the issue papers, which were fairly comprehensively criticised have been - they will not be apparently further edited and developed by the WGIG as WGIG papers but exactly that they'll be replaced with, I think, is not clear. As I mentioned, the NRO website contains deliberations and communications and all sorts concluding the NRO comments on the WGIG paper. The working group has only got a matter of months before it's got to submit its final report to the UN Secretary-General in July and I think it's very unclear as to how much it can get done and what way it will get those tasks done between now and July. APNIC along with the other RIRs has established a position within this context about the WGIG and its work. We have found it necessary to promote very strongly and vigorously the need for continued stability in IP address management distribution and the - in association with that the risks of damaging the stability of the Internet itself by making ill-advised changes to the IP address contribution system. Now, there are many within the Internet community who are promoting this position, which has been referred to as a position of a "do no harm" to the Internet and it's seen as a fairly conservative position and, in some senses an alarmist position where we might hide behind a tactic of saying "do no harm, change nothing or you might regret the consequences" but what we need to do is to express these consequences and these dangers in a rational and careful manner because there certainly are some serious potentially adverse consequences from ill-advised changes to the system that we have in place at the moment. One of the problems that we see that's widely recognised is the misconceptions, misunderstandings - in some cases, frankly, misinformation - that relates to the Internet in general and to, in particular to IP addressing, to the nature of the RIR system for instance and associated matters. And so one of the very vigorous activities that has been under way within APNIC, within the other RIRs certainly within RIRs themselves, within their own regional communities, within the NRO itself at a more global level, we have been very active in trying to promote a correct and accurate understanding and to dispel these misconceptions and misinformation about what issues we're dealing with here. Recently, for instance, APNIC has published some articles one about the myth, we call it of address shortages in China. We still hear, frankly, we hear allegations that China has got less addressing, less IP v4 addresses than MIT or Stanford Uni. We hear for instance that ISPs in China cannot receive IP addresses. And we within the APNIC Secretariat and APNIC community certainly in the case of China CNNIC, the NIR for China, we're well aware that IP addresses are being distributed very rapidly in China, that very few address requests are ever turned down, that addresses are being distributed more quickly in China than in any other part of the world. So, we, in one case, have published a document addressing those myths. We've also translated that document into simplified Chinese and made it available through various means. We've also published background briefing papers on ICANN, the ITU on these issues of WSIS and Internet governance. We've covered IP addressing itself, such as a comparison of geographic addressing proposals, which have emerged recently in connection with IPv6, and the traditional evolved provider- based IP addressing system with which we are all operating. We responded to - as I mentioned - to the WGIG paper. In fact, APNIC provided a response to that and the NRO provided a response to that. They're very complementary responses, the fact that there are two or possibly more is simply a matter of timing to the documents in the process at the appropriate time. Internet governance is something that's widely regarded as developing in the Asia Pacific in terms of understanding of information and education so, on the APNIC website, we've been developing and we'll go on developing an area which relates to recent developments in Internet governance. The URL is on the screen here and it's accessible easily via the homepage. We've also been involved with the UNDP, the UN Development Program and in particular with the Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme, APDIP on a process for ORDIG, the Open Regional Dialogue on Internet Governance, and that is a project that's designed to address this lack of common understanding and a lack of effective dialogue across the Asia Pacific on Internet governance. And the UNDP has put a lot of resources into a series of regional meetings, into an online dialogue which ran for six or eight weeks on their website. This is something that APNIC has been actually actively supporting. Kapil Chawla of APNIC staff has spent quite a few weeks in KL providing Secretariat support to that project. Sam Dickinson is one of the editors of that portal website on Internet governance. We found that, as a sincere - with a sincere motivation to assist in information dissemination and understanding, to be quite productive in facilitating this project and facilitating some well-informed outcomes. One other related activity is that APNIC, a couple of years ago, put an application into the United Nations Economic and Social Council for accreditation as what is called an NGO, a non-government organisation, in consultative status with the UN ECOSOC and that was something which was a long process of application with many long delays but we were just recently informed that that application was approved