Stenography Transcript

RIPE 89.
30 October 2024
4 o'clock.
Main room AGM.

ONDREJ FILIP: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, this is not a working group, this is the General Meeting, and I am not in the role of local host here, but I have even better presentation as a Chair of the Executive Board of the RIPE NCC, so welcome.

Before we start the real agenda, let me share some administrative matters that are important for today's meeting.

First of all, I appointed Athina frag, the Cheif Legal Officer, as the secretary of the General Meeting, and Athina is here. Also there will be the ‑‑ the meeting will be minted at usual, according to Article 19.4, and the draft of the minutes will be published two working days after the General Meeting, which is going to be Tuesday, 5th November. And then you, as members, will have three weeks to submit a notice of objection to the General Meeting minutes.

The objection will be collected using a tooling at the General Meeting minutes on our website. If you see any problem, just please try actively to object.

And unless the Executive Board receives a notice of objection signed by at least 100 members within three weeks of publication of the draft minutes, the draft minutes of the meeting will be final and binding.

The objection system will be available from the GM web pages on 5th November.

One more note, many of you I saw have a phone in your hands, please do not take pictures from this meeting. There is an official photographer, and he is taking pictures of the meeting, but please you individually, try and not to do it, although I know it's tempting.

What is the agenda of today? As you can see, we have ‑‑ it's actually not just today but also today and on Friday, we have nine points of the General Meeting.

First of all, it's welcome, which I am just doing right now. Then Hans Petter will share a report from the RIPE NCC. Me again, will report from the Executive Board. Then we will discuss the draft of RIPE NCC activity plan and budget, which I believe is the most important point of this General Meeting. And then we have a report from charging scheme task force from Peter Hessler, my fellow co‑chair of the task force, then there will be a presentation and followed by the voting about the financial update and redistribution of NCC surplus. And then we will explain how to vote on the resolutions. And then, you know, the General Meeting will be interrupted, and on Friday, there will be an announcement of the voting results.

So, with that, I think we can move to agenda item No. 2, which is the report from RIPE NCC, and will be delivered by Hans Petter:

HANS PETTER HOLEN: Thank you. So a quick report from the RIPE NCC. This is to do a summary of what we have done since the RIPE meeting since we spent all of the Services Working Group presenting the plans for next year, we thought it was good to bring that report in here.

In the Registration Services, we have been busy implementing findings from the external audit of recommend registry procedures, and we have been supporting the RIPE community in the development of RIPE policy, so there is quite some discussions going on in the Address Policy Working Group as you know. And continue to keep the best possible Registration Services to our members.

Our member services, reducing the number of outstanding invoices while increasing our quality of service. This is all about collecting money. And registry monitoring aiming to complete a total of 2,500 ARC currently at 2,452. I trust we will get there.

You can see the number of Internet number resource records in the registry has increased from 156 to 1599. The number of resource certificates is also continuing to increase, and on the assisted registry, we have already passed last year and we hope to grow that even further. And as I said in my previous presentation, we are now automating that so we should get to even greater heights in the future.

Information services. LIR portal. We are finalising changes in relation to end users and how we store their information. We are doing UI improvements and out at the desk outside, you can talk to Falen and aunt knell a who will do interviews regarding functionality and user face in the LIR portal.

RPKI. We have just launched a new dashboard and we have achieved the Type I ISA E 3000 audit. When you have done a Type 1 you do a Type 2. Type I means the system is in place and tested. Type 2 is that you have followed it continuously for a year.

RIPE database implemented, inetnum AGGREGATED‑BY‑LIR status. Implemented Max references and block by IP prefix to mitigate production issues in WhoIs updates. And we have done an impact analysis of removing MD5 hashed passwords and there's been a lot of discussions in the Working Groups and corridors about that. So it's great to see good feedback.

RIPE Atlas. We are working on unifying the probe firmware, so that it can be installed on post popular Linux distributions. As you have may have noticed we are doing a lot with Atlas infrastructure and there is a link to an article on that.

