Stenography Transcript

RIPE 83G M 

Annual General Meeting 

24 November 2021 

16:30 (UTC + 1) 

CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN:  It is 4:30.  Let's start.  Before we start with the General Meeting, a quick slide about the administrative matters, you have seen that a couple of of times already.  I appoint as a secretary for this GM, Athina, and if you have any objections and how the whole procedure works, it's here on the slide but we published it a couple of time before.  

And with that, let's have a look at the agenda.  This is the fourth time that we do the virtual and I am really getting bored of this and every time I think next time we can do it and still no chance.  So let's see.  

I decided to let my hair grow.  So let's see how long it will get.  The agenda. .

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Agenda is relatively light today.  We had the report from the NCC from Hans Petter in the NCC Services Working Group, so you hopefully just have seen that one.  

Number 3, the report of the Executive Board, will come from me in a moment.  

Point 4 and 5 will come from Hans Petter afterwards.  

Then, we probably have the biggest and most interesting agenda item today, which is the charging scheme model, we'll talk about that in a second.  And then we will talk about the financial update and redistribution, and Simon‑Jan will report on that, and then we'll have one resolution to vote on, we'll see in a second, and then, as usual, we will convene the meeting 'til Friday and then announce the results on Friday.  

Good.  And with that, the report of the NCC Executive Board.  

So, that's what I talked about.  That's how we looked pre‑Corona, you can make a little game and see, I think most of us are still recognisable so it shouldn't be too bad.  I want to say welcome to Job, I guess we did it now five times, but still, welcome.  And the rest of the board composition is the same, as are the various positions which we hold.  So no change there.  

We had a couple of meetings since the last General Meeting, actually six of them.  That has to do with two facts.  Fact number 1 is we decided to have more board meetings to react to some of the cases like AFRINIC situation or others more in Japan because we had, like, four plus the ones at the GMs so we added and squeezed another two in.  Sorry for that NCC, we tried to not stress‑test them too much, but that gives us a higher cadence so that we actually have a better idea of what's going on in terms of critical paths, and you will see in a second how that reflected.  

The minutes were published and you have, hopefully, seen them, and otherwise they are on the web page.  

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Good, the first Executive Board meeting, 144, which was in May, which was pretty much straight after the elections, which we had, we distributed the functions which you just have seen, so no change there.  And we want to of course say thanks to Volk von Bornstaedt, who was on the board for one term, and for his contribution and work, he helped a lot especially in the transition phase, so very thankful for that, and welcome number 6 to you.  

The next board meeting, I think ‑‑ I'm not sure if I said that before, but you see that we have two board meetings, so what we did is, in the Corona time, we, what we had on like one, one‑and‑a‑half days before we met which ended up still in, like, five or six hours of Zoom calls, which is already bad enough, so we split them over two days so that nobody gets crazy.  

Just a quick overview.  As I said, the main parts are in the minutes.  We discussed the structure of the NCC, especially with the reflection of the diversity of the membership.  

We appointed, actually, Falk von Bornstaedt as a member to the Board of Rob Blokzijl Foundation because he was interested in that and did that before, so that seemed quite straightforward.  And we were presented a charging scheme options, or potential ways forward, and we will talk about that quite a bit today.  

One of the Executive Board meetings came from the fact that we talk at least once a year with the Works Council, from the staff of the NCC, and we didn't want to have it on another board meeting day so we actually moved it out and had a dedicated meeting, we regularly see what the Works Council has on their mind and we usually talk about strategy, the way forward, and about the culture and how they feel; of course, Corona was, as well, a big topic.  

The next board meeting, there were actually two and you see the dates, 10th and 19th, they were dedicated to the AFRINIC situation, that was the high phase where the AFRINIC topic was in court and it wasn't exactly clear where it goes, and what we did, which is now kind of superseded by the events, is, we have a joint stability fund between the RIRs and we discussed that we want to use that to help AFRINIC if it would be necessary, and then we passed the resolution that the Managing Director can actually act without having another board meeting and do something, if needed, there.  

And I think it was said at least this week and I think Hans Petter said it in his presentation before, the joint RIR stability fund was not requested from AFRINIC, and actually, the legal suggestion has changed that they had full operational capabilities again in regards to the money, so that was not necessary, but at least we went through the exercise and had a resolution.  

Next board meeting charging scheme was a big topic, of course.  I believe that was the one after the open house, I want to say thank you to all the people that were in the open house section and also gave feedback so we had a better understanding what the members wanted that shaped certainly the proposals and our discussion quite a lot.  

We also approved the publication of the activity plan and the Cloud strategy framework for publication, which you hopefully have seen.  We approved the agenda, which ‑‑ for today, and we reviewed the treasury statute and agreed it for a new cycle of a year.  

149.  We were presented three possible models for the charging scheme.  As I said, charging scheme is probably the big topic right now, and we talked about the Sanction Transparency Report and published it, also a very big topic, and the certified professionals, as Hans Petter said in the Services Working Group, was one of the topics.  

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Ongoing work:   

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To be honest, I think this slide is probably, since Hans Petter has joined and we don't change much because that part hasn't really changed, so certainly work with Hans Petter very closely, guide the NCC management, fulfil our corporate governance and fiduciary responsibilities.  Probably the only thing we fall a little bit short and that has much to do with no conferences and not so many opportunities to talk with the other RIRs, is the last agenda item.  This said, I actually had a call with some of them, so we haven't forgotten them completely, but you can feel, I guess, that the cohesion in the community after two years isn't as strong probably as it is when you see each other every couple of months.  

The resolution, I will read it later, and Simon‑Jan will talk about it in his presentation, that is the only resolution.  Very quickly, this is about the clearing house and what we do with the surplus, we will have three options.  As you will see, one is keeping it, one is redistributing it completely back, or 50/50, as we did before, so we actually had a precedence for that.  And the board is recommending option B, which is 50/50.  

We believe that this is most likely the last year with ‑‑ we will have such a big surplus.  I guess we said that a couple of times before, but now we have a waiting list, and whenever you become a member you are not automatically getting IP space quickly.  So, we believe that this certainly has an influence and I believe Simon‑Jan talks about a little bit for about the capital expense ratio, so we would like to go for the 50/50 option.  

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Your input to the Board is very important.  We have it today at the GM, so you can use that opportunity.  In the past, it was of course a little bit easier when we had face‑to‑face conversations and you could grab one of us and talk to. Us.  Otherwise, as you know, that we try to give opportunities which we probably didn't have before, like the open house with the charging scheme came out of that, so we are sure that we don't lose touch and actually hear you.  

That slide certainly hasn't changed, our informal at social events, I guess that is our social event today.  But otherwise, you know the drill.  We have the Members Discuss mailing list which we all read and monitor, even if you don't react probably on realtime and see a little bit how the conversation goes depending on the topic and you can e‑mail us directly as well at that e‑mail address.  

And with that, we are open for questions, comments.  This is a little bit the open‑mic version, as afterwards ‑‑ if you have topics to the parts I mentioned afterwards, probably that's where they are better suited, but if you have generic ones to the Board, then this is the best time.  Let's see... questions.  

"Will you be around on SpatialChat later?" 

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I can talk for myself, the answer is yes.  But we are certainly around this week and I see some heads nodding, so yes, you can find us later there.  

"I would like to hear the position of the Executive Board regarding the situation with Alexa in general.  Also, are there plans for strategic accounting of which countries are at war with each other, Russia and Ukraine, Armenia and Azerbaijan?  Without this, the RIPE NCC will not be able to remain a truly neutral organisation since for one of the parties it will always be an enemy." 

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I guess there are two questions.  I'll start and see if other people want to jump in.  

We don't have a position per se.  We actually follow what Hans Petter said before.  We are certainly not happy with the situation, and, to be honest, that is also not one of the parts which we could have imagined a year or two ago that we have that situation, so ‑‑ but they have been being monitor, as in actually see where we stand and then we want to go with that very closely with Hans Petter, and so there is no disconnect there, but, to be honest, I have not more answers to that.  

We do not track which country is at war with which one.  When you actually wrote the question, and I saw it, I was actually thinking about, you know, a metrics chart with red colours who was fighting with who.  No, we are not there. It is true that we have ‑‑ that it gets more difficult for us to actually stay neutral and we have seen another couple of times also with the sanctions part and other situations, which certainly have an effect on us, and that in the Board meetings as well.  I don't think we have a general solution for that, and I guess it's more case by case, but we actually monitor what the various countries are doing, not necessarily from a Board perspective, but, you know, certainly from what other regulations they are doing, how do they behave in the Internet ecosystem, what does that mean for us, what does that actually means for us in general as the member base.  So, yes, we monitor that, but otherwise we don't have a golden bullet and I don't think that would be necessary.  

HANS PETTER:  I can add to that, if I may, that we have indeed made a very detailed analysis of this internal spreadsheet with colours, if you like.  I don't, however, think that it's appropriate for the RIPE NCC to publish such an analysis of where we think there are conflicts or not in the region.  But we are very well aware of the conflicts.  Our external engagement and community department is looking carefully into this, and we are re‑evaluating our engagement strategy so that we are able to engage with the community as widely as possible to work around and avoid being in the middle of these conflicts.  It's quite clear to me that the landscape has changed over the last couple of years, and we are monitoring that closely.  So, rest assured that we do that, but I don't think it's appropriate for us to try to publicly make any interpretation of political conflicts.  

CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN:  Thank you.  Next question I will find funny because I will actually give it back in a second:  "Will you be doing something about the lack of diversity looking at the average colour, age and gender of the Board?" 

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We do, but to be honest, I give that question back to you, people.  You are the ones running and electing, so, the question is, what are you doing about it?  From our point of view, we do.  It is not that we, as members, have one world, right, we elect as well, but who is actually getting elected, we have certainly no control over that.  So then it comes back:   Who is running?  We actually try to encourage people and we see that we sometimes, you know, if people have an interest, especially when they have ‑‑ they are coming from different regions, we try to have certainly a geographic and culture diversity for sure and I guess one of the parts we had in the past was Salam, which was ticking that box certainly more than, I guess, the rest of us right now.  And then we talked to the people, tried to encourage them, explain to them how we work, what it means, what the workload is, and try to, you know, bring them to stand, but in the end of the day, if they do or not is one question, and then if they get elected, it's really up to the rest of all of us members.  So, yes, we do some parts, but I think our part is actually limited as we do not appoint ourselves.  

We have a lot of questions here.  

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I am coming back and I know that we have two or three people in the mic, so I will come back to you in a second.  Let me do more of the written ones and see if we can solve them, otherwise I'll stop somewhere in the middle and go back and forth.  

Next one:   "Will you request the RIPE NCC to restore the transparent statistics on the ticket response time and otherwise other metrics they decide to monitor in regards to customer service?  Do you think this would be a good idea?  If yes, can you ask them to provide such stats in realtime before the next RIPE meeting or for two meetings from now?" 

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We have seen that question in the Services Working Group.  We talk about ticket statistics and times in the Board meetings as well, so, the answer is yes, we would like to see something, but we also understand that, you know, it has to kind of make sense and be ‑‑ how should I say it ‑‑ that we are not just producing random numbers without either context or then, you know, they are not true or whatever.  I don't know in realtime, to be honest, but we will bring it back, and to be honest, Elvis, one of the reasons why it was on the Services Working Group and while it was such an agenda point as well was because, you know, people ask, especially you, if that results in a dashboard on a report, let's talk at the next Board meeting with Hans Petter, in realtime I am not sure about that, probably Hans Petter can comment.  I don't see the difference or... what "realtime" means in that case.  Realtime, for me as an ISP CDN person, means at one minute.  I don't see the benefit of that.  

