MINUTES
April 16th, 2014
Teleconference 11:00 AM UTC
Executive Council Attendees:
Chairman: Adiel Akplogan (AA) AFRINIC
Secretary: Axel Pawlik (AP) RIPE NCC
Member: Paul Wilson (PW) APNIC
Apologies
Treasurer: Raul Echeberria (RE) LACNIC
Member: John Curran (JC) ARIN
German Valdez (GV) NRO
Observers:
Anne Rachel Inne (ARI) AFRINIC
Cathy Handley (CH) ARIN
Pablo Hinojosa (PH) APNIC
Akinori Maemura (AM) APNIC
Andres Piazza (API) LACNIC
Antony Gollan (AG) RIPE NCC
Secretariat:
Nick Hyrka (NH) NRO
0) Welcome/Agenda Review
AA welcomed attendees and noted that they had AP and JC on the call, but it looked like Paul Wilson and Raúl Echeberría would not be able to join.
1) Agenda Review
PH noted that Paul was on leave and he didn’t know if he would join the call.
AA asked if they should proceed with only three EC members.
AP said they could proceed carefully, keeping in mind that decisions would have to be confirmed by the absent EC members after the meeting.
JC noted that he was at the ARIN 33 Meeting in Chicago and had a board meeting after the call, so would only be available for the next 55 minutes.
AA suggested they start with the CG reports, as they hadn’t received any reports since Dubai and had missed this at their last meeting. He said this was also something they could do without any risk. He added that the IANA transition was also an important point, and they would move to the other points last if there were time.
2) CG Reports
AA noted that they didn’t have all of the CG Chairs on the call. He requested AI give an update from the PACG.
ARI said the PACG had been at the WTDC for the past two weeks and before that had been at the ICANN meeting, where most of them had meetings with the ICANN Vice President and Theresa Swineheart, who was in charge of ICANN’s global strategy regarding the IANA oversight transition. Coming out of that meeting was an agreement that Paul Rendek would meet with Theresa in Washington to align their messaging and make sure that anything that came out in terms of the RIRs was correct and consistent. She added that CH might also be attending to assist Paul. She noted that some of the discussions had been on the documentation ICANN had sent out regarding the process to create the NTIA transition proposal and the scoping, and they had been a little unclear on the implication this had for the rest of the community.
ARI said that in terms of the WTDC, they had known this wasn’t going to be too controversial. She said they ended up with two things that related directly to the RIRs – Resolution 63 that talked about IP addressing and facilitating the transition to IPv6 in developing countries, and looking at quality and regulatory aspects concerning adoption. She said this was something they would have to deal with at ITU-D in Study Group 1. She said they were concerned with ensuring that good technical input went into any decisions that happened in this space.
NH took over from AI to give an update from the CCG. He said the CCG had its conference call in the first week of April and had another one planned for May. He noted that this was harder to coordinate during in meeting season but they were managing. He said the CCG was meeting with the PACG regarding the IANA transition at the RIR-regional level, but they hadn’t brought this up to an NRO level. He said they should be seeing some output from some of the RIRs on the IANA transition this week. He said they were coordinating on the Continuing Cooperation and IPv6 Around the World documents that would be needed for upcoming meetings, particularly the IGF in Istanbul and were watching the outcome of NETmundial for any supporting statements that might need to come out after the meeting. He said they were also giving attention to the NRO website and making the information there easier to find, in addition to wrapping up some items with the ASO website.
NH said he also wanted to highlight that the CCG had an outstanding request regarding approval for a face-to-face meeting at the upcoming ICANN meeting in London. He noted the deadline for this was approaching very quickly.
JC said in general he was trying to cut down on the number of meetings, but if the CCG thought this was needed, then he was very supportive of this.
AA thanked JC and said they had a similar request from the RSCG and said he hoped to hear more from them.
Action Item 160414-01: EC to review meeting requests from the CCG and RSCG for ICANN 50 in London.
AA noted that they were missing people from the ECG and the IPv6 CG. He asked if there were any more updates from CGs.
There were none.
3) IANA Stewardship Transition Updates
AA said they had all seen the ICANN document with the proposed process to come up with a transition proposal. He said the question was now for the RIRs to translate that for their own regional communities.
JC said there were two components to the steering group in the ICANN proposal – the registry component, for which they would like to have two NRO EC members sit on; and the addressing community component, where he thought they would ask the ASO AC to appoint two members.
AA asked if they should let the ASO AC choose who would occupy the two community seats on the steering group, or if the NRO EC should give them some guidance in the form of recommendations.
JC said he thought that over-thinking the selection process might not be received well by the community, as this was about the design of oversight processes. He said while it was appropriate for the RIRs to be involved, they shouldn’t be in an overly powerful role. He reiterated that they should let the ASO AC select their two representatives, presumably from their own ranks, and the NRO EC should not try to shape the decision process – as this was meant to be the voice of the community and not the voice of the RIRs themselves.
AP said he supported what JC said.
JC said they should wait for whatever came out of the process and was published by ICANN, but they should give the heads-up to the ASO AC that they would need to think about this. Axel said he agreed with the document so far and the process.
AA a lot of the consultation would happen at the various RIR meetings as well. He said these would be key inputs into the process and they needed to keep an eye on their upcoming agendas. He asked if ARIN was doing anything with its community about this at their meeting.
