______________________________________________________________________ DRAFT TRANSCRIPT Session: APNIC Member Meeting Date: Friday 3 March 2006 Time: 9.00am Presentation: Welcome, APNIC status, and financial report Presenter: Paul Wilson ______________________________________________________________________ PAUL WILSON: Good morning. Welcome, everyone. We should make a start, I think, on the APNIC Annual Member Meeting for this year. It is the last day of the APNIC 21 Open Policy Meeting and it's the day where we talk about issues of interest to APNIC members primarily. But it is an open meeting, of course, so those of you who are not APNIC members are welcome to stay and invite your friends and ask questions and participate and so on. But it will be looking at all the traditional issues at this time - reporting from the Secretariat, reporting from our colleagues at the other RIRs, reporting back from the events of the last week, the SIG sessions and so on. We'll also be electing three positions on the APNIC Executive Council today and hearing about what will be happening at the next APNIC meetings. Firstly, I'd like to say thanks to the sponsors of the meeting today - TWNIC, CNNIC, KRNIC of NIDA and JPNIC, all of whom are actually APNIC NIRs and they've all kindly agreed to take out silver sponsorship to support today's meeting, so thanks very much to those friends of APNIC. The agenda is here, as I've already explained (refers to slide). Reporting mostly in the morning, followed by, before the end of lunch, preparation for the EC meeting and you'll be able to exercise your right as APNIC members to vote in that election during lunchtime and we will ask the votes to be returned by 2pm. So it's quite important for any of you who might step out of the room during the morning for any reason at all - be sure to be back and return your ballots by 2pm because we're not going to be able to accept ballots delivered back after that time. There'll be people counting the votes and so on so that we can announce the result in the afternoon. Lunch will be from 12:30 to 2pm, followed by the reporting from the last week's activities. We'll be hearing about the NRO and WSIS in the afternoon, announcing the election result and details of the next meetings. You can see you've all got a survey form there which is all about your opinions on the meeting, both today and over the last week. And there will be a prize drawn for a lucky person who has filled in all the spaces. And that will be drawn at the coffee break this afternoon. So you've got most of the day to think about what you're going to say there. And the prize is an iPod. I know we've all got iPods but there's no harm having two. PAUL RENDEK: I don't. PAUL WILSON: You don't, Paul? Fill in the survey. Are there any questions about this agenda? Does anyone want to bash the agenda? OK, well there'll be plenty of time to do so later on. There should be time for open microphone if anyone wants to raise any question, comment or matter of interest to the meeting. Please think about that and you'll have a chance to do so. So I'd like to start with the APNIC Annual Report for 2005. I think in your meeting packs you all have a copy of the annual report in a bright new format - lots of pretty pictures in there. What I'll be doing today is talking to that report and taking you through some of the details, which will save you having to read it later. So I'll be going through the issues and content of that report, more or less in the order that it comes, looking at some of the projects and activities of the APNIC Secretariat and APNIC more broadly over the last year. Who is APNIC? At the Secretariat, there are 46 staff now and there they all are (refers to slide). About half of us are here now, a little more than half, all cleverly disguised in these white T-shirts. Secretariat staff, could you stand up briefly and identify yourselves. Most of us are cleverly disguised anyway. APPLAUSE So the team at APNIC has got, I think at the last count, 18 different nationalities and around the same number of different languages from the region so, as you can see, we're a pretty diverse group and the whole idea is to be able to serve the needs of the region as broadly as we possibly can and through language and awareness of culture and business around the region and through the services which the APNIC Secretariat has been developing, you'll see exactly how you can reach these people better and better as time is going on. Now internally within the Secretariat, these staff, most of them, have been involved with a project called Clients First, which is a broad-brush review of policies and processes within the APNIC Secretariat. And the idea has been to try to continually improve the way we do things, the way we organise and provide services to simplify procedures, to use the feedback that we receive from surveys, from interactions on the helpdesk, from training and other contact with members, in particular of course, this meeting that we're having this week. And so that's resulted in a lot of behind-the-scenes work, some of which you'll have seen already and some of which is still coming. And it's things like how you get information from APNIC via the website, how you enter information in the forms, how you enter procedures, like the procedures for receiving digital certificates from APNIC. And so these things are all in a genuine effort by all the staff to improve the service that we provide to members of the APNIC membership and community. Specifically, we've got a VoIP system available now. Late last year, we upgraded the phone system within the Secretariat office to a VoIP set-up and we now have public numbers to