RIPE Chair Report May 2016

The RIPE 72 meeting in Copenhagen is starting in one hour and I wanted to share some of my experiences since the last RIPE meeting in Bucharest in November 2015.

Shortly after the RIPE Meeting, I got the sad message that Rob Blokzijl had passed away.

My thoughts go back to the first RIPE Meeting I attended at NIKHEF. Rob quickly put me to work as scribe in one of the working groups, and from then I was drawn into the community.  I will miss his concise interventions when discussions go off track, and cheerful chats in the corridors and at the social events.

"What would Rob have done" is a question I have found myself asking, and I could always get an answer from Rob.

But not any more.

Rob, you will be greatly missed in our community - but also remembered for a long time to come.

The Internet in our part of the world would not have been the same without you.

Internet New Year

After New Year's, I was invited to take part in the Chairpersons’ debate at the Internet New Year Event in Amsterdam.

After others pointed to the IANA stewardship transition and technological developments, my take on this was that the ruling by The Court of Justice declaring that the Commission’s US Safe Harbor Decision was invalid

is the event that will have the biggest impact on the Internet for Europeans. This ruling puts a limitation on the use of the open Internet across borders. This may present an opportunity for EU business to step up the competition against the US Cloud industry, and it may also bring back a more distributed computing model as a good alternative to the “Mainframe” style centralisation of the Cloud vendors.

Looking ahead, it is also interesting to look at the governments two faces. On one side, they want to protect us and our personal data. On the other side, they want to have full access to all our data through surveillance programmes.

Roundtable

Later in January, the RIPE NCC invited me to a Roundtable Meeting in Brussels. The topics covered included the evolving RIPE NCC membership, regulatory challenges surrounding the Internet of Things, the IANA stewardship transition, RIPE NCC coordination with law enforcement and government participation in the RIPE Policy Development Process (PDP).

NIX

In February, the Norwegian Internet Exchange held a meeting in Oslo where we heard about the lack of success with the regional Internet exchanges in Norway as an attempt to generate more interest for regional peering. There was also an interesting presentation from the Norwegian Government, DIFI, making IPv6 mandatory in the public sector.

My participation in the meeting was to facilitate a discussion to re establish a network operators group (NOG) in Norway. Jan Zorz gave an extensive presentation on his experiences in Slovenia. After a slow start on the following discussion, perhaps overwhelmed by the Slovenian NOG, it was clear that everybody was happy if NIX would put together two meetings a year, and in the end a couple of people volunteered to be part of the programme committee.

Mirjam Kühne from the RIPE NCC also gave a presentation on the RIPE NCC,Internet measurements and IXPs.

ICANN 55

In March, I participated in ICANN 55 in Marrakech, Morocco as Chair Elect of the ICANN 2016 Nominating Committee. As Chair Elect appointed by the ICANN Board, I get to assist the Chair and learn how to manage the process in preparation for chairing the committee next year. If you are interested, you can follow the work through the “Report Cards”.

MENOG 16

MENOG 16 took place in Istanbul, Turkey at the end of March. It was a good meeting with interesting presentations focusing on security topics such as DDOS protection and mitigation. Elvis Velea presented on IP transfers and made an interesting reference to a presentation at the last APNIC meeting, indicating that needs-based IPv4 policies do not prevent transfers that cannot satisfy the needs criteria when the transfer contract is made. The contracts are simply formulated as a future option contract.

This is important for the community to take into account when making policies. This is also the case with the ongoing discussion of the last /8 policy and the number of LIRs per member. It seems that no matter how we formulate the policy or membership rules, there will be ways to set up new legal entities to achieve the end result. While this will be against the intent of the current policy, it will be extremely difficult to prevent. There are policy proposals under discussion in the RIPE Address Policy Working Group, and the membership elements will be discussed in the RIPE NCC Services Working Group and in the RIPE NCC General Assembly.

SEE5

I was unfortunately not able to go to the South East Europe (SEE) 5 in Tirana, Albania due to work commitments.

LACNIC 25

At the end of April, I went to LACNIC 25 in Havana, Cuba. It was interesting to observe the different meeting style with close cooperation between the RIR, TLDs and Internet exchanges. It brought back memories from RIPE Meetings before CENTR and EURO-IX were established. This meeting also had a strong focus on security-related issues. Hard to follow in Spanish, but the translation was excellent.

IANA Transition

Looking at the political landscape, it is worth mentioning that the SLA for the IANA numbering services has been completed and is ready for signing. At the ICANN meeting the ICANN Board Chair Steve Crocker sent the IANA Stewardship Transition Proposal and Enhancing ICANN AccountabilityRecommendations to the NTIA. The next steps of the process are now in hands of the US Government, but there is also more work to be done in ICANN to prepare the implementation of the proposed strengthening of their accountability mechanisms.

ICANN CEO

It is also worth mentioning that Fadi Chehadé stepped down as ICANN President and CEO and that his successor is Göran Marby from Sweden.

in the end

I have also been invited to the RIPE NCC Executive Board meetings and have met with RIPE NCC staff at the events and in their office. On top of this, I have taken some trips in my day job at Visma to Sweden,Lithuania, Romania and Bergen and Trondheim (Norway), so I am beginning to know my way around the airport in Oslo during the construction works to extend the airport. Now I am looking forward to a successful RIPE Meeting here in Copenhagen.


Sincerely,

Hans Petter Holen

RIPE Chair