HANS PETTER HOLEN:  Since you passed the question to me, I think I am committed to provide meaningful report on statistics in future RIPE meetings and, of course, to Board meetings.  I do think it's important to think a bit about the bigger picture here.  It's a team delivering this. I really want to empower the team to do their best in order to do the right things and not to be slaves of metrics and being monitored by all the customers.  So that's one side of it.  It's not up to me or Felipe, but it's more up to the team and the team monitors to manage their work on a day‑to‑day basis.  I really want to empower the team here.  If we can provide meaningful metrics, that would make sense in realtime, and I can think of one such metrics from my time when I was a customer, and that was when can I expect to get a response?  Right.  So back in those days, that was 20 days, so it was useful to know whether it was 15 days or 20 days, because if it was 20 days, I could go on a three weeks vacation; if it was two weeks, I could only go on a two weeks' vacation.  Now, we're in a much better state now, we're talking about days, and we are ‑‑ we are not in the situation that we were 25 years ago.  

So, if key metrics that are valuable can make the difference for the customers, sure, we can look into that, but I think the most important thing is to improve the service level and work on that and spend the resources on that, rather than making metrics that don't bring a value to the customers.  

CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN:  Next question:   "Does all RIPE NCC activity management are clear and transparent for the RIPE NCC Board?" 

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I would believe so. I want to believe so.  But the NCC produces, you know, on daily output, is of course a lot.  We get an aggregated view for most parts.  This is also, you know, like a part‑time side job, so this is not a full‑time job, so, of course, transparency, I want to believe yes.  How deep the informations are going, I am sure they are staying on an aggregated level and, to be honest, that is also our job, right.  The job of the Board is not to know every aspects but that we have hired Hans Petter and we see ‑‑ and we manage him.  So, of course, we can ask our questions and go in different directions, but then we stay on a certain level.  

So not different than any other Board job in general or not any different than any other organisation which we have self‑governed here in the Internet ecosystem.  

Same person:   "What is the current status of Alexa at RIPE NCC?" Let me say my status and then Hans Petter can correct if I'm not using the correct wording.  

He is currently suspended as we look into the whole case and into the investigation, and, till then, I think that part isn't changing.  This goes pretty much to what Hans Petter said before in the NCC Services Working Group.  Do you want to say anything more, Hans Petter, or do you think everything is said?  

HANS PETTER HOLEN:  No.  I can just reiterate that. For those who don't remember the whole story.  Alexa is a Ukrainian citizen, he was working in Moscow, in Russia.  He was picked up by the FSB and they suspected him of illegal activities and they expelled him from Russia, so he is safely back in the Ukraine.  Now, we put him on administrative leave after that in order to investigate the consequences of this, and we are in the process of wrapping up those investigations and reaching a conclusion on what is happening.  On the one hand, I see that he is a very valuable resource towards the part of the community, for instance in the Ukraine.  It will be difficult or impossible for him to work in Russia for the next number of years, and of course various governments may have various views on what the RIPE NCC should do here, but we are willing to make a call on what's best for Alexa and what's best for the RIPE NCC in this case.  So, as I said earlier, we will hopefully be able to make a decision and an announcement shortly.  

CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN:  Thank you.  Next would be Erik.  Erik, if you don't mind, can you queue again?  You cancelled it for the video, then you can speak as you probably intended originally and then we take your question there.  Is that okay?  Otherwise I'll read it out ‑‑ ah, here we go.  

ERIK BAIS:  This is the decks from the NCC itself.  Not my decks.  Let me see, how can I do this?  Anyway, I can't show the slides that I have in front of me.  Anyway, I'll do it without the slides.  

There is a ‑‑ during the report from RS by Marco, there was quite a lot of ‑‑ there were a couple of slides in his slide deck about the multiple LIR and IPv6 stockpiling, as you may know.  There is a graph in his presentation about the number of /24s that were allocated to LIRs that were not the initial LIR for members, especially in the last half year.  Same that we saw on the IPv6 stockpiling through multiple LIRs.  The question that I have is:   Now that we see the IPv4 waiting list moving up, there are already 177 LIRs currently waiting in queue, is the RIPE NCC ‑‑ or is the Executive Board planning to do something about signup of new LIRs for multiple LIRs?  So not the initial LIR per organisation, which would basically solve the waiting list, and would also solve the issue with the stockpiling of IPv6?  

CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN:  Ondrej, do you want to come in regards to the charging scheme because it has components in that?  

ONDREJ FILIP:  Sure I can.  After ‑‑ I think after Simon‑Jan's presentation I will present a new charging fee which will probably answer your question, because, in that new model, this will not, you know, make sense.  So, creation of multiple LIRs.  So I don't know if you want to wait after my presentation, and then, you know, discuss that, maybe that will be more appropriate, if you don't mind.  

ERIK BAIS:  Yeah, that's fine.  

CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN:  And last one:   "Is the Board also watching, observing the trading market for IPv4?  We get regular requests for sale by subnets."  

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We do, I do in my day job as well, and I am actually a private LIR and I also get e‑mails every two weeks at least, so yes, we do see that.  Sometimes, when they call me, I actually ask them where they get their info from and which details and information they are using, and ‑‑ but yeah, it is kind of fighting against windmills.  I am not sure if that had otherwise a particular other background or question, but we see it, we know it.  

Good.  That was the question section.  

Then, I think we move on, as these were the only ones, to the various topics, and I think Hans Petter is next, and some of the charging scheme for sure comes up later when we have seen the presentation.  

HANS PETTER HOLEN:  So, the first presentation is on strategy, if I remember correctly.  

CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN:  That's correct.  

HANS PETTER HOLEN:  Yes.  So, again, my name is Hans Petter Holen, I am the Managing Director of the RIPE NCC.  And the RIPE NCC management stuff and Board has been working together since May/June on the strategic document.  It sets out our key objectives for the next five years, it provides us with a clear direction that will strengthen our position, and, as I mentioned, it's built on input from staff, Executive Board and from the members and community.  

You can see the life cycle here for this.  We intend this to be a long‑term view on our planning, and still keep the annual activity plans and budget in the planning circle.  

The strategic framework contains, as usual, the mission, vision and values:  why we are here, what we want to achieve and how we want to behave while we get there.  We have a lot of factors, external factors affecting the RIPE NCC, so we did a PESTLE analysis to not only look at the threats and the opportunities, but do this in political and economic and so on and so forth.  

We have analysed our internal strengths and weaknesses and out of this comes the strategic objectives on the high level and more detailed strategic goals on how to achieve our objectives.  

Now, the next level for the organisation after this is approved by the Board in December is to then further develop the key result, how we measure that we reached these objectives and align that with the work that we're doing.  

So, the vision:   "Together, let's shape the future of the Internet" has not been changed in this situation.  Working with the strategy, of course, this is something that we'll come back to and see, well, is this a clear destination on where we want to be?  You could argue that it's not really, it's more about the journey, and I think the RIPE NCC being what it is, it is really about the journey on how to shape the future of the Internet.  

Our mission:   Being an authority of the unique Internet number resources we enable people to operate and develop the Internet.  As secretariat of the RIPE community, we are a trusted steward for the open, inclusive, collaborative Internet model, engaging and connecting people and communities.  

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Thirdly, as a neutral source of information and knowledge, we actively contribute to the stability and evolution of the Internet.  

So, the most notable change here is emphasising that we are the secretariat for the RIPE community.  

Looking at the values, and there has been several iterations of the values in the RIPE NCC before, but I don't think we have published them, or spoken much about them.  

We believe that we are trustworthy, and we build trust and confidence through competence, reliability, integrity and empathy.  We are open, we work in an open and transparent way.  We communicate our plans and actions and result in a clear and direct way and we give feedback honestly and instructively.  We are inclusive, we value diversity in our people and community and treat them fairly, respectfully and equally.  We seek out respect differences and variety in ideas and opinions and we are caring; we care about each other, and we care about other members and community and we care about doing a good job.  

So, in a more traditional commercial company, you may have seen organisational excellence, operational excellence, as the last one, but we thought that the caring aspect is more appropriate for a non‑profit membership organisation, but it's really also about providing excellent services because we care about the members.  

External factors and our strengths.  It's a wide range of factors that influence us, and we don't really know what the Internet will look like in five years and we don't really know what's coming next year, so this is, of course, just a point in time, but we have tried to take this into account when we built the strategy and we have identified 17 such factors in the political area, the economic area, the social society area, technical and legal areas.  

And we have also identified our strengths that we have that makes us confident that we can achieve our objectives, and it doesn't say here, but of course we also looked at our weaknesses and see where we have to improve.  

So, the five strategic objectives, and I'll go through them one by one:  

The first one is to support an open, inclusive and engaged RIPE community.  

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So this is where we come from.  The community established us as the secretariat of the RIPE community, so the goal is to support the community in being recognised as an inclusive and diverse and one that sees participation from all relevant groups.  

We also would like to create and foster environments and dialogues throughout the service region to maintain a highly engaged community, and also, support the RIPE community's open bottom‑up process on consensus‑based decision‑making.  

In addition to that, we also maintain excellent relationships with technical, governmental and standard bodies and increase community knowledge through learning and development activities.  

So, secondly, as we were set up by the community to be one of the regional Internet registries, we need to ‑‑ we are here to ensure that the registry and Ripe Database have the appropriate levels of accuracy, compliance, resiliency and security.  Allow updates to the registry to be done by automated processes with legally accepted digital means, so this is moving into the area of digitisation.  Improve the registry processes, service delivery and interfaces that allow members to carry out their operations with us quickly and effectively.  

And here, as for everything else, our next level now is to see how do we reach this goal, asking the question as measured by and then identifying the measurements so that we know that we're on the right direction.  

Thirdly, enable our members and community to operate one secure, stable and resilient global Internet.  So, it's a lot about not what we do for our own sake but what we do for our members and community.  So securing the Internet number resources by developing and operating a resilient externally auditable and secure resource certification trust anchor.  So this is all about our efforts in the RPKI, to make sure that the Internet can stay secure through this mechanism.  

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Support the global naming system by operating k‑root and DNS services.  I mentioned auth DNS earlier today.  

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Support the growth of the Internet through promoting the use of best practices for Internet resources and standards such as IPv6 and RPKI.  They could, of course, become more, but those are the most, two most important ones right now.  

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Be a centre of excellent for data, measurements and tools that provide insight to the Internet and its operations.  

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And support the innovation and evolution of the Internet through contributing to initiatives meant for the good of the Internet.  

Now, of course, in order to do all this, we need a stable organisation with a robust governance structure.  And, of course, as for any organisation, ensure our stability and financial strengths is a prerequisite for being here, but we also need to be resilient in the face of political, legislative and regulatory changes that have potential to affect our operations.  

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Now, we are part of the RIR system and we are operating a joint Internet number registry, the sum of the Internet registries of the five RIRs, and we need to protect and maintain that together with the others.  

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Maintain necessary levels of security and compliance with best practices and applicable regulations, and this is an area that has increased focus over the last five to ten years, where not only security in the sense of technical security, but also to be able to demonstrate that has become increasingly important.  

Now, in order to do this, we need engaged, competent and diverse staff.  And in order to reach this objective, we need to attract, develop and retain talented people from the across the service region, and that's been an objective since the start of the RIPE NCC, that we don't only want to recruit locally, but actually have a diversity in the staff that that reflects the membership.  

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Maintain a healthy organisational culture with engaged staff aligned with the organisational values.  