so what we have is the official recognition of consultant status with the UN ECOSOC and that provides official status at UN meetings and so on. It's one important recognition of the role that we play. Now, within the context of the NRO, there've been numerous statements in the area of, not just WSIS, but ICANN-related matters. But there was a statement released in December 2004 in particular about ICANN and WSIS and what the NRO is doing quite explicitly in this context is supporting the ICANN model, supporting ICANN as the current solution and the current system of providing the global coordination of Internet administrative activities. We continue to support ICANN in that role and we continue to support the evolution of ICANN, for instance, in terms of genuine internationalisation of ICANN. Quite critically we feel, in terms of independence of ICANN from the US Government in particular, in fact from any government, but there are specific issues within the WSIS context at the moment in which ICANN is regarded as being too close to the US Government and it is in fact still formally linked to the US Government through MoUs and contracts. Those MoUs and contracts are due, some say, to expire leading to the genuine independence of ICANN, in 2006. Now, concern with that timing is that the WSIS process ends in this year, the end of 2005. And there is such genuine concern about this connection between ICANN and the US Government in particular among the WSIS community, we find it is critical for ICANN itself and the US Government to give clear plans for the independence of ICANN before the close of the WSIS process. To fail to do that is really to ask the WSIS community as a whole to simply trust in something that is still very vague, something that's ill defined. That will hopefully happen in 2006 but maybe not. So we've been - we try to make that call and that issue as clear as we can. We do, also specifically support the involvement of the public sector or governments in IP address management, in the context of the current models. We believe that the current model is open and genuinely open to the constructive and meaningful engagements of governance. One of the strengths of the RIR system is that we are regionalised and the different regions can have different approaches so, for instance, in the APNIC region, the NIR model is a very important aspect of the public-private partnership which is involved with APNIC and address management in this region. But, across the entire NRO, there are numerous mechanisms and there is a genuine interest in the engagement of the public sector governance in whatever aspect of address management is appropriate. And that I think is a fairly broad summary of numerous issues. I would encourage you to have a look at the papers, the statements and comments which have been made within the APNIC website and our Internet governance area, on the NRO and the other RIR websites as well where I think, if there is sort of - if some of these issues are still a little confused in your minds, I think there is a little bit of study to be done because it's a fairly complex area but I would Encourage you to take the time to do that study and look at these issues in detail. There is, as I mentioned at the beginning, definitely some scope, possibility within this whole framework and set of issues for outcomes which would radically change and alter or redirect or set on a different path the administration of Internet resources among other aspects of Internet governance and management. And certainly no-one is opposed to change as such. In fact, the APNIC open policy process, for instance, is all about change, it's all about improving and refining assistance but when there is a process of fairly radical change being proposed from outside the community that is currently entirely responsible for our self-management and self-regulation, I think it's something that we all need to be extremely careful of and aware of so I'll finish up there and take any questions or comments, whether from other RIRs, from members of the community, from any APNIC EC members in particular or those who might have been involved in some of these discussions and activities. DAVE FARRAR the ITU published a proposal that touched on the IT space and proposed that half or something of the IPv6 space be given to the ITU so that if could hand it out to national IP registries to I think they call it provide competition to the RIRs. Perhaps any comments you or APNIC have on that proposal might be of interest to people. PAUL WILSON There have been numerous responses to that, the Japanese Internet Governance Task Force published a response to that paper. Numerous other bodies have done so. Geoff Huston has authored a fairly technical paper regarding the issue of national versus provider-based addressing. I have nearly completed a paper, which is a little less technical and aimed a little more at the policy level to discuss and explore some of the potential impacts there. I think we've got to be careful about possibly being seen to reject such proposals out of hand. I think some such proposals have come from genuine concerns, in some cases, well based, in some cases based on misunderstandings but, in any case, genuine concerns which do have some basis in truth and fact at some level and I think it's important for us to recognise those and try to understand what's behind a proposal such as Houlin Zhao's proposal and see what we can do to address the genuine concerns and genuine misunderstandings. I think to look at - both Geoff and myself in