The data centre reduction has been made possible by infrastructure modernisation. There was a presentation on the details on that at the last RIPE meeting, if you are interested.

RIPEstat. Continuing to work toward a unified UI. We have had two UIs that we have developed in parallel. Now we will focus on one unified and then hopefully have an even better and greater service in the future.

RIS: The routing information systems. We have adjusted our peering strategy so we collect more useful data and working to continue to improve the quality of the data. But, the really hard work here has been on shifting the data into new clusters that so we can free up all the old racks of hardware and move out of the data centre. Felipe talked about that and the issues we have had with that.

DNS and K‑root. Awareness and outreach increased the number of hosted instances from 108 to 121, and AuthDNS, that's the other DNS service that is we are providing, from 15 to 23. And we have started the process of Sunsetting ns.ripe.net. That's the secondary service for the delegations, not our INR.arpa, but the members, and 65% of the zones that used it are no longer using the service.

IT support focused opted efficiency and reducing complexity on infrastructure. Containerisation is really the future of being more efficient at managing IT infrastructure. Deploying them in cubernet clusters either on premises on in the clawed. That gives us choice of moving work loads around. Simplified our surgeon platform by adopting a hybrid two‑tier architecture with reduced costs while meeting the capacity resilience and performance requirements for all our applications.

There's been a lot of behind the scenes work that nobody sees, but is really appreciated when it's done.

External engagement and community. This is what everybody notices, right. So, we have published a publication on how to get IP addresses for your network. I mean, in the good old days you could go to the RIPE NCC and now there are no more v4 addresses so there are multiple options of getting them from the packet. And we have documented that. We have done the RIPE meeting in Krakow. We have done CA pif in Kyrgyzstan and we have done Internet measurements day in Romania. When you get bothered or want interesting content you can listen to RIPE lab podcasts where there is really interesting stuff we have published and is coming up.

The website has been revamped, as you can see, and we are now at this meeting taking feedback on the revamping of the meeting website.

One thing that we have done is also move the translation thing, we had a project some weeks back where we did translation of some key documents into multiple languages. We have moved that back to the main publication platform, so it's got the same look and feel and we are also now getting volunteers to translate into multiple languages. No volunteers to translate to Norwegian yet, but I think there is one both from Sweden and Denmark, so Norway is losing out here.

Social media is interesting. Highlights here, is that well Instagram has doubled, but it's still marginal compared to the biggest one, X, but with X, we have dropped with a thousand followers over the last year or so. Interesting thing here is Mastadon is using and for those what are saying you should leave X and move to Mastadon. Sure, but then put your support in actually following us on Mastadon so that we have more followers there than on X and then the choice is natural. But the main purpose of us being on social media is to reach people with our content and the strongest growing platform is LinkedIn.

.

Yeah, some statistics here on meetings and the number of labs articles published, 116. That's an amazing number, and the most popular is on Atlas IPv6 measurement and tools, routing and Internet number resources. So really the measurement services come really high up on this list.

And of the 116 articles, 58 are published by staff and 58 by external. So if you have interesting comments, please contact us and see if it can be published on RIPE Labs.

Learning and development. Reduced budget but with almost the same number of courses for in‑person training, but we are focusing then on e‑learning experiences and in‑ person courses with a focus on topics in LIR and NCC membership and v6.

So, there has been many jokes here about the v6 elevator, so maybe we need to train the elevator repairman in v6 for next time.

We have improved engagement and user experience in the RIPE Academy and we run a summer school and celebrated its ten years' anniversary. It's a busy area.

.

In coordination and collaboration, that Working Group is tomorrow, so you will yet see more presentations there. We have round table meetings and participated in relevant intergovernmental foray, and if you follow this link here you see all the responses that he have with given on consultations, both to the Dutch government and especially to the UN processes around the future of global digital compact, and the NIS 2 and more.

