[pause] 00:09 Marco Schmidt: Good morning, bonjour, my name is Marco Schmidt, I am the Analyst from the RIPE NCC. I am working there as the Policy Development Officer, and I would like to give you a little update about recent policy developments in our region, but first I would like to say that I'm very happy to be here at this very special AfriNIC meeting for the 10th anniversary. And as Ernest and Seun said, in our region quite a lot of policy proposals have been discussed recently or are under discussion, and it's maybe for your own interest what was discussed. And exactly now I understand how it works. And I have... Because there were quite many proposals discussed and recently accepted, also and others are still under discussion, I have divided my talk a little bit in the topics. I will present some proposals related to IPv6 deployments, then something about internet resource transfers, that's a topic that is not possible right now here in the AfriNIC region, but in RIPE NCC... The RIPE region had quite some development here. And also on request, I will talk about out of region use, because there is a policy proposal here. 01:29 Marco Schmidt: First I would like to talk about IPv6 deployment, some proposals related to that. We have right now on the main list two proposals under discussions. One is to keep the IPv6 PI assignments when requesting IPv6 allocation, because right now the RIPE policy defines if you want to have an IPv6 allocation as a member, and you've got in the past IPv6 PI, you need to return it if they have the same routing policy. And the proposal said well, that's actually bad for IPv6 deployment, because the company might have started to deploy IPv6 on their provider-independent assignment, and then they are forced to renumber. And, he proposed to remove that section, and in the initial discussion phase it got a vast amount of supporting voices, and right now the RIPE NCC is preparing, or actually has finished impact analysis, and then it will move to next phase next week to the review phase. And then the discussion will go on. 02:34 Marco Schmidt: Another proposal is the assessment criteria for large IPv6 allocations. Quickly to explain, in the RIPE region, you can get by default a /32 IPv6 allocation, and you can get up to a /29 without any further justification. If you want to have more than a /29, you have to justify them by the amount of users that you have at that moment, and the extent of your network. However, we have now quite some organizations and governments in our region that are not ISPs but they plan to roll out, they plan to deploy IPv6. Multinational companies or governments, and they often have a very aggregated addressing plan over multiple hierarchical levels, like if you think about a multinational company, they have different businesses in different countries and different branches and so on. And the same for governments, they have the national governments, federal governments, counties, states, cities. And they often have problems to justify their request, they need quite large address books for their plan, and it doesn't match with the current policies so they, as a proposal to remove, this strict requirement and replace it by additional requirements. 04:00 Marco Schmidt: And it was also initially discussed, it got some support, and it will now move to the review phase, and right now the RIPE NCC is creating an impact analysis, so we'll look into it, what actually will happen it's just of course, it would be accepted. One proposal related to IPv6 that was accepted in March, so a few months ago was removing the IPv6 requirement when requesting IPv4. To give you there a bit of background, you probably know IPv in the RIPE region, we have to reach the last /8, and each member can get only one little block at one /22 IPv4. And until March the policy said in order to get this block of IPv4, you need to have an IPv6 allocation, the idea was behind to push the people a little bit to use IPv6. 04:50 Marco Schmidt: However, it was proposed to remove this requirement, and it reached consensus. And maybe some of you might say now "Okay, what? Is this good for the IPv6 deployment to remove this requirement?" But, the RIPE community came to the conclusion that this pushing by policy IPv6 does not really help. There was a comparation with candies and vegetables on the mailing list, like somebody said "Everybody wants to have the candy, the last bit of IPv4, but you should eat your vegetable to be healthy, the IPv6." You had IPv6 code. But then people said "Well, we are all adults. We all should know how many candies we can eat, and that we should live healthy, so nobody needs to tell us this." And that's why it was removed, and it was also the RIPE NCC was mandated to promote IPv6, to promote the use of IPv6, and we are doing this, and looking at the last few months since March, actually new members still requesting IPv6, so that's a good sign. 05:55 Marco Schmidt: Coming to another larger topic, it's resource transfers, Internet Resource Transfers, there is right now, one under discussion about the transfer requirements. Right now in our region it is