the papers that have been written, what we're trying to do is to look to the potential technical impact and potential ongoing longer-term transformation of the Internet under a system which becomes primarily nationally based and, whether you look at a detailed technical level or at a less detailed level, I think it's quite easy to see and to foresee some fairly dramatic changes in the architectural geography of the Internet over a matter of a number of years with as a result directly of nationally based address management. And this would be an imposition of a system, which is fundamentally different from the way the Internet has evolved so far. I think it's easy to underestimate but we shouldn't underestimate the potential impact that could happen there. But rather than simply rejecting the proposal out of hand, I think we do need to have a look in some detail, really analyse it genuinely because, as I say, some of these things are coming from general unit concerns, which we're also working on. One of those concerns does have to do with the access of the public sector, of governments in particular, to what's going on here in this room and what's going on for instance within the ICANN forum. Geoff, do you want to comment? GEOFF HUSTON Geoff Huston, also with APNIC. Yes, it certainly has a number of dimensions, which are fascinating. The first of these was the proposition that competition will instil efficiency no matter what good you're trying to distribute. And in proposing a model of national registries competing with regional registries, it was certainly put forward that this would ultimately benefit the consumer. But, in a model where there's no basic cost of production and the structure of the policies that we work through here are actually related to distributing addresses that work on the Internet, then competition doesn't naturally produce such an outcome, that you might be able to distribute addresses but, without a network, they're just numbers. So part of it is looking at it from the point of view of going, "Well, the structure of address policy that we actually operate under today has a lot of implications that are perhaps not well understood outside our community." And what struck me most when reading that paper was that I'm not sure we've done as good a job as we perhaps could about providing clear rationales for why policies are structured the way they are - why is aggregation and provider-based addressing a basic necessity in address distribution. Now you and I might say, "Well, it's the fact that routing is scarce and routing is fragile," but, if you said the same proposition in a different room, no-one would actually tie the two together. So one part of this is, I think, we need to do a better job as to why we're doing what we're doing and the underlying reasons. The other part of this I think is that, as Paul mentioned, there is a very real concern out there on a subtly different axis. As an industry, even a competitive industry, we can see a self-regulatory body that is the keeper of our secrets while we're negotiating for address space so that there is a confidentiality between you as an applicant for an address resource and APNIC over the details you provide to justify that request. But one could well imagine other bodies, particularly in the public sector that may not have the same trust in APNIC as being a repository for their plans, for their rollout and that they would see this current structure as not meeting their particular requirements about the integrity of their own information, who they disclose it to. We do have, I think, to understand that IP is going to go everywhere and it's not just private sector industry-led in Internet. There is a very real public sector of all the dimensions of the public inside there. I don't think, however, it is appropriate to set up a competing system. I don't even think that it's appropriate to say, "Well, public-based addresses are obtained through here and industry ones through there." We've all got to run the same Internet, we've all got to run the same policies or you won't have one. So, as Paul said, there is a fair deal of an agenda. And WSIS has managed to identify in this process some areas that are future work for us. It's not a case of saying, "Well, they're from the ITU. They know nothing." I think there are some very real concerns out there and, in some cases, they feel reluctant to come into a room like this and openly express what they would see as being shortcomings. So, in some ways, there's a little bit of going out towards them in terms of seeking and understanding what the problem is. Yes, it's a complex issue but I think it also points us in a direction of where we need to focus some work. Thank you. PAUL WILSON Are there any other questions? PAUL WILSON I declare the mic generally open. Please feel free to make a comment. (Pause) While you're all thinking about your comments, we could move along on to the next quite significant step in this afternoon's proceedings which is to do with the EC elections. There are about two tonnes of paper here. Can I hand over to you as the official chair of the scrutineers. What we normally do is announce the successful candidates and the number of votes. RAY PLZAK Thanks, Paul. I did not take a break and go to the Takashimaya department store! It's always been a pleasure for me to do for the last several years counting the ballots because I think it's a very important thing to do to show that Internet governance does really work. I also will believe it when I see it when APNIC does electronic voting. Having said that, we had a team of six people that were doing the tallying and of all the votes cast a very positive thing to report, there is only one invalid ballot. Only one out of all those that were done. So that's a good thing, very good. There was a fairly wide distribution of votes, so I will announce the four top vote getters and the total that each one of them achieved. I will point out that while everyone that voted was asked to vote for four people or could vote for four people not everyone did. There were some ballots where there was only one person marked, some only two, some three. So there's no way that you can go through and add these numbers up and come to a number of ballots because it won't work. Having said all that, Qian Hualin, 1,084. 