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And the third one which has become increasingly important during times of Covid:   Offer working mobility within the service region to support staff on the our vision, mission and strategic objectives.  So it's a delicate balance here with allowing staff from working from anywhere as long as it contributes to our objectives.  

Next steps:  

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I have seen there are some discussions on the mailing list already with the proposed additions to the strategy.  That is very much welcome.  We will compile a list of that, and add management analysis of the impacts of this, and present it to the Board at the December Board meeting, where they will do a final approval of the strategy.  

Any questions?  

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I see Constanze is asking for the mic.  

CONSTANZE BUERGER:  From Germany, and we provide the LIRG government.  From my perspective, I saw your point 4, that all the points are necessary.  From my perspective, I learned a lot in this year.  Germany is in a phase of restructuring, and the digitisation is a main point.  But the Internet community, all the things of infrastructure development are not visible; it's not visible in Germany, it's not visible in Europe.  So, from my perspective, we have to do much more than to stability, to give stability and to resilience.  We have to be aware this fact that we are not visible and we have to act.  We need a strong ‑‑ we have to be there.  We have to be ‑‑ to ensure that we are political seen in Europe and we have to bring in more voices of the technical community.  That's my point.  And I think it's really hard to understand that if we ask the politicians what is the right, what is infrastructure development, there are two less possibilities to be seen.  That's my point.  

HANS PETTER HOLEN:  Thank you very much for that feedback.  It's very useful.  And feel free to reach out to me or to Hisham or any of the people in external engagement, like Marco, who is working closely with Goldman's and trying to be present in this area already, so we'll make a note of your comments and see how we can further incorporate those.  I didn't see any more ‑‑ anyone asking to speak.  But there are some questions in the queue.  

CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN:  No, we probably should go to the next one.  I mean, you are still on mic, so if something comes up for the people, they can still ask after the second presentation for the first one.  

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HANS PETTER HOLEN:  So then the next one is Draft Activity Plan and Budget for 2022.  

So, yes, I just talked about the strategy.  This is then about the activity plan and budget for next year, and that document talks about financial figures, costs and statistics for each activity, and this is a good way to learn about our plans and if you make comments and contributions now, it could even influence the plans before the budget is final.  

We are now here in the planning cycle in November and then the Board will approve this in December, and then you will see the report from the previous years at our next RIPE meeting.  So the planning cycle is ‑‑ so that we actually make next year's plan before we made the annual report for the previous year.  

Strategic focus points for 2022 is, on the top of this list, is maintaining an accurate registry.  As Felipe said earlier today in his presentations, we do prioritise accuracy of the registry above other objectives in that area.  

Secondly, we are doing a significant increase in RPKI activities, and part of that is strengthening the infrastructure and we also have activities to strengthen the infrastructure of the Ripe Database.  

I mentioned security, risk management and compliance is an area that will receive more attention, effective engagement and outreach.  Hopefully, we are recovering from Covid and we can go back to actually doing outreach in person as well, but in case we will not, we will continue our virtual engagement here.  

Continue to support the RIR system and the wider Internet governance ecosystem and maintain an effective and sustainable organisation.  

The activity plan is split in four chapters, one on the registry, one on information services, one on external engagement and community and then the fourth one is traditional organisational support functions to main a strong organisation.  

Key activities in 2022.  

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I'll go through each chapter now and you can see the activities here.  

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The significant budget changes here is that we're almost doubling the RPKI budget.  Now, the second one here seems a bit strange, so we will have to rework that, because the team that is working on this is really not getting that much more in registering new IP addresses, but the resources are spent on transfers.  So, we'll make that clearer in the plan, I see that now.  

We have seen, as I mentioned earlier today, a sharp increase in the number of transfers, and I expect that will continue.  In this area, we see an increase of 9 FTEs and that is two new staff in the registry and we have then decided to convert two consultants in the four FTEs, because, roughly, we pay twice as much for a consultant as we do for a staff member and then adding three new staff members to the RPKI team.  And then the focus here is to look for ways to improve the efficiency and the response times.  

RPKI is one of our key focus areas, with an increased budget of 1 million, an upgrade of hardware security modules, a scale‑up of reports to improve availability and strengthen our infrastructure and publish a transparent report of findings in an assurance report, so that there will be a third party doing audits and producing reports saying that we actually maintain the RPKI infrastructure in a trustworthy way.  

And we will continue to automate the member checks against EU sanctions list to improve wait times.  So the objective here is, of course, that the sanctions should not unnecessarily delay anything in the registry.  

We are also working on a framework for managing the registry, so that ultimately that can also be audited externally.  We are, in conjunction with the monitoring for sanctions, we are using the same systems and vendors to monitor changes in members' legal structure, so that if the company changes name, if a company changes management and so on, that may trigger an alert so that we can contact the member and make sure that the data is up to date.  

We have improvements in the LIR portal planned, and the Ripe Database on the search, and on the next generations realtime monitoring.  

And there may be additional work here, depending on which of the recommendations from the RIPE Database Requirements Task Force the community decides to take up.  

So, the budget here is, totals up to 9 million for this area.  That's an increase of 6%, with an increase in FTEs of 15%, but, as I said, some of that is converting consultants to FTEs.  

Information services:   

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This is an increase in the budget for Atlas and a decrease in research.  That is mainly accounting purposes because we haven't clearly accounted on the differences between those two teams.  But it really makes it clearer that there is significant effort going into development and maintenance of Atlas and less time for research.  

Three new FTEs in this area, one in IT and the two others in RIPEstat and Atlas.  

DNS and k‑root, we're now offering hosted authoritative DNS to the wider community and this is a new service that members can apply for hosting the service, and we're increasing capacity on the current size.  

RIPE Atlas, we have signed a contract for the next level hardware probes and the probes are in the budget for this area, but there are also budgeted income in sponsorship for this, to fund some of these activities, not fully but some of it.  

We are, again, picking up the speed on improving the Atlas UI as we hire more staff, and working on more user‑friendly dashboards and APIs.  For RIPEstat, we are developing more automatic service monitoring so that can be used by the users to monitor services into RIPEstat.  

Also improving the UI and continuing to rework BGPlay.  

So the total budget for this area is €7.2 million, which is an increase of 3%, but with an FTE increase of 8%.  

External engagement and community:   

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And as you can see from the activity plan this year, we have changed the structure a bit, so we have now divided it in three areas because the structure in last year's activity plan was more fine‑grained but it wasn't that easy to separate the different themes, so now it's more organised on the groups that will work, so, for community building and member engagement, we will exploit hybrid and virtual business meetings.  Hopefully we will be able to meet in Berlin, but since probably not all of you will come there, then we will have to make sure that we have a good experience also for remote participants.  

Continue translations of key information.  And we did build a new media room this year, so that we can start to do more media, rich media productions on video and audio and so on, so that's exciting activities that we're looking forward to.  

And then we're also investigating other forms of member engagement.  Some new community members are asking:  What's this e‑mail thing?  I don't use e‑mail anywhere else.  So that's the last millennium, but that's been a good stable factor going through all the years, but, on the other hand, maybe there are other forms that we can use for support and other activities.  

Community learning and development:   We expect to return to in‑person training with safety measures in place.  Virtual training through webinars and RIPE Academy are an important part of our programme.  Increasing promotion of our certified professional programme.  

Community coordination and collaboration, focusing on a greater number of targeted national events.  Responding to public consultations and other opportunities to provide information and expertise to policy makers and increasing efforts to share the technical community's perspective.  

So, I think to the previous comment from one of our friends from the German government, is that we are doing some activities in this area, but we may want to do more here.  

In the first bullet point you can also see that we are targeting national events more than regional events moving forward.  Because of the political situation in the region, it's not easy to stay with the same definitions of such regions that we have done in the past.  

So the budget for engagement and community is 9 million euros in total, with an FTE increase of only one person, that's 3%, and the increase in OPEX is 6%.  Now, the steep increase in OPEX here is mainly because we have budgeted for two RIPE meetings that we didn't budget for and that we haven't spent in the last year, so it is ‑‑ it's not a significant increase in this area when you take out the effects of travelling and of Covid.  

Maintaining a strong organisation.  

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So, it's a significant increase in HR here and part of that is leadership programme and culture work internally, so spending more money on training internally.  And then a significant increase in information security and compliance.  

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Four new FTEs in this area.  It's a bit strange because there are two new FTEs in information, security and compliance and the two other new employees are not really new, they have been here, but they were, for some reason, not in the budget for last year, so don't ask why that is.  

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Facilities:   We will continue to support a hybrid way of working, so while the office is now open again, it's fully voluntary for staff to come here and work.  Of course, we need some staff, like reception and maintenance and so on, to be on site, but, other than that, we do not force people back to work any time soon.  Also, regulations in the Netherlands right now is still encouraging people to work from home, so it's a lot of room available in the office right now.  The contract, however, is for another five years, so we can't really start to discuss whether we should make savings on this yet.  

And then HR, launching a leadership programme and talent development programme, as I mentioned, and also spending time on investigating the possibility of us working from locations outside the Netherlands to support other staff.  As you know, I have been working from Norway in a large part of last year, although that has tax and social security implications and I am now in the final round of submitting my revised tax report in Norway, so we will see how this turns out in the end and I don't wish staff to get into the situations without knowing what they are up for before allowing that.  In principle, I would like staff to be able to work from anywhere, but as long as there are tax and social security limitations, there has to be limits to that as well, unfortunately.  

Legal:   

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Of course, it has a function to make sure that our procedures and frameworks remains up to date in line with developments relating to GDPR and other applicable privacy‑related laws and regulations.  Keeping our service agreements up to date and in line with our review of electronic signatures and follow regulatory and Internet governance matters.  

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So, really, the legal team is also heavily involved in regulatory affairs.  

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And then last but not least, working to seek a long‑term solution for sanctions that minimises the potential impact on our members.  

So the total budget for this area is another 9 million, which is an increase in 12% over last year, which is mainly in the information, security and risk compliance, and then it's a bit of shuffling costs around between the other areas.  

And then we have now also made fully transparent in the plan the separate budget for the RIPE Chair.  So that's also including travel expenses and other expenses for the RIPE Chair team.  

So, in order to have a plan to spend all this budget, which is the activity plan, we also need the income to match this.  So, we have a plan to invoice our members and we have an estimate of how many members we are going to have have 1st January, so that's roughly 33.7 million.  We do expect some new members which results in signup fees, which two RIPE meetings we would expect 250k in meeting fees.  Sponsorship is a mix of RIPE meetings sponsorships and Atlas sponsors, and then some other incomes adding up to 35.6 million.  

So if I then go back to this overview here, you don't see the depreciation and bad debt here, but there is then a small surplus when you add this together, I think around 400 K in the current versions.  Now, there may be some adjustments based on the input that is being suggested, but my aim is really to try to balance something that is zero or higher.  So don't expect the large refunds of next year.  

So to summarise this:   We have an increase of 6% on the top line.  10% increase in FTEs.  We expect 22,500 LIRs at the end of the year.  The cost per LIR is expected to be 1,576% [sic], which is an 8% increase.  Membership fee will remain at €1,400 for 2022, that's what you voted on in May this year, so we can't change that now.  But we then did agree to reduce the signup fee from €2,000 to €1,000, and we then see, as a result of the changes, a reduction of slightly less than €3,000,000 compared to this year.  And we do have, as I mentioned, an estimated surplus of €400,000.  

So, basically, we are seeing a slight decline.  We had a massive surplus the previous years; that has been redistributed, but we are now seeing the stop of that, and this is then the backdrop for the next presentations on revisiting the charging scheme.  

