Dear local IR's, As announced at the last RIPE Meeting, Daniel an I travelled to Hong Kong to attend the APRICOT Conference and the APNIC annual meeting. Below you will find our report. If you have any questions or comments, please do not hesiate to ask. We (or David Randy Conrad from the APNIC) will also give a short report at the RIPE Meeting in Dublin. Please also refer to the detailed draft minutes of the APNIC meeting: ftp://ftp.apnic.net/apnic/drafts/jan97-minutes Kind Regards, Mirjam Kuehne Manager Registration Services RIPE NCC ---- APRICOT 1997 Reort Karrenberg, Kuehne ____________________________________________________ Report from the 2nd APRICOT conference and the APNIC Membership Meeting Hong Kong, January 1997 Daniel Karrenberg Mirjam Kuehne Scope This is a short report from the 1997 APRICOT confer- ence and associated meetings. It is a personal account giving just highlights and summarizing sub- jectively. Regional Registries Coordination Meeting Prior to the conference a regional Intenrnet reg- istries coordination meeting was held. Unfortu- nately IANA could not be represented as planned. InterNIC reported that a new version of the ARIN proposal had been published and has received a posi- tive response from ISPs. The discussion on the NAIPR mailing still has a high volume. The estab- lishment of ARIN is still foreseen in Q2/1997. Slow start allocation policies were discussed as APNIC will propose to implement a policy very simi- lar to the RIPE NCC one. We reported that we have been requested to make a proposal for temporary special rules to promote allocations from class A addresses. InterNIC reported that they are planning in the near future to allocate such space to larger providers which are considered capable of supporting it. The NCC will circulate its proposal to IANA and the other regional IRs for comments at the same time it is sent to the local IR WG for comments/approval. Further a number of procedural issues and specific cases were discussed in order to align the way regional registries operate. The next IANA/RIR coordination meeting is planned in conjunction with the 27th RIPE meeting in May 1997. ____________________________________________________ Page 1 APRICOT 1997 Reort Karrenberg, Kuehne ____________________________________________________ APRICOT Conference This was the 2nd APRICOT conference. Compared to the RIPE meetings the format is certainly very much more like a conference. During the first two days a large number of general tutorials was offered for a charge. Topics ranged from sendmail configuration to configuring firewalls. The presenters were top experts in their respective fields. The conference itself had four tracks: operations, applications, legal/political and business related topics. The formats used were presentations and panel discussions. The emphasis was very much on information dissemination rather than working on recommendations and common activities. There were no scheduled working group meetings. There were intesive hallway discussions. Topics for the panel discussions were somewhat over- lapping. The RIPE NCC participated in panels about Internet address regisrtation and Internet gover- nance. We had the impression that while the region is quite diverse in many aspects, there is a strong will to cooperate on many issues and there is gen- eral acceptance of the APNIC as a regional registry. Many discussions focussed on the domain name pro- posal from the IAHC. Two IAHC members were present. They stated that IAHC will publish a report soon and that they expect to see it implemented very quickly. The imminent danger of alternative DNS hierarchies disrupting DNS operations was given as a motivation for the urgency to move forward. APNIC organises the conference as requested by the APNIC membership. This is a serious amount of work part of which is done by volunteers. Some aspects of the conference are sponsored by vendors and other relevant organisations including ISPs. There also was a small vendor exhibition featuring mainly the sponsors of the meeting. Nevertheless the confer- ence has a serious turnover and associated risk. APNIC expects to loose some money on this confer- ence. This was due The situation in the Asian Pacific region is suffi- ciently different from Europe, that we believe no aspect of APRICOT is directly applicable to RIPE meetings. We could consider offering some tutorials that are very specifically geared towards ISP needs. These could also serve to get people up to speed for working group discussions. However this should be ____________________________________________________ Page 2 APRICOT 1997 Reort Karrenberg, Kuehne ____________________________________________________ introduced slowly and carefully in order to guaran- tee high quality and minimise financial exposure. Annual APNIC Membership Meeting APNIC is run by the membership who elect a five per- son executive council which makes decisions between meetings. The paid staff are referred to as the APNIC secretariat. The meeting we attended was the annual membership meeting. It can be compared to a combination of the RIPE local IR WG meetings and the yearly RIPE NCC Contributors Meeting. Most deci- sions were made by voting rather than establishing consensus. Large members have 4 votes, medium ones 2 and small ones 1 vote. Voting was open as the registry ID had