access the APNIC Secretariat from anywhere on the Internet via that SIP URL there - helpdesk@voip.apnic.net. Don't all try it now because there's a smaller staff back at the office but, if you do try, it will work. That's something that provides much cheaper access to APNIC's telephone helpdesk service, which seems to be very important. We've had that phone helpdesk service for a couple of years now and have found that the majority of calls are coming from within Australia, where the phone rates are cheaper of course. So this is a way of rolling that out to everyone. MyAPNIC is the portal by which we deliver services to APNIC members and other clients or customers of APNIC. It's being developed as we speak. During the last year, we had the first online election to the ASO EC via MyAPNIC and that was successfully carried out. It's been used also in the last week for the EC elections. In accordance with the bylaws, APNIC can conduct elections, can conduct formal votes, through our online mechanisms and we've got a defined schedule of how that has to be done and you'll hear about the results of that later. We're also, of course - the election that's coming later, we'll also allow you to vote on paper. We also had MyAPNIC lite. This was an effort to redesign some aspects of MyAPNIC so it goes faster, and it does go faster, as I hoped you all noticed in using the service. Other outputs - the helpdesk team have worked pretty hard to extend their hours, now working across some of the local public holidays and up to 7pm local time, which is useful for the members in the western part of the region. There's also this live chat service and you'll see the icon on the screen here which tells you - that's a static graphic but, if you look at that on the website, you'll see whether the live help is online or offline at any particular time. It's online for most of the hours in which the Secretariat is open and you're able to use a sort of Javaclient to enter into a live text dialogue with APNIC helpdesk. OK, we've also got quite a number of activities under a sort of R&D banner. The primary one of those is resource certification. We've heard a bit about this this week with a plenary presentation from Steve Kent and some SIG presentations with issues to do with RFC 3779 and certification of resources using digital certificates. And that's something - if you remember discussions over the CA in recent years, it's something we've been looking forward to and preparing for in some small ways so far. And now, with the release of that RFC and a lot of other discussion about how this important service, or this important service to the routing community, can actually be implemented. So we've actually been issuing trial certificates since some time last year and there's a possibility of providing some full services by 2006. There's still quite a lot of research and development work to do to bring that about but it's planned for the next 12 months. Geoff Huston, as you may know, has been doing some work on AS number consumption and also the transition to a new 4-byte AS number system and we had a policy proposal this meeting, which was approved, to facilitate that transition and commence a registry for the 32-bit AS numbers. And there's also, at the infamous potaroo.net website, there's resource consumption reports and projections and BGP reports and a huge wealth of information that comes from Geoff who now, as you all know, is working on R&D activities at APNIC. There's also some support for independent R&D. We support a small grants program, which is also supported by the UN Development Program. It's had some money from Microsoft and the Internet Society and this is for independent practical technical research into matters of interest to the networking community in developing countries around the region. So there's things happening like people trialling a SIP interface with an existing eLearning platform, which is being developed in Thailand. Some work on IPv6 and similar sorts of activities which are being supported. That program is now being replicated in Latin America. LACNIC, our counterpart in Latin America, is now involved in that as well. Now, what does the APNIC membership look like now? It's 1,157 as at the end of last year and a few more since then. We seem to have slightly slowly accelerating growth in the membership heading up towards 1,200. And there were 179 new members last year, which is the largest number of new members in a year since back in about the year 2000. So there's just a slow pick-up since the leaner times of the early part of this century, if you like. And the membership is distributed around the region according to this chart. We've had a large increase in small memberships in Australia, which has a lot to do with the transition of historical address space from the previous AUNIC registry has, which has been going on at APNIC for quite some time but there are members coming along in smaller categories to representing organisations that hold that address space. India is 12% of the membership. Hong Kong 11% and so on and so forth. As I always note on this slide, the NIRs which exist in six countries now - each one only accounts for one membership in this chart so it's a little bit of an illusion in terms of where the largest activity is in terms of resource allocation, but I'll get to that a little later on. This meeting is all about policies. That is the Open Policy Meeting, all about the policies under which APNIC operates and I won't go into this in a lot of detail because we will hear more from the SIGs later and we've been talking policy for most of the week. But there were five policy proposals implemented during 2005, or