So, I believe that is what I have.  So, any questions?  So I don't see anyone in the microphone queue yet.  

We have one there.  Elvis is asking:  "Is providing access to the ticketing system one of the focus points for the RIPE NCC?  We have been promised a great ticketing system more than six years ago and all we have is a blank form."  

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So I will not make any comments on anything promised before I started.  What I am trying now, which I mentioned a couple of times, is that all teams will make quarterly plans.  So when something appears in a quarterly plan, then we will also deliver on it.  So improvements in the ticketing system, yes, that is on the next roadmap, as far as I recall.  I don't have the details in front of me.  And, of course, looking into the support system to make the RIPE NCC more efficient, whether that is ticketing system or automating processes that don't need to work through tickets, is definitely on the roadmap.  

I don't see any more questions, so back to you, Christian.  

CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN:  Thank you, much appreciated.  So let's see, that was planned activity and budget, brings us to line item number 6, the charging scheme.  

ONDREJ FILIP:  Hello, everybody, I am the treasure of the RIPE NCC and I have one of the most discussed topics that is usually presented at the GMs, and that's the change from the NCC charging scheme.  

So the current model has been with us for ten years, and so far it worked for that period, so that's a good thing, although, you know, we felt that it's not sustainable any more.  We would, anyway, need to do some changes, and later I will explain why.  So, at the last GM in May, we, and it was basically me on behalf of the NCC, presented a presentation, you know, talking about the future, the current charging scheme, and the history and, you know, it was a huge discussion and I am very thankful for that because, you know, we got a lot of good comments.  

We got an impression and a strong signal that the members would like to have more options for the charging scheme, which we definitely took into account.  On the other hand, there was no common viewpoint, you know, where to go, what we should do.  So, it was tough to reach a consensus.  So we decided to kind of work on that topic and we prepared a survey for you, for members, that we asked you what do you think about the future charging scheme?  And again, we got a lot of responses.  Precisely, it was 868 from 793 companies, legal entities, so a huge attendance, thank you very much for that, and, after this survey, we organised an open‑house meeting, you know, video meeting, that we went through the findings, and, you know, we discussed what is in those numbers and what that means for our future.  Again, thank you very much for participating in that.  In the preparation for this presentation, I ran it again.  It's really nice, 92 minutes of factual discussion, so thank you for your participation in the topic.  And of course we committed prepare something for this meeting.  

So, what did we learn from the survey and from the open house?  Basically, the majority was in favour of changing the charging based on resource that is held by the member.  So those were in favour of redeeming a separate charge for provider‑independent address space, again something we understand and it's in the current scheme as well.  Surprisingly, there was no strong signal saying, you know, that the charging scheme should support deploying IPv6 deployment.  I was quite surprised, I expected a little bit more technical enthusiasm, but that's how it is, thank you for this signal.  People were against using the charging scheme to conserve AS numbers.  Okay.  And, of course, you know, the whole discussion was about do not make it very complex, you know, do not make it too complicated, make it simple.  Kind of values that you valued most were predictability, simplicity and fairness, so those principles gained the most support from you.  So we took this into account.  

You know, if you are thinking about how your organisation should behave, if you are thinking about some change, of course the best thing you can do is look around and watch your peers, what they are doing, and we did, of course, the same, he we looked at the other RIRs, how the models work, and all of them have resource‑based model.  For example, you know, APNIC, their price starts at 1,180 Australian dollars and they have, you know, mathematical formula that says how the fee is calculated.  ARIN, their price starts at 250 bucks and they have a lot of categories; the highest category is almost 1,000 times higher, it's 256,000, so quite expensive, and so on.  

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So those were examples from all our friend organisations, and again, we learned a lot from them.  

Let me just remind you our current model, which is different from those organisations I named before, our model is based on the principle that we have one fee per LIR account.  It's not the same as member.  LIR account, which is €1,400, plus extra charge for PI space, €50 per PI space.  The signup fee for this year is still €2,000; that, you know, we propose to change, and it was agreed by you, it it will change after January 1st to €1,000.  So, that's the only change that this model or this principle really accommodated.  In fact, this model doesn't seem that all members pay the same price.  First of all, there are those PIs, and also members can have multiple accounts.  So, in reality, there is one member, and to be honest I was really surprised when I got this information, one member that pays over €100,000 ‑ thank you very much for that ‑ and we have four members paying more than €50,000 and 90 members that pay more than €14,000.  So that's the current situation.  Although the principle is simple and it looks like that it's the same for everybody, in fact it's not.  

We are also evaluating what it would mean if we were to keep this simple model.  I have a few ‑‑ two tables that I want to show you.  Those are, you know, just model, they are based on the fact I'd say that the assumption that you would freeze the company, that we will keep the same FTEs, we will keep the same structure of course, and that we would just add an inflation for the Netherlands.  The expectation from the Dutch bank is, you know, from 1% to 1.8%.  So that's the expectation for the next, I think, four or five years.  

So we included those numbers in the models.  Again, this is not a budget; it's just an example what would happen if we would continue using this simple scheme.  

And here you can see what happens.  You know, the old budget would be negative in 2023, and the deficit would increase from year to year, which is logical.  The number of members is declining, our membership base is a little bit shrinking and the members would pay the same amounts but the costs are, of course, increasing because we have inflation, we live in the real world.  So that's how this would look like.  

Look at the reserves.  You haven't voted yet, so I included all three options, what would happen with the clearing‑house redistribution, but if you took any of those options, you know, sooner or later they will run out of all results which is something we would like to avoid because, of course, the financial stability of the association is a key point for us, for all of us, I believe.  

So, certainly we have to do something.  So, we would like to present you two models basically today, and of course you can still keep the old one and you can just, you know, a little bit amend it, but ‑‑ so we'll have at least three choices, or maybe more we'll see in the discussion, so I will introduce you two models that we have prepared for you.  They have both have the same bases.  The bases is that we would distribute the membership categories.  So let me show you the categories.  We prepared six ‑‑ sorry, five categories:  extra small, small, medium, large and extra large, and those categories are for, you know, for this presentation, is an example how that would work, divided by several criteria.  We have either the size of IPv4 addresses that is, you know, assigned to that ‑‑ allocated, sorry, to the LIR account, or, based on IPv6 prefix or number of ASNs.  We were developing those three options, and actually if you look at the table, the distribution based on IPv6 prefix is not working superbly well because most of the members are in the category extra small ‑ it's 96%, which is quite a huge number, and, you know, that's not working perfectly.  Also, the distribution, based on ASNs, you know, doesn't help much with that, while, you know, the criteria based on IPv4 prefix makes a quite reasonable spread of the membership categories.  

So, as you can see, we have roughly 23 LIR accounts, and that would be the model of the categories.  

Let me continue.  So, this is what we chose.  Again, based on IPv4 prefix:   Extra small, /22 or smaller, small up to /21, medium up to /19, large up to /17, and extra large is just bigger than that.  And if you take all the current members, or LIRs, you can see that roughly 62% is in the small category.  The situation is a little bit bigger if you look at the members, because of course some members have multiple LIRs, but, you know, in this model it would make sense to keep multiple LIRs, I guess.  So that would kind of make the ‑‑ this problem go away.  

So, let's go to the model.  We have five categories, again based on resources, such as IPv4, but maybe a combination of all of them, you know, if you raise some rank in some category you just stay there, that would be simple.  And the basic fee for extra small would be €500 per year.  And every category would have doubled this fee.  Also, a new member will pay €500, and the same fee will be applied if you do a transfer or merger.  So, those transactions that creates the highest load, you know, which must be processed by legal team, by other people inside in the NCC, would be charged €500.  

Also, you know, we thought what to do with the rest of IP addresses, you know, we currently don't have IPv4, of course, we don't have many of them, but we hope that some will appear in the future and we thought how to deal with those IP addresses, and we thought it would be fair to create some fee for those IP addresses which will be based on market value.  A little bit below that, for the purpose of this presentation, we chose €5,000 per /24, but, please, it's something I will discuss at the end of the presentation, it may be changed but just take it for the purpose of the calculation.  

So, here are examples how this would work.  So let's imagine that we have, for example, a small company that just started and decided to allocate /24 from a free pool, let's assume that it's available, so such a company pays €500 as a new member, €500 as a new fee and €5,000 for those IP addresses.  If the organisation just allocates an IPv6, the calculation would just be much simpler:   500 fee, 500 for new member, so just €1,000.  If you are a small organisation, which is the majority of you, you would just keep €1,000, if you don't allocate anything additional, if you don't have any ‑‑ if you don't do any mergers and so on.  I have an example of a medium organisation that transferred IP addresses and did some merge.  So, €2,000 yearly, 500 transfer, 500 MNA, 3,000 in total.  One larger organisation that just transfers IP addresses, 4,000 plus 500, and an extra large that that doesn't merge and then allocates from free pool, so it's 13,500.  

This is just an example.  The reality will be different.  

Of course, we need to ensure that money will be sufficient for the RIPE NCC to operate, so we did some calculations.  Again this is a theoretical model, please don't take it as a granted, it's just how we calculate it, how we proved that the model can work.  It doesn't say that it will be exactly like that. It's not a budget, it's just a theoretical calculation.  And if you split all members, and we expect the shrinking of members, you'll be able to cover 34,000, let's say, €34.5 million, which is very close to what is the budget of NCC.  And if we will calculate additional one‑offs, and again this is an example, this is just an estimate, we don't have crystal balls, and I have one but I don't know how to look into it, so we didn't know what happens, but this is just an estimate of what could happen, is, let's say, we raise another €4.5 million, and that will, you know, create an overall income of €39 million, roughly, which will cover NCC's operations for sure, at least for the newer future.  

So, that was model A.  Again, keeping your heads to categories, because model B is based on categories too, but it has a little bit different way how to construct the whole fee.  

Let's say at that time base membership fee will be €200.  That's an interesting thing, because it can open a possibility for members who are not interested in IP addresses and just wants to participate as an option, of course, although we don't expect much of them.  And then you would pay €50 per PI, €50 per ASNs, and the category will be same, again based on IPv6 and IPv4 ‑‑ or IPv4 numbers.  And the lowest category would be €400 and the highest €6,400.  The mergers and acquisitions fee will be the same, and also for the newcomers, and again /24 from the pool will be charged at a discounted market value, again for the purpose of this presentation, is €5,000.  

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Again, theoretical model, some situation that you can think of.  So there might be a member without resources, that member would pay €200.  But, for example, somebody who is extra small and has one PI and one ASN, would pay 200 plus 50 plus 50 plus 400, so €700.  I think ‑‑ I don't have to read the line, you can probably do it by yourself, you know, extra large member will pay €200 plus €6,400.  If this member has some PI and ASN, it will pay another €50 and €50, so €6,700 in total.  You can also see some one‑offs, you know, again for a new member, for transfer, mergers and acquisitions and for allocation from the free pool.  

Let's move to the income, because again we need to be sure that this model makes sense financially for the organisation.  As you can see, this model brings roughly the same income as the previous one.  So, at least if you compare those two models, financially there is no big distinction.  Again, we will raise 13.5 million in recurring fees and roughly 4.5 million in one‑off, so roughly the same.  The difference is not really huge.  

So that's the model B.  And of course, we need to also discuss the price of the IPv4 addresses from the free pool.  As, you know,  as you probably see, the price is rising quite rapidly, especially this year helped a lot.  Currently, it raised ‑ if I can read from the graph ‑ roughly from $25 to $40 better IP addresses.  That depends on the size of the prefix and so on.  So, the pricing is rising quite rapidly.  