to be noted on the voting slips. First two positions on the executive council had to be filled. Out of eight candidates five of whom were present two new members were elected: Dr. Xing Li from China and Prof. Dr. Srisakdi Charmonman from Thailand. The other sitting members of the execu- tive council are Geoff Huston, Prof. Jun Murai and Dr. Tommi Chen. The APNIC reported about their activities since the last meeting: Registration Services Yoshiko showed interesting statistics about APNICs address and AS number assignments. Also included was an overview of the contributors per country as well as assignment statistics per country. The APNIC has currently 108 con- tributors. The distribution in small, medium, large and enterprise contributors is similar to our region. In addition there are 5 confederations registered with APNIC. The APNIC handles great parts of requests with automatically parsable forms. We willinvesti- gate whether this might also be useful for the NCC. Financial Report Kyoko Day reported about last years expenses and presented the forecast for next year. The 1997 operating expenses are expected to be US$500.000. APNIC currently aims for a reserve ____________________________________________________ Page 3 APRICOT 1997 Reort Karrenberg, Kuehne ____________________________________________________ of around 6 months operating expenses. It is notable that the APNIC only formally exists since April 1996 and has therefore a short history that can be used as basis for their forecasts. One important issue for the contributors was the high level of company tax (>51%) that the APNIC has to pay in Japan. The executive council has asked the APNIC secre- tariat is to investigate a possible relocation to another country in the AP region. A report is expected in March and a decision in this matter will be taken soon thereafter. General Report David Conrad reported on general APNIC issues as staffing situation, equipment and future challenges. The APNIC has currently 3 full time staff (Yoshiko, Kyoko and David), one part-time staff for special projects and one part-time staff to support the business manager Kyoko Day. This is considered understaffed. It is planned to hire additional staff asap. The APNIC provides the following core services to its memebers: - IP address assignments and allocations - reverse delegation of the allocated and assigned addresss space - maintenance of the APNIC database - APRICOT meeting support The APNIC proposed to introduce a new billing cate- gory called confederations in order to improve fair- ness in charging national NICs and similar organisa- tions which are currently charged the same fees as single ISPs. There was a lively discussion about the financial consequences of this move. It was recognised that a way to charge fairly for confeder- ations was needed but financial instability could result. During this meeting a decision could not be reached. The APNIC secretariat will collect sugges- tions and re-issue a proposal to the membership. The membership will then have the option to vote on this electronically if a proper procedure to do this can be found. The meeting decided to introduce non-member fee to ____________________________________________________ Page 4 APRICOT 1997 Reort Karrenberg, Kuehne ____________________________________________________ those organisations who wish to obtain address space directly from the APNIC without being interested in becoming a member. They will be charged per address as well as a yearly maintenance fee for the database entries. The fees are set such that in typical cases they are substantially higher than those of a member registry. The meeting also decided that APNIC should start an activity to advise ISPs in the region which announce unnecessary routing prefixes on how to avoid this. It was noted that this is similar to activities C2 'Routing Registry Data Exchange' and C5 'RR Maintenance' of the NCC and we agreed to support each other in this endeavor. On suggestion of the secretariat the meeting decided to introduce a slow start allocation policy combined with an assignment window which is very similar to the one used by the NCC [ripe-140]. We supported the secretariat by describing our experiences to the meeting. The secretariat stated that membership meeting will be held prior to the conference in the future because meeting preparations were hampered by lack of time due to unexpected amounts of effort needed for the conference. Even during the meeting the winding down of conference activities needed atten- tion form secretariat staff. The APNIC will launch a new Web site which was shown to the meeting. Interesting topics were a "What's new?" page with pointers recently changed pages and documents on the site in reverse chronological order. The APNIC Web site also contains pointers to the other RIRs, the NCC should do the same. Conclusions Visiting the APRICOT and the APNIC Meeting was very useful as we had the possibility to exchange a lot of information and ideas with APNIC staff and Inter- net people from the AP region. This way we got a number of new ideas for the RIPE NCC's internal pro- cedures as well as for our meetings. Most signifi- cantly such direct exchanges help ensure that the regional registries maintain homogeneous policies and procedures. ____________________________________________________ Page 5