Dear Colleagues,

Thank you Michael for the summary and of course everybody else who provided feedback, both here as well as via private channels.

From what I gathered so far, the neutrality bit seems to be one of the more important parts. But I think that is also reflected in the draft guidelines, which to me at least read as saying that freedom of choice should be the default. There is obviously a reason why the document is expanding quite a bit on the circumstances under which this should not be the case, by providing examples of “objective technical criteria” that would be acceptable as a rationale to ignore the net neutrality part.

Taking it back to my initial question: should we provide input on behalf of the RIPE community? I am not feeling that confident that there has been sufficient feedback at this stage to submit anything as reflecting the broader opinion of the community.

As the secretariat I am in your hands and I am happy to take guidance from the chairs. But if as a group we feel this is important, we need to start drafting some text that is to the point of addressing the contents of the draft guidelines.

Did somebody take the time and look at the criteria in the draft, do they make sense from an operational perspective? Of course, we can also submit something along the lines of “RIPE community has a strong preference for XYZ”, but to make such a statement on behalf of the community, we probably need a bit more than the few voices we have heard so far.

Finally, as I mentioned before, the process is still open for people to file individual responses. So if there is no consensus on a collective submission, not all is lost.

And of course, we will keep monitoring this process and alert you when other opportunities to provide input arise.