possible to transfer IPv4 space but if you receive such a transfer, you cannot transfer again for 24 months, for two years. There's a holding period. This was proposed and accepted to avoid speculation that somebody gets it and he sells it again or transfer it again. However, I mentioned before, you can get also this /22 from the RIPE NCC from the last /8, and there is right now no holding period on it. So the policy doesn't define anything there. So what happened, that people open an LIR, get a /22, and transfer it immediately, open another LIR because it's possible in the RIPE region, get a /22, and transfer it again. This proposal tried to mitigate that problem and also proposed a 24-month period, holding period, for allocations given by the RIPE NCC for the /22. There was quite some discussion on the mailing list but right now it is in the review phase and once this review phase is over, the working group just will review if there's consensus or not. 07:25 Marco Schmidt: And in the last months, quite some proposals related to transfers have been accepted in our region. In March, it was to allow IPv6 transfers and also AS number transfers between resource orders and now, with these two proposals actually it is possible to transfer any type of resource inside our region. So it's IPv4 PA PI, IPv6 PA PI, and AS numbers. It has been accepted in March and the RIPE NCC is right now busy with implementation and we expect around July we will be done then these transfers will be possible inside the region. And then in April, we all have accepted, the RIPE committee has accepted an Inter-RIR transfer policy, and this is one very open that it says that any resource can be transferred to another region if this other region has a competitor transfer policy for Inter-RIR transfers, which is right now ARIN and APNIC. ARIN has Inter-RIR policy for IPv4 and APNIC has transfer policy for IPv4 and AS numbers, and we are implementing them right now and probably in August we will be ready. 08:45 Marco Schmidt: I mentioned right now a couple of times the difference between accepting and implementing. Maybe I should point out in the RIPE region, it's different than here that the board has no final word to say. It is once the working co-chairs declare final consensus the policy change is accepted and the policy document changes. However, the RIPE NCC needs some time to implement it, to adjust to procedures, to adjust to the software, and to make more clear that there's a period where the policy is already in place but not followed by the RIPE NCC. The document is now... We show this in our page on our website. Then I was asked to talk about Out-Of-Region use because you have an ongoing policy proposal for that one. There is in the RIPE region no current policy that defines Out-Of-Region use and has also no proposal like that. [pause] 10:00 Marco Schmidt: One active network element is located in the RIPE NCC service region. And yeah, I would like to close my presentation briefly with some interesting information. I hope interesting that we of course try to... I tried to promote the PDP as much as possible to raise the awareness and raise the participation. Here you can see a map from Europe that shows a little bit in 2014 from which countries where people are contributing on the mailing list to policy discussions because also here to point out one difference. Here in AfriNIC, you decide on policy proposals at the meeting while in the RIPE region or in the RIPE community, it's always in a mailing list. So policy discussions and policy decisions are made on the mailing list. 10:53 Marco Schmidt: And you see on the bottom a little bit of Africa, and that's gray. So in 2014, there was no one from the African continent participating on the community discussion, the RIPE community, but it doesn't mean that you cannot. You're all invited to do so because as Seun said, the RIPE community is open for everyone, it's not limited to the RIPE NCC service region. So if you see any proposal from the RIPE region that you find interesting that you think it might impact your business or that you think that is a proposal good or bad for your internet, by all means please join the discussion and be part of the RIPE community. 11:37 Marco Schmidt: And also, just briefly to mention to increase the awareness, I'm also sending now monthly policy updates in Arabic and Russian to some specific mailing lists in the Middle East and the countries of the former Soviet Union to make people more aware about what's going on. 11:57 Marco Schmidt: And yeah, I would like to close my presentation with some hopefully useful information, if you have more questions about policy proposals and the PDP and the RIPE region you can find me in the next days here during the meeting, if not, you always can send me an email. If you would like to be a bit updated, stay updated what's going on you can follow me on Twitter. They always get the latest developments of the PDP in the RIPE region and beyond and there also some links on the bottom that if you download the presentation you can see the current policy proposals. That's for my side. If there are any questions