JC said they would be asking the community to get involved in the ICANN’s process as they saw fit. He said he had discussed this with the board and they wouldn’t be taking a position in the transition, as this was about what the community thought was important in the process.
AA said that from their side the process looked good as well and they weren’t going to have any special arrangements for input to the proposed process either. He said they were more focused on how to contribute to the overall process later on. He said he thought they needed to continue to watch this area after the end of the comment period, which was in a few weeks.
AA asked if JC had any feedback after the Senate hearing. He asked if the dust had settled or if it had helped the process.
JC said there was a bill that had made it out of committee that would require a bipartisan report to be produced before the NTIA made any final decision. He said that one way or another, Congress would be interested in such a report. He said this meant the resulting proposal had to be viable. He said as much as they wanted the scope to be limited to the oversight function, the rest of the world wanted this to be something larger – so there was a gap between the expectations of Congress and the rest of the world. He said if they went through a 15 months process only for the plan to be rejected, there would be a lot of resulting anger and this would make the community worse off.
AA agreed. He said he thought this was a serious issue. He asked AP what he saw from Europe.
AP agreed with JC’s assessment about the potential outcome. He said he wasn’t hearing anything unexpected and people generally liked the plan. He said that once people were reminded that this was really about taking care of the void it the NTIA oversight was removed, rather than splitting up IANA or ICANN, then they tended to calm down a bit. He said the current play that they saw politically wasn’t unexpected. He said the community needed to come up with a good plan and document how it worked, and if the politicians didn’t like the proposal it would make the community angry, but there wasn’t anything they could do about it.
ARI asked if it was worth working on responses to some of the questions that had come out regarding the transition, to assess if this was really worth having or not. She said if they had these answers themselves, it might help them to understand the potential issues and to have a clear way forward. She said it was also worth the RIRs doing this in terms of damage mitigation, so that if Congress pulling the plug on the NTIA for example, the RIRs would have an idea of how to manage this. She asked what the group thought.
JC said that the NTIA had given some full criteria and he believed it would hold to those criteria. He said his concern was that the materials from ICANN had a very tactical scope and excluded some aspects of oversight. He said that instead of discussing the overall implication of losing periodic renewal of ICANN and the whole system, the scope had been limited to the regular week-to-week operational oversight of functions that the NTIA provided. He said they would know almost immediately if a mistake had been made managing the free pool, for example. He said what wasn’t in scope was the question about what would be done if an RIR was captured by business interests or if it stopped listening to its members. He said if they were happy with the scope – to plan for the replacement of this “mundane” oversight – then NTIA would be happy with that, but there would be a disconnect between this and what many others were expecting from the process.
AA said they had seen this at Singapore where the ICANN people had kept bringing the conversation back to this daily oversight. He said in his view they had created this scoping on purpose to deflate the initial heat the NTIA announcement had created. He said if Congress and the NTIA didn’t have the same understanding of what this oversight meant, they might have to deflate it further.
JC said they might like to increase accountability in other discussions, but those seemed to be ICANN discussions and were not a part of this process.
ARI noted that their interactions with ICANN included root oversight. She said that even if they were to separate IANA oversight from ICANN, they would still have this issue. She asked if it was worth discussing how to find a way out of this in Sao Paulo.
AA said this was something to first discuss with Fadi Chehadé and it was something that globally they needed to align themselves on. He said Sao Paulo was probably the place to do that.
ARI referred to JC’s earlier comment on accountability and said they were working with Paul Rendek and his team to create a matrix that they would check their strengths and weaknesses against to increase accountability. She said Athina Fragkouli would be helping, and thanked the RIPE NCC for that.
AA said this was something that they needed to continue watching to make sure that clarity was brought into the process. He said he would be in favour of having this discussion again in Sao Paulo. He said he had been chasing Fadi to have the meeting with them that he had promised, but he hadn’t received anything back. He said he would try and reach him before Sao Paulo.
AA said that on this IANA transition, they would wait until the end of the consultation period to act, but in the meantime the ASO AC would need to select people to join the steering group. AA said that was it for IANA transition.
4) NETmundial Updates
AM gave an update on NETmundial. He said they had published the draft outcome document around 12 hours earlier and this was available at:
Document/netmundial.br/
AM said this was a public document with a comment functionality that allowed comments to be submitted for the whole document or paragraph by paragraph. He said they had a few meetings around this and had tried their best, but this was not meant to be perfect and would require more work to reach consensus at the meeting.
AA thanked AM for his comments. He said he had seen a mail from Fadi regarding their ability to support people who needed it and asked if the EMC was involved in this.
AM said not really.
AA noted that AP and JC were leaving the call.
AA said most of them would be in Sao Paulo. He said Paul had requested they meet beforehand. He said that if possible, the EC should meet quickly for an hour or two after the I* meeting. He said he would send an email about this so they all had it.
AA noted that point four on the agenda had been covered by AI’s PACG report.
AA said they’d push the requests for approval to the next meeting.
AA said he knew that JC and AP had given their approval for the CCG’s request for a second face-to-face meeting, but he would let the other EC members know that they needed to give their approvals. AA confirmed that he had also approved this.
AA closed the meeting and said he would see them all in NETmundial.
Last modified on 14/07/2014