at least passed through the APNIC process during 2005. One of those is a global policy - that's the IANA policy for allocation of IPv6. And that's been endorsed in three regions and it's likely to come through the other two regions in the next small number of months, I think. That will result, finally, in updating the IANA's policy and procedures for allocating IPv6 to the registries. The second proposal there is to do with the publication of assignment statistics in the standard statistical format that we use. The next one is related to the Japanese trial for allocation of IPv6 addresses and IPv4 together to provide some incentive for use of IPv6. The deprecation of ip6.int reverse DNS. That will be happening from the 1st of June this year. We also had some discussion which was partly successful in terms of the original proposal and that's to amend the IPv6 assignment utilisation requirement. Half of that proposal was passed and endorsed and that's to update the HD-ratio to 0.94 but it's subject to approval in other regions. It's one of those policies which doesn't make one sense to implement in one region without being considered in the others. That's under way in other regions and there'll possibly be some action during this current years. And all of the history behind these proposals, the status of them and also previous proposals is available on the APNIC website. There's a URL there and you can see quite a lot of information there about the policy process over the last several years. Moving on to training. Training is a fairly important part of the APNIC activity plan and we're always being asked to provide more training because apparently it isn't easily available in many parts of the region. We're trying to take a formalised approach to training, refining sponsorship benefits and formalising the fee structure to refine this process, scheduling events six months in advance to provide a more streamlined training service. It's a fairly small team and I don't think anyone wants APNIC to develop into a large training organisation. But we do have quite a lot of activity, particularly for the size of the team. There is various improvements to the service and we have a new routing essentials workshop, developed in collaboration with people from the community, people like Philip Smith. Half-day tutorials on spam and security, work being done on DNS training as well and IPv6 coming up. There were 34 training sessions conducted in 22 countries in 2005. So the core training courses we have are still the Internet resource management courses, IRM I and II, and the Essentials course. That's the focus, but we've been under demand to develop additional courses as well, which I list here in terms of technical workshop and tutorials and IPv6 under developments. So there is a training page on the website and you can see that URL here as well. And the latest development, which has been one of these things we've been talking about for some time and which has been requested for some time, is eLearning and that is the online delivery of training through the Internet. And we have a new eLearning development project officer here at the APNIC Secretariat now. That's Sall'ee Ryman, who I think is in the audience. And Sall'ee's been - well, she should be. She's out on the helpdesk, OK. So Sall'ee is working on this eLearning project, looking at a fairly tight schedule now of training by eLearning in the second quarter of the pilot basis and we'll have three modules ready by the third quarter. Now, we're looking at eLearning hopefully from a comprehensive point of view, taking into accounts the needs of adult learners, English as a second language, of course, and all the requirements that go along with that, and we hope to have some pretty good eLearning content available online well before the end of this year. OK, APNIC has got some involvement in infrastructure. We provide 24/7 essential services, which are of critical need to the Internet community. We're also charged to some degree of assisting with infrastructure development around the region. In the first case, we have been improving the 24/7 online services, which include collocation facilities, which provide more stable infrastructure. There are now two PoPs in Brisbane, one in Tokyo, one in Hong Kong and one in the USA. So we've got services around the world to share load and make sure we've got redundancy and hopefully this is something that will continue just in order to provide improved performance and access and so on. Fighting spam is something that we did during the last year internally and that's implementing a system that cut our spam load by about 90% and there are some details of that on the ICONS website if you're interested in knowing how that was done. We've been cleaning up the reverse DNS quite actively and fairly successfully as an ongoing operational activity so that the reverse DNS can be somewhat more clean and reliable in the Asia Pacific region. OK, the other area of infrastructure - which is not internal to APNIC as such - but it's the rootserver project. To date, we've been involved with deploying 19 in total rootservers around the Asia Pacific region. They're the ones that are marked with the orange letters here (refers to slide). That's a pretty comprehensive coverage now and although there are a couple of more rootservers in a couple of other countries which are on the agenda for this year, it's something that will be scaled back progressively because, as we've seen, as this project has proceeded, the anycast technology or the anycast technique has been adopted much more readily by other rootserver providers and there are a good 13 additional rootservers, which have