677 votes, Ma Yan. Kuo Wei Wu with 679 votes. And Billy Cheon with 541 votes. APPLAUSE Having discharged my duties I will hand over the tally sheet. PAUL WILSON I would like to say thanks to all candidates, congratulations to the successful candidates and last but not least thanks to the scrutineers who helped to provide that result. That is the EC election for this year. The four successful candidates will serve four two years, so those positions will be open for election again in two years. The next election one year's time will of course elect the other 3 that make up the 7 positions on the APNIC EC. I would suggest that the new APNIC EC might gather at the end of this meeting somewhere in the room just to perhaps brief the new EC members on the next steps, if I could suggest that to the EC. Thanks. The microphone is still open. We have only one remaining item of business and that is to do with the next meeting, which is the APNIC 20 meeting which is being open for proposals which closed a month or so ago. There were proposals made for the APNIC 20 meeting, the APNIC EC has made the decision amongst those proposals which will be announced now. We have made an opportunity available for the host of the meeting to make a presentation. Is that going to happen? Let me announce then that the APNIC 20 later on this year will be in Hanoi, Vietnam, hosted by VNNIC. APPLAUSE We'd like to hear now from VNNIC about what we can expect at the next APNIC open policy meeting. NGUYEN MAHN THUAN, VNNIC REPRESENTATIVE Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Thuan, I come from Vietnam NIC. We are very pleased to know that Hanoi capital city of Vietnam has been selected for the next place for hosting APNIC 20 meeting. I'd like to take this opportunity to give our sincere thanks to APNIC EC members for their kind consideration and approval of the proposals for hosting this event in Vietnam. And also thanks to APNIC staff for their support. In the spirit of the Internet community it will be an honour to welcome participants from Asia Pacific and all other regions to see a first-hand experience of Vietnam, the country of peace, tourism and hospitality. May I take this opportunity to introduce some pictures of the venue and Hanoi. Here is the venue Melia Hanoi Hotel that we propose to host the meeting. As you can see on the screen, Hoan Kiem known as Return Sword is parts of Hanoi. This is the scenery by night. This is the outside view of the temple of literature. Regarded as the first historical university of Vietnam. Also traditional music show. And here is a historical Ba Dinh square and the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum where his body is being kept for memory of our people and some other people from some countries in the world. Besides water puppet show is most enjoyed by foreign visitors is Halong Bay regarded as world natural heritage side. It's near Hanoi too. There are more interesting things that you can enjoy during your stay in Hanoi. And now welcome to Hanoi for the APNIC 20 meeting. Thank you very much for your valuable attendance and we hope to see you in Hanoi. APPLAUSE PAUL WILSON Thank you very much. Having been to Hanoi a couple of times myself I can say it is an extremely unique and fascinating, beautiful city. I do hope that you all join us there and that many others will come along as well. SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR Their modesty is outstanding in not pointing out that they have the best food in Asia! PAUL WILSON There is that as well. Modesty and food. Thanks, Bill. Before the meeting finally does close, I'd like to quickly check if there are any questions or comments that anyone would like to make in this open policy meeting, just one final chance. I can see we're all ready to go and see the temples or something, so I'll move on. This is the end of the member meeting and the end of the open policy meeting APNIC 19 and I'd like to say thanks firstly to all of you who attended APNIC 19. This meeting has been really well attended. It's very good to see this crowd in the room today, also the SIG sessions were really well attended this time. Very productive. I'd just today, just this afternoon had yet another comment about the quality of the APRICOT conference itself and of the APNIC meeting. I'd like to say thanks. I hope the meeting has been beneficial to you. I hope it's been worth your while coming and contributing. Your support is very welcome and very much appreciated. I will give you a few statistics about what happened at least at today's meeting. We had a total of 113 registered attendants at the meeting. Interestingly, we had over 150 who actually registered and fewer turned up. On several previous occasions we've had a much smaller number register then many more people turn up, so