If you calculate what is the cost for the /24, if the price is €35, let's say 900.  If it's at 50, which were some peaks, it's €12,800.  If you look at how ‑‑ how cost effectively can you get IP addresses from the RIPE NCC, this year, for a /24 you would pay, if you would get it, you would pay €4,800.  Next year, if there is something available, you would pay €1,000 less, so that's makes the situation where you create a new LIR, and allocate something, while in 2003 it would be different.  Let's say you would pay some fee from either model A or B, and then the fee would be based on the discounted market price, how we would like to kind of calculate it, we don't know exactly, but we understand that we need to define some source of the market price.  One suggestion was that, possibly, Address Policy Working Group could play a role here.  I am always very happy to push some of our work to some other Working Groups.  And this market price would be set based on the market, of course; it might be monthly or quarterly, it depends on the formula that we would come with.  Then we would apply discount of, let's say, 20%, so that's how this price would be calculated.  Again, for the purpose of this presentation, I used a fee of €5,000, although it's not ‑‑ probably not absolutely realistic.  

So, what we expect to happen next.  

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I will open the mic in a minute, and I'm sure I'll get a lot of responses and comments.  Thank you for that.  Of course, if you are shy and you don't want to speak publically, you can contact us directly via e‑mail or SpatialChat, either me or my fellow Board members or Hans Petter or somebody from NCC, of course, it's up to your choice.  We would also like to publish more detailed information and get some input on the members list.  I am sure there will be a very nice discussion, and we plan to propose a model quite early in advance of the next General Meeting, so you will have time to digest, to calculate, to think about it, and we hope that we will ‑‑ you know, based on those inputs, that we would create a final proposal and you will vote on it.  

So that's the current plan.  And I'm opening the queue now.  Terence is asking:  "Why are you using comma to separate numbers?" 

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My country uses that, I'm sorry for that. 

"What about e‑invoice?"  

I am not sure what it means.  Hans Petter, can you please help me with that?  

HANS PETTER HOLEN:  Could we take the question to the charting scheme presentations and come back to the ones to my presentation?  

ONDREJ FILIP:  So that was to your presentation, I apologise.  Thank you.  

HANS PETTER HOLEN:  I would go all the way down to ‑‑ 

ONDREJ FILIP:  What was the first, which is related to ‑‑ Raza:   "Is there perhaps for future years or maybe something that financially encourages the return of IPv4 and ASes back to RIPE, perhaps a credit on the fee?  Of course, I realise it might stimulate nothing except [something] but it might lead to something being returned if fingers are crossed." 

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Interesting point.  I have never seen such a comment.  I don't how to make it technically, but definitely we will try to look at it, but, off the top of my head, I have no idea how to realise this because this is not easy.  But good point.  I don't know if somebody has something there right now, but I can just accept this as a comment.  Thank you.  

"Would you consider for next budget charging models to split the numbers of LIRs into categories 3, 4, no more, which would represent their estimated turnover?" 

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Well, I am not sure if I understand this question correctly.  Gregory, can you clarify?  

CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN: I have seen that on the mailing list before, there are...  [inaudible ‑ bad connection] company should pay... depending on their turnover and contribute to the ecosystem, I guess.  

ONDREJ FILIP:  I see, I understand, but... 

CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN:  In the past, we have seen that, that is certainly true.  In the past, there were not many voices for it and I don't think it came up in the open house much or in other forums like surveys or so, so, to be honest, we kind of dismissed that part, not even talking about the complication to actually measure and put that in, but we have seen it as one or two people actually coming up with that.  So, it's currently not on whatever you want to call it, the roadmap of what we are looking at.  

ONDREJ FILIP:  Okay.  Thank you.  Maximilian Emig:   "Why is there an X for /24s in the middle for small to large to small LIRs but extra large has the price listed?" 

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I think it was just an example how those LIRs would behave if they would like to acquire some extra IPv4 space.  So it was just an example.  Some models just to show you the calculation what ‑‑ how much the member would be charged if.  So, there was no logic; it was just an example of different behaviours of different members in different categories.  

"Medium with /20 means that all PA IPv4 hold by the members are summarised and if they exceed of total of 32 /24 networks will be categorised to the next category?" 

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Yes, you will assign all IP addresses and if the number of IP addresses will be higher than the number of IPs in /19, including that, then you will go to a higher category.  Exactly.  

Erik Bais:  "Is the presentation of Andrei Sandberg (?) to read back, it isn't in the supporting documents for GM?" 

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It will be definitely published, so I can't help you now, but if you want to see some specific slide I am happy to jump back and forth but I am sure it's going to be published immediately after this meeting.  

Daniel:   "For some of us, very clear, nearly ten years ago, 2012‑2013, that once IPv4 had deleted and the RIPE NCC will start allocate a one‑time /22, no /24, why did the RIPE NCC wait so much to take action?  Why did the RIPE NCC, back in 2010, allow the LIRs to request so many IP addresses without checking the actual utilisation of those resources?  Was the RIPE NCC ever of that many LIR at least from EE countries?  We are using those allocations for renting IP space for spam.  Of course... is there and thing and can be checked and taking on facts.  How was all things...... LIRs that only got /22?" 

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Thank you very much for that.  Honestly, I don't know what to answer because ‑‑ 

REMCO VAN MOOK:  If you will allow me, Ondrej, I'd like to response to that.  Daniel, I sense very deep and well‑founded frustration in your question, and on a personal level I can completely sympathise.  However, and here is the 'but' part:  What the RIPE NCC has always done, and has done so in I think in a very truthful way, is execute the policy, certainly when it comes to address allocation, that was set by the community.  And there certainly have been people who have tried to restrict issuing of address space in the ways you describe.  But that all failed in the community policy process.  It is not up to the Board to then go against the community policy, because that's sort of the foundation of the RIPE NCC.  

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So, yes, I wholly sympathise with looking back at the last ten years and having misgivings about what happened there.  But people were there, myself included, who tried to stop this, but it couldn't get consensus inside of the community, which is where this discussion was done and where this decision was made.  I understand that this doesn't ‑‑ this is not a satisfying answer, but this is what happened and why it's happened.  

ONDREJ FILIP:  Thank you very much, Remco.  I have got some more comments from others.  

"Does model A count only IPv4 PA or does it also include IPv4 PI in the counting?" 

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For the spread of categories, it counts all IP address space, PA and PIs together.  While in model B, that PI is charged separately.  But both models are, you know, makes total sum of IP addresses used by the member, or by the LIR account.  

Sorry, that was a question from Robert Scheck.  

I can see another question from Cynthia:  "I would like to see something to not charge for IPv6 PI resources in cases where the end user is holding IPv4 PI resources already in order to remove the financial burden of deploying IPv6." 

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Thank you very much, Cynthia.  I guess that's not a question, that's a comment.  I think we can include this in the calculation.  Kind of makes sense for me, but again, as I said at the beginning, that was not clear decision that the charging scheme should support adoption of IPv6, but I understand your point.  Thank you.  

HANS PETTER HOLEN:  If I may add to that, Ondrej.  So if you look at the different categories here and you see the distribution of assignments, you will see that the majority of the those who have v6 not be pushed up to the next category.  So if you're in the smallest category with v4 and you request v6, that will not change the category that you are in.  So I think that is actually taken care of in the proposal.  

ONDREJ FILIP:  Very true, but in model B it will be PI, I guess.  

HANS PETTER HOLEN:  Well, yeah, that's the question of ‑‑ but the €50 for PI is really because of the additional administrative burden of checking the end users which are not members so you could argue maybe that's a construction that we didn't want to have at all, that everybody should become a member directly rather than go through somebody else, but then that's opening up some other concerns but it would double the membership, roughly.  

ONDREJ FILIP: Thank you for that, Hans Petter.  And we have Christian Bretterhofer:   "Could you use to show purpose of cost per year in various models?" 

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I must say I have actually no... 

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Okay, that's more a question to NCC, if you can, you know, show the member which category would that member go.  Do I understand you correctly?  

HANS PETTER HOLEN:  So there is already a better version of the tool to do that developed by the Web Services Team as we speak, but we need to align on which model we want to present before we publish that.  But yes, there will be a tool out.  

ONDREJ FILIP:  Thank you.  Cynthia:   "Hans Petter's answer to my statement but that burden is already completed for the IPv4 PI if it's the same end user."  Yeah, I think that was what we discussed.  That PI ‑‑ additional IPv6 PI, she doesn't want this to be penalised, which I understand.  

HANS PETTER HOLEN:  Understood.  

ONDREJ FILIP:  Yuriy Bogdanov:   "What is the goal to change current membership fee model?  Is RIPE NCC not satisfied with anything?" 

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Well, it's not the NCC, it was the membership input that we should again take the charging scheme, to look at it, to try to propose some new ways, as some of members were not very happy with the current one, and so it has a lot of problems, we talked about multiple LIRs and so on, we also see that some members pay enormous money and so on.  So I think this wasn't really ‑‑ it hasn't started with NCC but it was more a membership‑driven thing, so ‑‑ but, you know, the members can always decide to keep the current model, that is absolutely no problem with that, although, as I said, we would need to amend it a little bit, but we can continue with the current model, but we have some new proposals on the table which at least you can think of.  

Daniel Nägele:   "Will NCC keep the current two‑year log on one amount after allocation, will that apply to transit resource too?" 

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Oh, good question, Daniel, I hadn't discussed that yet.  You know, again this is just ‑‑ this model is is not complete.  We haven't ‑‑ we didn't go through all the details of it.  My gut feeling is ‑‑ 

REMCO VAN MOOK:  That's ‑‑ the two‑year log is part of the current Address Policy and that's what we're executing, so if you want that changed, then that needs to be changed in policy, and, as a result, there is no part of a charging scheme.  

HANS PETTER HOLEN:  But you raise a very important point and if you look at the slides regarding the discounted market price that Ondrej talked about, that is to address that point because currently it's a combination of the charging scheme and the policy.  Now, if we discouple those and say, you know, whatever you have to pay to get address back from the RIPE NCC, here is what you have to pay, there is no need for that two‑year restriction any more and we can get rid of the whole constructions of multiple LIRs, which causes a lot of issues in our back‑end system.  So either we need to invest significantly in implementing that fully or we could get rid of the construction of the multiple LIRs just to have more address space.  So that's my motivation for proposing something that could change that.  

ONDREJ FILIP:  Thank you, Hans Petter, and thank you, Remco.  

We have a question from Petru:  "Do you realise that the top 5% of LIRs hold probably around or even more than 50% of entire IPv4 pool.  The fee increase for them is pocket change compared to what small companies have to pay.  It is one thing to charge a VPS hosting data centre company €5,000 per year and another thing to charge Deutsche Telekom or other huge LIR around €10,000 per year.  It's not simply fair related to amount of IP addresses versus amount paid." 

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I understand it, Petru, it's a very fair comment.  On the other hand, I don't think the current charging scheme helps with that.  I think the proposed a little bit increases payment for those large ones, although it doesn't go to extreme, but, you know, one of the features that the members wanted is predictability and some stability, so it makes sense to me not to make something super radical.  But the same problem, you know, stays with the current model, so, the proposed one either A or B is better in that little bit more fair if you look from your point of view, of course some other members might have different meaning.  

CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN:  Might I add something, Ondrej.  I sympathise with the comment or the question, I guess it was more a comment, to be honest, from the last one.  This is what we have seen over the last couple of years, right, some people were in having a different understanding ‑‑ I guess there is basically the battle between equality, fairness and where do we stay, what do with we do with that?  Which part is more important?  And that was also one of the reasons that we had a little bit problem in the past for the Board to bring new charging schemes, because the opinions were on the left and the right side, and finding a consensus was not easy with that one, so we hear these comments, but as far as I can say, there was not necessarily consensus on it so we tried the paths which we saw from all the various camps and tried to bring them together in the ideas today.  

ONDREJ FILIP:  Thank you, Mr. Chairman.  Again a question from Robert Scheck:   "Is there any chance for new address model which reflects the actual IPv4 address distribution across LIRs in an even more fair case?" 

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Well, there is always a chance, of course.  I'm not sure where this goes exactly, Robert.  If you can clarify a little bit, maybe I'll repeat the question.  You know, we ran the survey so we got the idea what we should do, how we would propose a model.  We tried our best.  Maybe we didn't make it super and we need to change it a little bit, you know, tune it, that's how it is.  Of course, if you think that we should make a bigger change, there is always a change, but I don't think ‑‑ I don't think the membership is... if I understand your question correctly.  If not, please repeat it, I will try to answer differently.  

We have again a comment from Yuriy:   "It's a good idea to extra charge IP holders that don't use their IP allocations.  It will help them to free resources and give it to companies who really need IPv4 Internet.  As far as I know, there are a lot of IP owners who doesn't use IP and IPv4 space utilisation is very bad according to the BGP stats." 

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That's a good point.  I understand, Yuriy.  And I think, you know, if you hold some resources and you don't use them but you pay for them, that's ‑‑ I think that's a motivation to do something with, especially with the current price in the market, it makes sense to transfer them to somebody else.  So ‑‑ and I think this model, a little bit helps, you know, the holders with a lot of resources go to higher categories and pay a little bit more, so I think this proposal, both proposals are aligned with your comment.  

And Andreas:   "What influence do the charging scheme options would have IPv4 legacy addresses space the LIR holds?" 

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Good question.  

HANS PETTER HOLEN:  We have not treated legacy in any special way in the simulation, so I guess this is one of the decisions that have to be made:   Should it be ‑‑ the category be on space regardless of being a PA, PI or legacy.  At least my intent was to look at address space as address space.  

ONDREJ FILIP:  Thank you, Hans Petter.  I'll wait 20 more seconds if something appears.  Then, if not, I will close the mic.  Again, the discussion is not over yet.  Feel free to contact us online, offline, whatever method you prefer, and we'll be happy to take your questions.  Thank you very much.  The mic is closed and I'm returning the floor to CK.  We can't hear you, unfortunately.  

JOB SNIJDERS:  He says in the chat we will go to Simon‑Jan.  

SIMON‑JAN HAYTINK:  Hello, everybody, my second time presenting at the GM.  I am the Finance Manager at the RIPE NCC.  I am happy to state that again we can report a stable financial position, a very similar year to 2020, but we do have a redistribution question to be answered.  

So let's get started.  

A quick recap of our financial strategy.  Our funding strategy aims to generate sufficient income so that we can fulfil our obligations in a stable and predictable manner.  A flat fee per LIR has kept things straightforward and predictable since 2013 and we are committed to maintain a low‑risk profile.  

The financial update.  

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All indicators are green, number is over budget, costs are under budget and we have more LIR accounts than anticipated.  In short, the RIPE NCC is in a financially sound position.  

The 2021 numbers so far:  

Our income is 9% over budget.  This is explained by the signup fee number of €5.1 million, which is €3.1 million more than budgeted.  A major increase in new LIR accounts in the month of October, we had 566 new LIRs, but we also have to report 427 closures.  This totals 23,789 LIR accounts and 20,297 members at the end of October.  

Expenditures.  13% under budget mainly due to the effect of Covid.  The e‑count is 161.1 on average compared to a budget of 170 FTP.  This has resulted in a surplus of 10.7 million at the end of October.  This is 118% above budget, but almost identical at 2020.  

Our balance sheet:  It remains very healthy, specifically these signs, we have a very sound financial position.  Financial fixed assets do show a decline, explained by two government bonds reaching end of term in 2021, totalling 1.6 million.  These funds from been added to cash.  A reinvestment decision has been postponed at this point in time due to the treasury project.  

The next slide I will go a bit more on capital and liabilities.  

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A steady clearing house over the years.  A surplus of October 2021, and 2020 are about far and above the same level.  In 2020, we reached 100% percent of the surplus and in 2019 we redistributed 50.  This slide shows the effect of the redistribution, of lowering the surplus and increasing the fees to be redistributed to our LIR accounts and members.  

In 2019, tax payable over the surplus was 2 million and is reported to other current liabilities.  Overall, happy to report a very health balance sheet.  

Income:   

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Income is at €34.9 million, annual membership fees at €39.8, compared to €31 million in 2020.  The signup fees are at €5.1 million, compared to €2 million in 2020.  We have had zero income from the RIPE meeting and a very low other income due to Covid.  

New LIR accounts and closures:  

In 2021, new LIR development showed a clear increase due to the IPv4 free pool.  We do not expect this trend to continue for the remainder of the year, as the free pool is empty once again, or at least almost empty.  The closures clearly show the consolidation effect taking place.  

Members and LIRs:  

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It compares the number of LIRs versus our members.  From the end of 2020, we can see a slightly increase in trend of our members and LIRs.  We have forecasted that the number of LIRs, the basis of our income budget for 2022 at 22,500.  And we expect a number of members to be around 20,000 at year end, as we do anticipate some closures from members as well.  

Membership income compared to previous years.  The forecast of membership to be €41.4 million at year end.  With 22,055 LIRs, this provides an average income of per LIR account of €1,840.  This increase compared to 2020 is explained by the high input of new LIRs which provide high income to be the signup fee and a lower amount of LIR accounts of 2021.  

Impact of Covid‑19 on income:  

Looking at the payment behaviour of our LIRs, we can state that Covid no longer seems to have an effect on payment behaviour, which is very positive.  The 2021 behaviour is almost exactly similar to the last normal year we had, 2019.  

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Banking relations:  

As the RIPE NCC, we need our banks in order to provide our services to our members.  Our banks are applying closer scrutiny to their compliance with the sanctions and anti‑laundering money legislation.  This comes after two major Dutch banks were fined for non‑compliance.  

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While we appreciate the position of our banks, a lack of clarity on or exact compliance obligations as set by the banks has made things difficult.  

We are, however, making progress and our banks appear to feel more secure as we have improved our sanction screening, supplied details of know your customer and due diligence procedures to our banks.  Some exposure does still remain, especially in countries where banks consider high risk, such as Iran and Syria.  It is our best guess that this concern is linked to our banks' operations in the United States.  

So what does this mean in practice?  We have not invoiced affected members.  The payment obligations have been postponed, not cancelled.  Initially we postponed invoicing 453 LIR accounts for the 2021 membership fees.  386 of these members were invoiced in July.  This leaves 67 LIRs that have not been invoiced yet.  

To make it clear, this is in regards to concerns from our banks, rather than requirements under EU law.  And we will, of course, continue to search for long‑term solutions.  

Expenditures:   

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Total expenditure:   23.8.  13% under budget.  Payroll and personal expenses at 14 million and 3% under budge.  Other operating expenses:   8.6, 26% under budget; and depreciations and bad debt are at 1.2 million, which is 9% over budget.  

Budget variances:  

In total, we are €3.6 million under budget.  Personnel is explained by being on the budget FTE.  Other major items such as travel, etc., can be explained by Covid‑19.  We are over budget in the IT infrastructure with 400k, which can be explained by the business licences or increased due diligence.  This budget was originally placed as a budget in consultancy, which explains being over budget in this category.  

The variance in consultancy of €75,000 requires a bit of additional explanation.  According to the numbers, we are on budget.  However, in October 2021, we reclassed our outage and PR consultants from outage and PR to consultancy.  The reason is to provide a truer and fairer view of the costs as consultants and should be report as such.  The total correction was €510,000, which uses the free budget which was intended from the IT infrastructure mentioned in the previous slide.  So, all in all, we are on budget regarding consultancy.  

Outreach and PR:  

The biggest budget variance of 2.2 million, and this is mainly explained by Covid.  RIPE meeting, regional meetings, training and outage and PR and marketing are all under budget.  I am looking forward to a year in which I do not have to use the word "Covid".  

Our procurement reports, October year to date:  

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Total turnover with all our suppliers is €10.8 million.  1,405 invoices so far, with an average of 7,722 per invoice.  We have 20 invoices that individually were €100,000 or more.  44 invoices related to capital expenditure, averaging €3,823 per invoice.  One of these 44 invoices has been bigger than €25,000.  Overall we use 287 suppliers, providing an average of €38,000 per supplier.  

Our 15 suppliers with a turnover of €100,000 or more, including VAT.  First of all, staff pension:  €1 million to our pension provider.  Number 2:  IT housing.  This concerns the rental of physical space to store servers, network and storage equipment.  Those costs include service costs such as electricity.    3.  Office rent concerns the rental of our Amsterdam offices.  

Moving on to the next page.  Number 9  refers to the purchase of support for hardware owned by the RIPE NCC.  

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Number 10 concerns laptops for staff, based on lifecycle replacement and new employees.  

11 and 12 concern Cloud suppliers and one is a direct Cloud supplier and the other one is an intermediary which supports, educates and helps develop Cloud infrastructure.  

The overall impact of Covid‑19 on our expenditure:  

Nothing new here.  Again, 2021 and 2020 are very similar.  No physical meetings, personal training courses or travel.  Overall, 3.6 million under budget.  

Overall expenditure.  We forecast a total expenditure to be €29.7 million for 2021.  Just about the same level as 2020.  This breaks a trend of reducing average cost per LIR.  This increase is explained by the forecasted reduction in the LIR accounts by the end of the year.  We started with 23,569 compared to a forecasted endpoint of 22,500.  

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Treasury:  

An update on treasury.  At this moment, we have 388,000 unrealised negative financial result overall.  This consists of 398,000 unrealised negative revaluation result on a 10.3 million investment portfolio.  831,000 posted interest income, resulting in an overall negative 261k result on our investment portfolio.  We have seen strong fluctuations over the year due to volatile markets, even for investments that are considered to be safe.  We have €39.4 million cash in hand at the end of October.  We paid just under 0.5% negative interest on this cash.  168k negative interest year to date and a positive 47k exchange rate result.  Totalling €388,000 unrealised negative financial result.  

As a result from this is that we are in close cooperation with Executive Board, reviewing our current treasury [something] with a desired end result of a professionally‑managed investment portfolio that better serves the RIPE NCC and its members.  

This brings us to the surplus.  Our surplus for end of October is €10.7 million and we forecast a final surplus at €11.6 for the year.  Again, very similar to 2020.  If the GM would vote for a 50% redistribution, that would mean an average redistribution of €257 per LIR, and a 100% redistribution would mean €515 per LIR.  

Comparing the overall picture to previous years, it becomes clear how similar 2020 and 2001 actually are.  Membership income is slightly lower in 2021, signup fees increased significantly.  Income and expenditure overall are on the same level, as is the surplus.  

Capital and liquidity:  

We are balanced and healthy.  A clearing house buffer of 32 million is (inaudible ‑ connection lost) helps us to respond to uncertainties.  We are solvent and we have a strong financial position and therefore we are ready for the future.  We do have to consider carefully the redistribution vote as our Executive Board already mentioned.  As with the 2022 budget level we will go below 100% capital expense ratio if the surplus is redistributed in full.  