been provided and set up independently of APNIC. That's at last count. At least - as you see, at least 32 and probably more servers around the region which is a vast improvement from the position a few years ago of having a single server up in Tokyo. OK, the circles here represent the servers which have been deployed in the last 12 months (refers to slide). OK, communications activities at APNIC are being strengthened. We have a new communications officer, Holly, who may be in the room. Holly is down the back. Welcome, Holly. Holly is a communications specialist who has worked in Beijing with some technology companies there and is doing some very interesting work on communications and outreach. Anne Lord is the communications director at APNIC these days and is overseeing quite an active integration of all the communications activities, including training and outreach, the website and so on. We're also looking at the communications with the members by way of improving the facilities for participation in APNIC activities and meetings. So the communications team has run a survey asking about the needs and expectations of remote access, remote participation in meetings, using that to improve the services that are offered and that's included in this meeting - audio-only streaming which we didn't have before and podcasts of the APNIC meeting. So, for the lucky person who wins the iPod, you'll be able to take the APNIC meeting content home with you by podcast and listen to it any time you like. OK, Apster is the quarterly newsletter of APNIC. We've been covering quite a few topics in the past year, including issues of Internet governance, AS numbers, some of the results of research into AS number consumption and also some documentation about how the AS number system with 4-byte AS numbers is going to be developed for use on the rootservers, country reports and so on. We've also been doing - if you haven't noticed - quite a bit of work on multimedia productions, which are useful for illustrating different aspects of APNIC operations and issues in different ways. So we've got some flash animation on the NRO, on the history of RIRs, on what is APNIC and on MyAPNIC. And also a video documentary called 'Inside the APNIC Open Policy Meeting'. If you see that documentary on the website, you'll see some familiar faces - some of the participants in the meeting have kindly helped by giving their thoughts on what the meeting is all about. I'd also like to demonstrate, if we have a chance, later on today, a CD that we have which is called 'APNIC Interactive' and it's just a package of a whole lot of materials from the APNIC Secretariat information, training and reference materials and so on. And if you go to www.apnic.net/multimedia, you'll see a list of five of those multimedia productions. Some of those were done in the context of the World Summit on the Information Society where the RIRs collectively found themselves needing to do a lot more on information dissemination and educational work to help people understand what it is that we do and how it fits in with the rest of the Internet management, governance scene. We're also working actively these days with SANOG, PacNOG, NZNOG, so over the last year we participated in several of these meetings providing APNIC helpdesk, training and other related services there. We've got MoUs with a number of South Asian ISP associations who are interested in having more participation from APNIC in the development of the Internet in their regions with training and so forth. We've attended something like 37 events over the last year conducting presentations, seminars of various kinds and a whole wide range of meetings. This is an increasing range of meetings due to this broader interest these days in Internet governance and in our particular area of IP address management so that's quite a challenge that we need to continue to meet because there are a lot more people taking an interest. In the last year - prior to the last year, we contributed, with the NRO, a substantial sum of money to the establishment of AfriNIC. We also have had staff visit from AfriNIC and with other RIRs, including ARIN, and of course attend the other RIR meetings whenever we can do that. I mentioned ICONS. It's a trial service, a trial activity, at APNIC, which is an effort to create a community-driven information repository for ISPs and network operators to understand what other people are doing with their networks, how they can find information of practical use to them in running networks these days. There was an ICONS joint session with APOPS over the last week and there was some useful feedback that came in on how ICONS can work. I stress that that's something that's intended to involve participation by operators, engineers and experts around the region. So it's a give-and-take thing and I hope that, as time goes on, there'll be more activity from people who have both something to seek and something to offer through that gateway. Internet governance - the long WSIS process, which went on for four years, came to an end in Tunis in November 2005. That was the second phase of WSIS. As you would have heard, I'm sure, there was a great deal of interest during that process, particularly over the last couple of years, in Internet governance and Internet governance is a very broad, vague term but it's one that includes the business of ICANN and the business of the RIRs and so it did place a lot of demand on the RIRs to go out to the community, particularly the governmental community, intergovernmental and international organisations who are starting to take an interest in this. We did a lot of work attending these meetings, making