I'm happy to take them. Then, thank you very much. 12:50 Ernest Byaruhanga: Okay, thank you very much, Marco, for that update and I believe if there are no questions, we are at the end of our mid-morning session, and... [background conversation] [pause] 13:27 Arnaud Amelina: Bon Jour. Good morning everybody I will speak in French. I would like to thank you for all the presentations made this morning, my name is Alioune. I have a couple of concerns regarding all the presentations made. I spent the night looking at all the AfriNIC sites and I have realised that regarding policy discussions that it has been done in November in Mauritius, and I have checked the different versions of the policy, there was no update. Do we still have to discuss the same policies where nothing has been modified on the versions. We have followed the presentations to share the experience, it's very good but at the level of AfriNIC are we really prepared for all these procedures? I don't think so. 14:56 Arnaud Amelina: This policy has already been discussed, there was no update logically, it should not be discussed again. In my humble opinion this is a waste of time, the same discussion will have the same effects given the recommendations of the first discussions have not been taken into consideration. Second, regarding the Inter-RIR Transfer, frankly, I have the impression that if AfriNIC will set up a type of policy of this kind, it will be risky because with the advent of IPV6 the transfer will be easy and maybe we will not have local clients because... Thank you. 16:05 Seun Ojedeji: Just to clarify, I hope I got all the concerns. Which are the policies are you referring to, is it the one for service region or the one for IXP or the one for Out-Of-Region? Is it the three of them or which specific one? 16:32 Arnaud Amelina: I would say three but mainly there Inter-zone transfer. 16:40 Seun Ojedeji: Inter-zone transfer. Sorry, the interpreter said inter-zone transfer so I don't know whether that is the right interpretation of what you are trying to say. 16:54 Christian Bope: So, it's Out-Of-Region. 16:56 Seun Ojedeji: Oh, Out-Of-Region. 16:57 Christian Bope: The good meaning. 16:58 Seun Ojedeji: Okay, so, thank you very much. Out-Of-Region happens to be the only policy among the two policies right now that has been updated recently. So according to the PDP process once there is an update on a particular policy it needs to be presented on the floor and then we'll continue to discuss it. It depends on the outcome of this discussion that will determine whether we'd recommend to the author, to either withdraw or we just don't see updates and it expires just like the service guideline has just been withdrawn, otherwise, it may have actually expired after this session. That's what I can say about that and I think there is a second comment, question. On the entire transfer, I think nobody has suggested that there's going to be a policy on that now, but if there's somebody that is compelled to start it up maybe they could take note of your comment as a point of warning or they could still go ahead to present the policy proposal. It's interesting that we're getting more cues now. This is at the expense of our break. So, what I will suggest is that we'll continue. We may need to adjust the timing for the tea break and let's just take the comments from the floor. So Paulos, please. 18:46 Paulos Nyirenda: Thank you, Chair. It's a brief one. It's related to transfers also. I didn't get the translation quick enough but I just wanted to learn... Paulos Nyirenda from Malawi. I just want to learn from the RIPE region on transfers they have, if you get a /22 and you want to transfer it, you've got to wait a certain amount of time before you can transfer it. I guess, this was designed to reduce the number of transfers per unit time and I wanted to know how successful it is. From your presentation, people are taking up the /22 and transferring it too quickly. So you put in a policy to limit the period in which a transfer can take place. What's your experience with the slowing down of the process? 19:54 Marco Schmidt: Yeah. I have to clarify. At this moment, it's just a proposal, it has not been accepted so it is still possible to open an LIR and transfer it immediately, and we have reported to the RIPE community. We see cases that even an organization open up to 30 LIRs and does so. We have done an impact analysis and we have calculated that around 10% of the allocations that we currently hand out from the last /8 get transferred quite quickly afterwards. I think it's around, if I remember the numbers fine, yeah, it was 10% and we would expect that if this policy proposal gets accepted, that this number will be reduced by this 10% of new allocations that we hand out. [pause] 20:53 Owen DeLong: Owen DeLong, ARIN AC. By my calculations, and I could be wrong about this, there are 64 times 256 roughly /22s and a /8. Given the rate at which /22s are exiting the building under this process, by the time you guys get around to adopting this policy will there still be /22s to protect? 