So, the redistribution of the RIPE NCC surplus of 2021.  A brief explanation of the rationale:  

We have made four scenarios and it's estimated the likelihood of each scenario.  The first scenario:   Continuation of current ongoings.  In our eyes, this is the most likely scenario.  Included here is the consolidation effect in which LIR accounts slowly decrease to around 20,500, which is about the level of members of the RIPE NCC.  

Scenario 2:  A Decline in income.  According to us, the possible scenario, however this can can deemed as negative outlook.  

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Scenario 3:  10% increase in income.  Unlikely, but very positive scenario.  

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And 4:  A worse‑case scenario in which is we have zero income from 2023 onwards.  We have classified this as next to impossible.  

In all scenarios, we have had to make several assumptions.  These have been, the charging scheme remains as is today.  FTE and other operational expenses remain on budget level at 2022.  And we have included a 2% yearly increase for salary‑related costs and 1.8 to 1% yearly inflation rate.  

Rationale:   

Only if we believe that income will decrease with more than 10% we could argue for a 0% redistribution.  A 100% redistribution is possible, but should be dependent on membership and/or fee increase.  A worst‑case scenario warrants a zero percent redistribution to ensure the stability of the Internet for as long as possible.  

Our advice to the Executive Board:  

Advise our membership to vote for option B, redistribute 50% of the 2021 surplus.  This provide an expected capital expense ratio of 104% And provides a stable financial position to operate soundly and continuously as per the intention of the clearing house.  

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Also, this is likely in the very last year we will run a large surplus, if nothing else changes.  

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Examples here could be Covid.  Let's hope 2022 we'll be back to normal and we can meet again face‑to‑face and of course the outcome of the charging scheme could have an effect.  

My very last slide.  What will it mean financially:  

These ratios are based on 2022 budget.  Option A needs a clearing house of €41.2 million with a capital expense of 116%.  This will mean paying taxes of approximately €2.8 million.  

Option B:  Redistributing 50% would mean adding €4.3 million to the clearing house, providing 104% capital expense ratio, accompanied by a tax payment of about €1.4 million.  

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Option C:  Redistributing the full amount would leave the clearing house as is and would mean a zero percent tax ratio with a capital expense rate of 92%.  

And that leads me to my very last slide.  And I am happy to answer any questions.  

CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN:  Thank you.  Can you hear me?  

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We start with a question for Simon‑Jan, then we jump back to Jerome's question, which we ignored, sorry for that.  Let's wrap all of these things up.  

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Questions for Simon‑Jan:  

There is a question from Erik Bais:   "If the NCC is looking for a replacement of the CFO position.  If it has been decided to not fill that vacancy or is it on hold?"  

That's more Hans Petter's question, I guess.  

HANS PETTER HOLEN:  Sorry, I have an excellent finance manager managing my finance department, so, I have no immediate plans of hiring any new management there.  And I won't go into the specifics on uses of titles here, but with the ‑‑ with respect to finances, I think they are in excellent hands with Simon.  

CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN:  I can comment on that from a Board perspective.  We actually, in our presentation and the information we get and everything, very happy.  So we certainly were not pushing, not that it is our business anyway, but we certainly were not pushing in that direction.  

Good.  Then, Simon‑Jan, you seem to be off the hook.  Thank you.  

Then, Jerome, finally.  Let me scroll up and give you the microphone.  

JEROME NICOLE:   So, I was initially planning to intervene on Ondrej's presentation but Simon's is also very interesting.  I mean, so let's start with Simon's, please.  Bearing sanction countries for political purposes and compliance obligation is an issue to freedom of communications, is there any way we could envision to use cryptocurrency within the RIPE as to alleviate our dependency to such sanctions?  

HANS PETTER HOLEN:  I guess that's a question that we would have to pass to our legal department.  I think my quick assessment is that, as a Dutch organisation, we are bound by Dutch law so we have to adhere to sanctions.  

JEROME NICOLE:  I understand.  We have in Simon's presentation saw some volatility in the investment portfolio.  Is there any prevention of the birth of the current speculative bubble around quantitativising since 2008, which has deeply affected our telecommunications sector in Europe?  And can we assess how much ‑‑ how many buried assets from non‑responsive local Internet registries do we have on the books to cover for that risk?  

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CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN:  We are undecided to answer the question.  Let me start it and see.  To be honest, for me, there were two different questions which are not related to that threw me off or I didn't fully understand.  But let me try and we'll see if it answers it.  

JEROME NICOLE: It's just about volatility and cover rate.  

CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN:  Yes.  

HANS PETTER HOLEN:  Yeah, so the current investments are very simplified in two areas:   It's cash in the bank and the current situation in the euro zone is that there is a negative interest rate in the bank.  So, that is, of course, very stable from any fluctuations but it is negative for the moment.  

The other part of the assets is in interest‑bearing papers issued by government, so that is always very stable from fluctuations in the markets such as telecoms and so on, but it is not a really good market to get any income at the moment.  So, we have a very conservative profile which is very resilient to fluctuations but with the current market it gives a negative ‑‑ it has a negative result, unfortunately.  

JEROME NICOLE:  Let me here.  The obligative and investment market in general is on negative fees, but IP v4 blocks prices are rising.  So, recovering such assets and stacking them will be beneficial to the future financial profile for the entire community.  Is that something we can agree on?  

HANS PETTER HOLEN:  I will just say that, let's take that into account when we discuss the further developing the investment profile and the charging scheme.  

JEROME NICOLE:  All right.  Thank you very much.  

HANS PETTER HOLEN:  Interesting thoughts, but exactly how to act on them, I think the Board needs to think about that.  

JEROME NICOLE: Yeah, sure.  It's developing a thought to develop by mail and I will have further exchange on that.  

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You presented us with three scenarios requesting ‑‑ concerning redistribution.  Obviously, C looks better to members, though our contribution to the Netherlands and European tax frameworks is a clear marker of our benevolency to the community, so could we consider that it is necessary to pay taxes?  

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SPEAKER:  Can I ask you to repeat that question.  Is it necessary to consider paying taxes or to consider not paying taxes?  

JEROME NICOLE:  No, I'd rather pay taxes because it is in our current state of mind to contribute to the community and not to undermine it, so trying to erase our tax profile will be detriment al to our state of mind.  

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SPEAKER:  To be honest, I think we are a non‑profit status, if we do indeed break even there is no tax obligations in the Netherlands, of course if we decide or the GM decides to add cash to the clearing house, we will have to treat that as a profit and that then will be taxed by the Dutch tax authority.  Does that answer your question?  

JEROME NICOLE: In most part, yes.  But there is a follow‑up, I'd be glad to take time to talk to you.  I'm also uncomfortable with the RIPE NCC publishing valuation for IP blocks.  I mean, sure, we have to keep track on the market, but would you consider that publishing the current value is also a trap to attract speculators to invest in IP blocks, because I have already seen that, I see vulture funds trying to acquire IP resources, and I am really concerned that the, what we have experienced in the past month would stop innovation and access to the market to new entrants.  I'd like us to take a precautionary measure.  I don't think a knock on market valuation is profitable in our global community interest if we're not putting market caps, value caps, on the transfer of resources, and we all know that putting such caps in place will lead to a black market instead of a grey market.  So, which compromise can we envision is full transparency suitable to the current situation, or should we try to liberate a bit more?  

HANS PETTER HOLEN:  So, I can start answering and then the Board can think while I am answering just to answer this.  So currently the RIPE NCC is not publishing the prices of IP addresses.  The Board has asked me to be updated on that, but we have not found a structured way to do this yet.  When there is a transfer in the RIPE NCC registry, we do not know the transfer costs.  

Now, in this presentation for the charging scheme, I believe there was one or two links to Open Sources for recent transfers on some auction sites or some other market places, that's in no way representative, that was just included there for the purpose of the discussion.  

Now, if the RIPE NCC were to step ‑‑ take a step further and be involved in the transfers so that we knew the value, we could, in theory, also publish them, but that is not in the current set of transfers, so if the members or the Board wants to move in that direction, that would be a significant effort to do that.  

Whether or not having transparency in the market is a good thing or not is a different matter, of course, and I have a lot of friends working in different types of markets like shares, electricity and so on, that has opinions on this, but yeah, or IP address market.  So I don't know if anyone on the Board wants to add to that.  

ONDREJ FILIP:  Maybe I will clarify the question.  Jerome, was your remark related to the charging scheme that we shouldn't follow the market price in the charging scheme that was presented?  

JEROME:   Yes, I think that's part of my position in terms that the charging scheme reflects current market positions and current speculation, the pressure on the market.  And so, it is in fact a reflective of the current position of potentially hostile actors, and that I'd like to prevent us, the community from them.  

ONDREJ FILIP:  Okay.  That's understood.  I understand it.  On the other hand, you know, the current system, we don't set ‑‑ we don't follow the market price on the other hand since our kind of price per IP addresses is much below the market, you know, that led to an increase of new members and that led to the empty IPv4 pool.  So that's why we wanted to introduce some mechanism to allow newcomers to get some IP addresses from the RIPE NCC, because otherwise they would anyway buy them from those market, IPv4 market traders.  So... 

SPEAKER:  Yeah, sure, but I think transparency can be a solution, crypto can be another part of that solution but there is still a third component to be created, and that's on our collective hands to create, and identity really like to get a focus group on that and that would probably be a new Working Group.  

HANS PETTER HOLEN:  I think you raised an important point here that I didn't think about when I made that proposal to the Board some months ago.  I mean, in an idealistic world, that we should hand out the addresses to those who need them, right, but it's a very difficult to determine what is the need.  So, market thinking is that if you are willing to pay, then you have a need.  But then as you say, it opens for speculation.  

I believe there was a proposal in the Address Policy Working Group yesterday to maybe auction off addresses from the free pool when they become available rather than the current setup.  So I think ‑‑ 

JEROME NICOLE:  Address Policy Working Group and I mean we're not currently in a functioning state on the APWG, maybe we should split into something more futuristic.  

CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN:  Thank you.  

JEROME NICOLE: That will be all because I had another point but I think I took another of your collective time.  So sorry for that.  

CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN:  No problem.  Thank you.  We have last, one last one, Erik.  

ERIK BAIS:  Interesting discussion on how Address Policy is working here.  If you want to have a discussion with me on that, I'd be more than happy to entertain that, especially about how Address Policy is doing currently.  

So, coming back to the question that I made earlier.  We have had lengthy discussion here on the charging scheme.  Auction off IP space.  If we look at how the waiting list has been working, I think it has been doing a very good, you know, it has a very good intent to provide IP space that comes back from the reserve pool for newcomers that ‑‑ to provide them with at least some IP space.  

If we look at these stats that Marco has presented from the Registration Services, as well as the stockpiling issues that RS has been addressing several times to Address Policy, to the mailing list, there is definitely something that I think the Board can do here.  The time for multiple LIRs has passed.  I have raised this before.  I think it's served its purpose.  I think we should stop adding new multiple LIR requests and do this on a very short‑term.  This will solve the waiting list and this will solve the stockpiling issue.  

So, yes, we still have some, in the current queue, the waiting list is currently filled, I think in a couple of days we had already 170 LIRs waiting for an additional /24, there is still enough in the reserve pool for new LIRs that actually are new LIRs per organisation.  I think this is definitely something for the Executive Board to step up and actually get some action and do something about this.  

CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN:  Yeah, I am not sure about that.  The multiple LIR and the member part, if I understand you correctly, I mean, at the end of the day what happens is, right, people really want to go for the /24 and wait, then they register new companies or do other parts.  So, we didn't seem to have solved that issue in whatever the last decade.  