presentations, collaborating with people, collaborating with other RIRs, IETF, ISOC, ICANN and so on. That culminated in the last WSIS meeting, this Internet pavilion activity, so we ran a display within the exhibition area, which was intended to show interested people, of which there were a lot, how we do our work and what it means. As I mentioned, some of those flash animations that were produced by the a APNIC Secretariat were used successfully at that pavilion and I think everyone involved regarded it as a successful event. We really did find, and we were told, that, as the WSIS process went along, there was certainly more awareness as time went on of exactly what happens at the RIRs. It became something that people understood a little bit more than they had done at the beginning. The outcomes of Tunis are in the form of documents, as is the UN process. And so, although WSIS is over, the sort of drama goes on because one of the recommendations in the Tunis agenda was to form this thing called the Internet Governance Forum during 2006. So that's the next challenge, I'm afraid, for the RIRs and for our friends, is to track the progress of the Internet Governance Forum, to attend meetings, to continue this process of letting people know what it is that we do. Because, frankly, there are a lot of people with a particular interest in - (Lights go out in the auditorium) I don't know what's happened to the lights but I know you'll all go to sleep if they don't come back! That's better. RANDY BUSH: Get to the end of that governance part and the snakes crawl out of the walls. PAUL WILSON: So other activities in the Internet governance arena - APNIC's been cooperating with the UNDP on something called the Open Regional Dialogue on Internet Governance which was something focused particularly on the Asia Pacific region - the views of the community, governmental and non-governmental, about Internet governance. This is something I reported on at the last meeting and one of the interesting outputs of that was that the formal survey that was done of priority issues in Internet governance ranked about 22 different issues, including spam and security and phishing and all this stuff and IP addressing was, I think, number 20 on that list, as an issue of concern. So when you ask the community what they're concerned about in a comprehensive manner, it seems the concern is a little bit lower than the level of noise. But we do still have the need to go on letting people know what it's all about and maybe in fact the low ranking of Internet addressing and related issues actually does relate to the fact that we successfully sort of hosed down some of the misconceptions and drama that's been going on in this particular area. OK, APNIC was awarded special consultative status to the UN Economic and Social Council last year, which provides us with participation with UN conferences and meetings. That's a fairly important recognition that, again, people are seeing that we are doing work that's of some economic and social importance in a global sense. And it's also handy not to have to go through quite such a bureaucratic registration process if we are going to these meetings. And many other meetings, UN and other meetings, in relation to Internet governance. What does it all mean for the RIRs? I think I've said already - it means more work ahead. It does mean that we've made some progress in being recognised by some people who really didn't have much of a clue beforehand. It means we're recognised as a stakeholder and likely to be formally involved with activities such as the Internet Governance Forum as time goes on. What exactly the IGF will do remains to be seen. It is agreed generally that it is not a decision-making body; it's a talkfest, but one that will have a lot of influence. It's likely to meet annually and the first will be a three-day meeting in October this year, so we've got a little while to wait before we have to attend that meeting but at the same time there are a lot of preparatory activities that go on and there've already been quite a number of meetings in Europe and other parts of the world aimed at preparation for that. OK, I'll move along now to the numbers. This is the section of the report which shows you how the APNIC activities in our core business, in the number of activities - number of resource allocation. You can see in this first chart that the IPv4 addressing, address allocations are proceeding upwards at what looks like an exponential rate. I'll point out that on the potaroo website, Geoff Huston has a very interesting report which are full of graphs and projections which are generated at least once a day automatically, and they actually show you the changing shape of the allocation profiles in IPv4 in particular. It tells you I think, down to the nearest hour and minute, what the projected exhaustion rate is. GEOFF HUSTON: Hour and minute is coming. PAUL WILSON: It's interesting and in some sense it's alarming that the IPv4 consumption is going up at this rate, but we continue to do our job and we continue to review the process of this activity through the open policy meetings and other RIRs. I think we've still got something like seven years, according to current projections, of IPv4 address pool. Over the last year, allocations in terms of different economies of the region - Japan received 1.4 /8s, mainland China, a 0.8, Korea 0.5 approximately and there were allocations to many other economies around the region. But you can see that the concentration of allocations is very much focused on just a small number of countries there. And the overall profile of v4 distribution throughout the region - this is all the address space that's