21:22 Marco Schmidt: Yes, it should. I mean, we cannot predict how long this proposal will go but right now it's in the review phase. Let's say it would reach consensus then in around two, three months it might be accepted but it can have more rounds. But we also have estimated in the impact analysis taking the current rate of /22s that we have, we should have enough for around five and a half years, so it should be on time. If nothing happened that more members signing up or more LIRs are opened, that this we cannot foresee right now. But seeing at the last six months the consumption rate, we have enough for five and a half years. 22:05 Seun Ojedeji: Thank you. Professor Nii. 22:08 Nii Quaynor: Yeah. This is Nii Quaynor, Ghana Dot Com. I get a feeling from the first question as to the status of the policies and the discussion that perhaps we have not made clear the modifications because when I look at the document on the website, I still see the last date 3rd July 2014 and so perhaps we have not had opportunity to see the modifications and that is why those kinds of questions are coming. So that's what I felt. Thank you. 22:50 Seun Ojedeji: Yeah, thank you, Prof. The dates on the slides is actually the date the proposal was actually submitted, the initial proposal submission. The modification is actually, if you look at the URL that was placed on the slides, it includes the date for the modification. But I recognize that we should have actually put that on the slide as well. So that's accepted... 23:18 Nii Quaynor: Yeah, I just think that's the point. Meaning that if that's what we're gonna discuss, that is what we should have. 23:24 Seun Ojedeji: Okay, thank you. 23:25 Nii Quaynor: Right. 23:25 Seun Ojedeji: Thank you for that observation. 23:29 Christian Bope: Okay. Christian Bope, speaking on my own capacity. Just following Arno comments. First of all, I think Arno deserves the credit because he spent all of his night checking the policy to see the policy we'll be discussing today. And my question is just simple, is yes or no. If the policy we will be discussing we'll be discussing today, is the updated version of the one we discussed in Mauritius, yes, we can discuss on it. 24:00 Seun Ojedeji: Yes. 24:01 Christian Bope: If not... Okay, we can discuss at least. But at least because, it seems to me... 24:05 Seun Ojedeji: Sorry, Sorry with a distinction. The policy we're discussing today, one of them is a yes. 24:10 Christian Bope: Yeah. 24:12 Seun Ojedeji: The other one is a no. 24:14 Christian Bope: Which means that the no, we'll not discuss what? 24:15 Seun Ojedeji: No. The no has not expired and because of that we'll have to still bring it back to the floor. According to the process, the process is that a policy will remain alive until after one year of no editing. So we have just had one discussion of one of the policies in Mauritius and that is what we're still carrying over up till now. We haven't gotten to one year yet. So if there's no updates after this or if the floor recommends... Again, the co-chairs can't withdraw a policy it has to be clear. We cannot unilaterally do this. It is the community that have to really, really get their views out and then get the authors to willingly withdraw the policy. So we're just doing our job by making sure that we follow the process so that's the reason why we're actually going to have the policy discussed again. 25:24 Christian Bope: Maybe my brain is not well suited but I'm a bit lost. Let me try to summarize what you've just said now. 25:30 Seun Ojedeji: Okay. 25:31 Christian Bope: Is what you have saying is we have three policies. One has been updated and two have not been updated. 25:38 Seun Ojedeji: We have three policies that was sent to the mailing list like two weeks ago, recently which was yesterday, one has been withdrawn. 25:50 Christian Bope: Okay. 25:50 Seun Ojedeji: And it is in the slides. That is the one that has to do with AfriNIC service region. That has been withdrawn. We have one which has been updated by making sure it was updated one week before this deadline and it was sent to the list, and we have one which is just coming, is represented as is. 26:12 Christian Bope: Which means we'll not discuss on it. 26:14 Seun Ojedeji: We're discussing it. 26:16 Christian Bope: But, because it seems like we're discussing the same thing we've discussed in Mauritius. We're wasting our time. 26:21 Seun Ojedeji: That's correct. So it's important... Like I said we can't withdraw it ourselves, we can only wait for it to expire. Since it hasn't expired we have to discuss it. 26:33 Christian Bope: Yeah, which means at the same time we're wasting our time to discuss about it, we can do other thing, something else. Right? 26:39 Seun Ojedeji: Okay. I think it depends on how we see it. 26:41 Christian Bope: Okay. 26:42 Seun Ojedeji: You will agree with me that the people that were in Mauritius are not the people that will be here. The composition of people in Mauritius are different from the people that are here, so maybe a lot may have changed between Mauritius and now to make people support the proposal more or to go against it more to also encourage the authors to withdraw. 