I have to say you keep us all guessing, we really don't know what to expect from meeting to meeting in terms of numbers. I would just encourage you all to come, I'd encourage you, please, to give us your registration details for future meetings as early as possible so we've got the best possible knowledge of how many people to expect. Out 113 people here's a breakdown by sub-region by the most attendees at today's meeting came from east Asia, 48. From Oceania 28. South East Asia 15, and then numerous from other parts of the world, 11 from Europe, from Latin America, from US, only a couple from South Asia and one from the Pacific. I hope at the next meeting we'll see more representation from those parts of our region. A little bit more detail about which economies are represented here. 23 from Japan. Naturally, there being the local host country, ten from mainland China - thank you very much. Ten from Taiwan, thanks as well. >From Netherlands we have 8, presumably from the RIPE NCC, almost all of them. Thanks Axel and everyone from the RIPE NCC for coming quite a long way, to be here. I won't go through all the rest, but there is a breakdown of the total participation. This meeting as I mentioned this morning was sponsored by 3 organisations at the silver sponsor level - CNNIC, TWNIC and KRNIC and NIDA. The financial support is very critical support to the success of the meeting in our ability to provide the services that we provide for the secretariat and to keep the costs as low as possible for everyone in attending the meeting. JPNIC was the silver sponsor for the APNIC reception event during this week, so thanks very much to JPNIC for that. For all of the sponsors I'd like to be able to provide you with a certificate of appreciation, so from CNNIC, for TWNIC, KRNIC and JPNIC, if you wouldn't mind coming to the front and I'll be able to present you with a certificate of appreciation from APNIC. Please come along up. We'll all clap for you. APPLAUSE (Further applause) PAUL WILSON There are a few others to thank. For the open policy meeting overall, for the entire event, we have our hard working SIG chairs, a couple of whom have graciously moved on in favour of the younger generations, which is very noble of you but nevertheless thank you so much for your efforts over theory, that is for all the SIG chairs for the efforts of the SIGs, for the reports today and so on. And we have co-chairs as well. Also, we have speakers Steve Kent and Russ Housley who helped out within the routing SIG, also our RIR colleagues for the reports that they've given today. Kathleen and Lorraine from the Australian Caption Centre. Once again everyone's amazed with what you do up there and thanks very much, I'm not sure that we all are aware but this text has been going out live into a jabber chat room, it's an archive that's available on the APNIC archives of the meetings. That has been a very helpful facility for reviewing what has happened at this meeting at future times. Scott McDonald and his team from E-Side. They were the host organisation for APRICOT this year. Scott and his team did a fantastic job of APRICOT. As I mentioned before, there's been some very positive feedback about APRICOT this time. It seems to have been a very successful event. So I'd just like to present a small token of appreciation to E-Side. APPLAUSE APNIC EC also for their support and hard work through the last year and at this meeting. And also to the APNIC staff who once again are here and have coordinated very smoothly a lot of the standard activities in the meeting as well as taking on a few new activities such as the documentary which is something which will be in production in a little while. That'll be a short documentary. Some of you have had interviews and some of you have had their picture taken. It will be something that will be available for the community generally to help to understand what happens at these meetings and hopefully to encourage people to attend. I was not able to attend this meeting until yesterday due to personal circumstances but I'd like to very sincerely thank the APNIC staff in particular members of the management team Anne and Geoff and Irene, just to name a few, for taking on the management and preparation of this meeting so very well. Which relieved me thankfully of some of my own responsibilities of the meeting, I'd just like to say thanks in particular to those people, but also to all the APNIC staff for the work on the meeting today. I think it's been successful and I'd like to lead a round of applause. APPLAUSE PAUL WILSON So, the next APNIC open policy meeting as we know, will be in Hanoi in Vietnam, that will be a fascinating event as well as another step in the ongoing process of developing APNIC and the APNIC policy process. I'd encourage you all to be there. I'd encourage you all to spend at least an extra couple of days looking around Hanoi. It's a fascinating place. Also visiting some of the places I haven't seen yet such as Halong Bay and others, it will be well worth spending the time. The next open policy meeting after that is scheduled to be with APRICOT 2006 and we dont yet have a location for the 22nd APNIC open policy meeting but that will be coming up in August/September of 2006. We will be issuing a call for proposals in due course for that meeting. In the Tokyo style, they say Arigato but more correctly in this part of the country it's Ookini. AUDIENCE MEMBER Ooh. PAUL WILSON Maybe not! If not, my apologies. But what I wanted to say was thank you and see you all in Hanoi. Thank you very much. APPLAUSE