been allocated by APNIC, is 34% in Japan, 30% in mainland China, 16% in Korea and, again, many other economies there holding much smaller address space holdings. IPv6 is something that's a little hard to analyse or to see the trends in, partly because policy changes over the last years have changed allocation rates very dramatically and this chart is - I hope you can see, is logarithmic scale. The top line is 100,000 /32s, the second line is 10,000, the next is 1,000 so, if you plot this in a linear graph, it will look very flat with a steep increase. And that's just really the beginning because the large jumps you see here tend to be groups of one or two large allocations which are made to large service providers with existing infrastructure. And again, on a logarithmic scale, the allocations have been focused on Japan, Korea, Taiwan, India, New Zealand, Australia, etc, etc, but, by the time you get to the right-hand side of this graph, they're quite small allocations, down around below 10 /32s. And the distribution of IPv6, again, as you'd expect, focused on just those small number of countries but that distribution is dominated by a small number of large allocations as we mentioned. ASNs are continuing in a sort of linear fashion. They're not accelerating which is good news because the projected consumption puts the exhaustion of the ASN pool in the fairly near future in our terms but I can also show that the ASN distribution per country over the last year is dominated by Australia, mainland China, India, Thailand, etc. And the overall distribution is shown here where Australia, Japan, Korea and mainland China are the holders of most of the larger numbers of ASNs in the region. I'm coming to the end of the report with another set of numbers and these are the financial numbers for APNIC's operation over the last 12 months or over the financial year of 2005. We had total expenses in the last year of just under US $5.5 million. That was over budget by nearly 5%. The breakdown, as you see - well, these figures are available in the annual report so you can see the details there, but it's largely dominated by salaries, around 45% of the total budget, I think, and then numerous other items, of course, which I don't think I need to go into but there's plenty of time for questions. We'll review these if anyone would like to do so. We've got two revenue lines here. One is a sub-total line which is effectively the cash revenues. And then the bottom line is taking into account the foreign exchange rate gains and losses. In the first of those total lines, you can see that our revenues in 2005 were US $5.4 million but there was a substantial gain of $400,000 in fluctuations in currency exchange. So it put us 10.6% over budget but it's good fortune in the way exchange rates fluctuate. It's a fairly unpredictable thing in our operation but it resulted in the end of year - rather than having a surplus of $7,000 for the year, as budgeted, we had a surplus of $314,000. So that put us in a better position in the year than anticipated because we did have an expectation of just a flat return, a flat result this year. The assets of APNIC total just over $10 million, $10.5 million, the difference between the year end of 2005 and 2004 is 10% which is sort of interesting in a year where you have a flat result. Where did the extra money come from? It came from the fact that the foreign exchange, again, fluctuated by 6% and we do have a substantial amount of that capital reserve in Australian dollars so, as the US dollar was cheaper at the end of 2005, it gave us a better US dollar value in the reserves of APNIC. So, again, lucky for us. So on to the budget for 2006. The way we do our budgeting at APNIC is to forecast membership growth based on our previous trends, which provides the majority of income in terms of annual fees. Then there are other income sources, non-member fees and the ever-unpredictable per allocation or per address fees that come in from NIRs and the remaining confederation members. We project expenses based on linear projections and known fluctuations and we try to take into account the foreign exchange rates and other factors. It's a fairly complex process. We look at pessimistic, moderate and optimistic scenarios and tend to take the middle ground in setting the budget. So that middle-ground budget for 2006 involves expenses of $6.2 million, revenues of just less than that and resulting in a deficit situation in this current year of possibly $100,000. That scale of deficit is well within the range of the foreign exchange rate fluctuation that is we might see during the year, but that's what we are budgeting on at the moment. OK, the cashflow for this year - the budgetary policy is to maintain 100% operating capital reserve in respect of operating expenses, so we do have to maintain, in the bank, enough money to run APNIC for another year in the event of no income and that's a policy established by the APNIC EC for the security of the organisation. So, in the case of changed circumstances, etc, we do have some continuity. We're going to achieve that in the coming year, according to the projected cashflow for the year. So we're even taking into account a possible increment for the following year, 2007's budget of 115%, we would have around about 100% of that budget forecast budget in the capital reserve at the moment. And that is the end of the financial numbers section and the end of the Annual Report presentation. So I would be happy to take questions now or to leave questions for the end of the next presentation, which is from the chair of the APNIC EC. Since no-one is jumping up, I'll ask Akinori to come and give us the EC report.