27:03 Christian Bope: Okay. Last comment. Maybe I don't have a full understanding of the policy, you may understand it better than me. 27:12 Seun Ojedeji: Yes. 27:12 Christian Bope: Just try to help me to get your understanding. What you're saying is even though there is no update we can discuss on the policy. 27:21 Seun Ojedeji: Yes. So, as long as the one year not been expired. Thank You. 27:27 Douglas Onyango: My name's Douglas Onyango and I would like to ask a question following the RIPE update. In that update there was one particular proposal that sought to remove number of users as the only requirement for allocation I believe for v6. We've had a similar policy here, proposed in the region but it was the very opposite for us to actually unilaterally have number of users as the requirement of allocations and assignments. I would like to ask what motivated this policy? Why do you think we should remove this as the... Why did RIPE come to the conclusion that they needed to remove this as the only requirement? I ask because we had this policy, we had a discussion and I think maybe there's a possibility then in the future someone may attempt to reintroduce such a policy and it would be helpful if we learnt from why you guys in the RIPE region think this wasn't an excellent idea. Thank you. 28:40 Marco Schmidt: Yes. Excuse me. As you said correctly, right now the policy defines we have to show the amount of existing users to justify an allocation larger than /29 and this is very much matching for ISPs because they can easily say, "Okay, we have one million users we wanna give them /48, please give us a /28 or a/27." However the two proposers that made these proposals, one is from the British Ministry of Defence, and the other is from a German multinational company called Kaufland and they both have plans to make a very aggregated multilevel addressing plan and they want to have basically... Let's talk about one government example, they want to have enough space for each city that they want to give, above they want to have space for each county, above for each state and then in the future when there will be some growth in each city and each state they would not like to give them another block somewhere else. They want to have one aggregated block. So they want to integrate some reservation in each multi-hierarchical level. Which is right now with this policy not possible because we will just ask, "Okay, how many end sites do we have? Okay, this is the block that you can get", and that's why they've made this proposal to take such additional requirements like security and safety mechanisms... Or yeah, this kind of multi-hierarchical level into account. 30:21 Seun Ojedeji: Yeah, Professor Nii... 30:23 Nii Quaynor: Mr. Chairman, I wanted to ask you a slight follow-up to Christian Bope's question. We are wondering if there's no new information, how we would avoid re-discussing the same thing over and over, and because we like to converge, so that's the nature of the question. If there's some new information, then we could perhaps discuss and get consensus or not, but if we have to recreate the entire debate over again, perhaps we may not be able to converge. So I thought I would point that out. 31:03 Seun Ojedeji: Okay, thank you very much Prof. From the Mauritius meeting, we recall that there were a lot of comments that were made in relation to this proposal we're talking about, which is a IX proposal and those comments were actually under minutes. I've been told by the authors that they tend to actually respond to some of those comments in this session, so we are hoping that perhaps one of the author has something to do, I see Frank there. However, irrespective of that, like I said, we're actually brining this back because of the process, not necessarily because we've discussed it before. We're just following the process. Thank you. 32:00 Marco Schmidt: There is more information that will be presented. Happy tea break. [background conversation] 32:20 Frank Habitch: My name is Frank, I'm one of the co-authors of that policy. [background conversation] [chuckle] 32:40 Paulos Nyirenda: I think that the PDP, the process itself, requires that unless a policy has been taken off the floor or has expired, it is still in play and needs to be on the mailing list, as well as on the face-to-face meeting. This is the policy, so I think unilateral withdrawal of a policy would break our own PDP. So yes, it needs to come here. If there is no debate on it, let it sit on the floor and then go out two seconds later, that is the process. Yes? 33:20 Nii Quaynor: I don't believe anyone says we should take it off the floor. What one is saying is "What is your process to make it converge?", and not that we'll go all the way back to the beginning and debate everything we've done before. But you give the answer that the minutes are there and you will use the minutes guide, as to closure. 33:37 Seun Ojedeji : Yes, please. 33:37 Seun Ojedeji: And I like that, thank you. 33:38 Seun Ojedeji: Thank you very much. So we'll go for coffee break now and I say we'll come back at... We'll come back at 11:00. Thank you. [background conversation]