ERIK BAIS:  I don't agree with you on that.  You know, auctioning off IP space in a charging scheme, I don't think that is the place for the NCC where it should put itself into.  It is substantially harder for the companies that are doing this to set up new organisations each time, to get onto the waiting list.  Yes, it is easier in some countries, but, you know, we need to see, you know, how easy it is currently to actually become, to open up a second LIR, put your credit card in, get a second /24, or your 50th, you know, the market is running so fast currently on the open market, and, you know, I have a broker that I am a director of, I know exactly what the pricing is, it is actually much easier to actually going to the NCC and tell the customer, you know, open up a new LIR, and this is also what other companies are doing.  I think the intent for the policy was for new registrants and not for companies to ‑‑ that already have an 18 or a 17 or how much space they already have, to open up new LIRs and get LIR number 35 with an additional 24.  This is not how we intended the policy.  And I think we can have any discussion in Address Policy on this, but this is something that the Board needs to shut down.  

CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN:  Okay.  I hear you.  One last comment and then probably someone else from my fellow Board can jump in as well.  I see the notion when, you know, we had 24 whenever you occupy your LIR and you got your /24 and of it fine it was just the process time of the NCC.  But now with the waiting list, do you think that a 24 has the value that the uncertainty and the unpredictability on when you get is it still random to spin off companies?  

ERIK BAIS:  CK, we run the numbers.  We know exactly how much the NCC has in the reserve pool.  This is not gambling what those companies are doing.  They know exactly what is in the reserve pool.  When it comes out of quarantine, so it's just a number game and the NCC is losing on this.  This is not the intent.  Because there are people that are actually doing this and I know for sure, you know, if there are 500 people on the waiting list here, then at some point, there is space coming back into the reserve pool six months later they are on top of the list.  This is not rocket science.  The market is working against us here.  

CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN:  Okay.  Got you.  Anyone else want to comment besides that ‑‑ I don't have an answer for you right now, what that means for us, or for the ‑‑ we will talk about that but I hear your part.  

ERIK BAIS:  Okay.  

CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN:  You have certainly more information that I personally, so thank you.  

ERIK BAIS:  I'd be more than happy to provide some insight.  

CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN:  I was wondering if I need an account.  Do you offer a ticketing system?  

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Okay, talking about Elvis, that was all from you Erik?  

ERIK BAIS:  Yes, it was.  

Elvis is next.  You seem to have disappeared.  Okay.  Let's see how quick that is.  We might not all wait.  Sorry.  

A quick comment.  I wanted to make about the ticketing system.  

That's my personal opinion, that's not necessarily a broad statement in any way.  We talked about it in the ticketing system as the NCC and the members in the last couple of years.  So that resonates with me and I can remember that.  I also can say that certainly since I was German, it wasn't a line item on the agenda, so, you know, when members say the ticket system is crap, and but leave that, then there were very few people actually saying that and, you know, considering how many members we have, then that was not a big surprise, and then when the NCC was saying we are working on either making it better, it was probably the extent of what paid attention.  

That didn't seem to be the case today when I was following the whole text when people actually were writing, so fair enough it was eight people or seven and not 20,000, but I think we have a story there, and what we will do is we will actually put it on the the next Board agenda, I already did and have a look at that.  That's all I can promise right now but you certainly now have our attention.  That is what I wanted to say to that.  

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Good.  Elvis, you are first and then we have two more things and then I slowly want to wrap that up here.  

ELVIS VELEA:  Can you hear me?  So I didn't want to say anything about the ticketing system now.  Since you mentioned it, yes, I would love if it could be an item that we could discuss, it's been years, and maybe it affects some more than others, but for sure, it affects me and it would help me a lot if I would have access, even though everyone hates it, right, but ‑‑ 

CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN:  I can I understand it first what the problems, so we'll talk about it, I'm not promising you get a new one.  

ELVIS VELEA:  What I wanted to say is, although I do my best to disagree with Erik on every topic, I agree with him on this one a lot, and that is the multiple LIRs thingy.  So, I know not everyone wants to talk about price per IP address, but the price per IP address is more between 50 and 60 now and it will continue growing as it has over the past few years, and right now, becoming a member and getting a block of a /24 costs about a third of that.  So, speculators will see that they can make 300% in two years and will keep on registering multiple LIRs.  

I also agree with you, CK, because I also believe that speculators, when they will have a barrier to register multiple LIRs, they will go and register multiple companies.  However, in the end, the gain on a /24 is less than, I don't know, 5, 6, 7 thousand dollars after two years, considering today's prices, so, the fact that the gain has gone down because the size of the block has gone down from a /22 to a /24 will also make a lot of them to think twice if they really want to do this for every /24 they want to get.  So they really want to open a company for every /24 they get.

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So, as I said, I rarely disagree with ‑‑ sorry, I rarely agree with Erik, but this time I do, and I think the Board should look at maybe banning multiple LIRs, and I don't know if there is any other option that the Board could think of to prevent people even opening multiple companies to get /24s, that might be also something that could be very interesting to think about.  

CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN:  Thank you.  Do you have anything else?  

ELVIS VELEA:  No, that was all.  Thank you.  

CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN:  Two last ones.  Then we go really forward.  We have a question which was in the Q&A chat from Yuriy:   "How much funds does the RIPE NCC have in the reserve funds and, on bank, what's the total reserve amount?" 

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SIMON‑JAN HAYTINK:  Yes, I am happy to answer this question, of course these figures will be the audited financial report.  At this moment, we have a clearing house reserve of €32.4 million.  We have €39.4 million cash in the banks and in the deposits.  We have an investment portfolio of 10.3.  That 32 million of course is part cash on the bank and the investment portfolio.  

CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN:  Thank you.  Now I am confused.  Is America an NCC person?  (MA RE K) then I ignore that.  Someone wants to upload slides now.  So ‑‑ 

HANS PETTER HOLEN:  I think Marek has been in the queue to ask a question.  

CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN:  But he doesn't have a microphone.  He want to pre‑load slides.  That doesn't seem helpful without a voice or a video.  So, Marek, you probably hit the wrong button.  You can either request a video or microphone, or a ‑‑ write it in the Q&A.  I was just asked there ‑‑ we have another question which we kind of ignored before, it was asked if we have e‑invoice?  

HANS PETTER HOLEN:  I can answer that.  We currently don't have that.  It's on my list of things to look into.  Although I know there is an initiative to make this cross‑border operable within the EU.  I am not aware of any initiatives which would make this fully operational in all countries in our service region.  So, we haven't started to do detailed investigations there yet but it would be something that we could add to our backlog on the systems moving forward.  

CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN:  Thank you.  

Good, I was tempted to click the button, but everything security related he says no, don't.  Good.  That was all the questions.  And with that, thank you.  

We come slowly to an end.  Line item number 8.  Talking about the voting on the resolution.  And as usual, this gets presented from the NCC.  

KARLA LIDDLE‑WHITE:  Hello everyone, my Karla Liddle‑White, and I am from the RIPE NCC communications team.  I am going to take you through the voting presentation.  

So, with an overview first, we had 19,295 eligible voters and 1,577 votes registered, which made a turnout of 8.2%, and 74 countries.  

Registration by country:   There was Germany, Russia, the Netherlands, France and the UK.  Quite similar to last time, I think.  

Now, voting on the resolutions.  There is one resolution to be voted on at this GM and it has three options.  We are using instant run‑off voting and the ranking options are:   

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You must fill out at least one reference for a ballot to be considered valid, or choose to abstain.  

You must also number the options of the resolution in order of preference, with 1 being your top preference.  

You can also choose to fill out as many preferences as there are options.  

It's important to note that abstentions are noted, but they do not count.  

As I said, we are using instant run‑off voting, and this is a preferential voting system where resolutions must receive more than 50% of top preference votes to win.  If no option receives more than 50% in a round of voting, the option with the fewest top preference votes is eliminated.  The system then recalculates after redistributing votes according to the order of preference.  This process of elimination and the recalculation then continues until an option receives more than 50% of the top preference votes.  

So, how does that apply to this GM?  

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There are three options in this resolution, there is A, B and C.  When the votes are counted, if none of these options has received 50% of that top first preference vote, one of the options is eliminated.  The second preference for the eliminated option are then redistributed to the other two options.  

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The option with the most votes at this stage is the one approved by the GM.  

How to vote:   

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Voting takes place as soon as Christian declares it open.  There are no ballot papers in this GM, paper ones, and electronic voting is available to all members who have registered to vote.  Electronic votes can be cast until 9 a.m. on Friday.  And we use a third party system called BigPulse for our voting.  

How to vote:   

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So, you should have had an e‑mail if you are registered to invite you to press the link.  You just click this link here in the e‑mail you received.  And you can vote on the one resolution with the three options there.  

If you are voting on behalf of more than one member, you will have it waited and you can assign these in the yellow box above your resolution options.  

You can also receive an e‑mail receipt for each vote cast and you can select the information included in each receipt.  

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The announcements will be on Friday, when the GM is reconvening at 10:15, UTC + 1, and the Executive Board Chairman will announce the results.  This is also be streamed live so you can watch it.  

Any questions?  

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Thank you for listening.  

CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN:  Thank you, Karla.  I have a question.  Usually I read the resolution, so do you have that slide or do I have to find it on my computer?  

KARLA LIDDLE‑WHITE:  I do, I have it here, I can share that with you now.  

CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN:  As we said, there is just one resolution.  Resolution number 1:   

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Option A:   "The General Meeting approves that the RIPE NCC 2021 financial surplus will be added to the clearing house reserve." 

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Option B.  "The General Meeting approves that 50% of the RIPE NCC 2021 financial surplus will be added to the clearing house reserve and 50% of all the RIPE NCC 2021 surplus will be redistributed to the membership in 2022 according to the RIPE NCC clearing house procedure." 

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Option C:   "The General Meeting approves that the RIPE NCC 2021 financial surplus will be redistributed to the membership in 2002 according to the RIPE NCC clearing house procedure." 

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And with that, I declare the voting open.  And we reconvene on Friday, 26 November, at 10:15 UTC + 1, and then we will read out the results.  And with that, thanks a lot for your attention, for staying so long with us, thanks a lot for the questions and comments, more work for us, and talk to you all soon in one or the other form.  Have a good evening.  Bye‑bye.  

LIVE CAPTIONING BY

MARY McKEON, RMR, CRR, CBC

DUBLIN, IRELAND.

RIPE 83

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GM results 

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Friday, 26 November 2021 

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10:15 (UTC + 1) 

CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN:  Good morning.  This is a continuation of the General Meeting.  We need another five minutes or so to get ready on our side.  Thank you.  

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Good morning to all the people who have just joined, we still need four or five minutes to get ready and then we will start.  

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The NCC indicates I would have the results in three or four minutes.  I have to disappoint all the people who are voting for Kahoot.  We're not doing that one.  The NCC just told me I will not have the results in the next minute to actually announce them, so we have to delay that a little bit.  

Apparently, we are talking to BigPulse right now and I hope I can talk a little bit about this later, what the hold‑up was, but we are moving the announcement most likely to the end of the closing of the Plenary.  I think we make another statement here then if that would not be the case, and then I hopefully have them.  That means the General Meeting is not closed and still open, but at least I am handing over back in time that the Plenary can start, so the Plenary doesn't have to choose for us what the results are.  

Really sorry about that.  We'll come back to you after the Closing Plenary, and we'll see if we can make an announcement there or shortly afterwards.  

Thanks a lot.  Sorry for that.  It was as thrilling for you as it was for me.  So, with that, talk to you soon.