Research: Being a centre of data, tools and insight. Hisham talked a bit about that already. And we have taken stock of what we have internally in terms of data sources code and so on, and made sure that this can be streamlined and run in one place. So, I think last week or the week before, a colleague sat at a coffee machine: Now I can produce data for country reports in 25 minutes. So just come with your countries and I will give you the data. So that's a bit cool to streamline those kind of production pipelines as well.

We have produced special reports both on IXPs in the Middle East, central Asia, Kpif on adoption of Internet technologies and so on.

Facilities and support:

I mentioned that already, that our office lease is up for renewal in 2026. We do have an option to renew it, so there is no reason for alarm, but we are now looking into do we need to do some improvements to the office? Do we need all the space? And so on.

And we're also looking at the improvements for staff travel processes. We have done a lot of work there, especially into safety assessment and risk assessment before people travelling, and then of course insurance portfolios is something that we need to review from time to time and that we have done.

Talent and leadership development is important and we have a programme for that, that's been rolled out and been staff and managers have taken part so far this year, and we are optimising HR policies and systems to try to automate as much as we can there and have good systems to support.

In the legal area, there is supporting the work of NRO and contributing significantly to the revision of the ICP‑2, the criteria for establishment of new regional Internet registries. Not that we plan to establish any new any time soon, but it was put in place 20 ‑‑ two, three four years ago to establish AFRINIC and LACNIC and it clearly needs a review that make sure we have ongoing criteria and criteria for decrediting in the case that's needed.

Sanctions and sanctions, and then EU legislations. And I have a very nice slide on that if you missed that in services, there is reference to all the different laws and regulations that we have to apply to or may have to apply to as they are coming in the coming year so you have some reading material there if you get bothered.

Finance: Working on solutions for income ultra high‑risk countries. That's been a very long and winding road with our banks trying to explain what the members are, what services we provide, and no, it's not unlawful for us to invoice them, and we have taken measures to be sanction compliant. So, if somebody thinks that we are doing too much compliant and security, just look at banks.

Supporting the charging scheme task force. Simone has been busy on that. And.then the work on the Middle East legal entity, and then continuously improving supporting and planning.

Information security risk and compliance: The ISAE 3000/SOC 2 Type I assurance report for RPKI is out. We haven't set‑up a Meta for distribution it yet but we made a form, so if you are interested in a copy, that you will then be able to get under NDA when we have the system in place, you can indicate your interest so we see how many are actually interested in that and how much we should invest in automating that process.

Security awareness training for staff, and enhanced security tooling and coverage, and vulnerability management.

Have you patched your system? Have you upgraded all your tools? Yes.

And then office of the Managing Director. That sounds very cool. I do actually have an office, but this is just a budget post that not only contains me and my closest support staff, but we also support the NRO RPKI programme with money from that through the NRO, the community project funds. We have a budget there this year that is now soon to be spent when the committee has made their choice. We are supporting Board travel, ASO AC travel and we are, from 1 November, chairing the NRO EC, because Oscar the CEO of LACNIC, is stepping down and we figured out it's better to rotate the Chair on 1 November rather than at the 1 January.

We have started to review strategic objectives ahead of planning for 2027. So we are trying to do some really long‑term planning as well. And that was it. Any questions or comments?

Nobody running to the mic. So back to you, Mr. Chair.

ONDREJ FILIP: That was quick.

So, then we have the agenda point number 3, which is the report from the Executive Board of RIPE NCC.

So, the Executive Board consists of six extremely talented people and me. You can see the list of them on the screen from the left to the right, and standing first and then the sitting ones. So it's Raymond, Remco, me, Sander Steffann, Harald Summa, Maria haul and Piotr Strzyzewski. They are really great people. It's a pure joy to work with them.

We had two meetings, and both lasted two days since the last General Meeting. It was executive meeting number 176 and 177. As usual, the minutes are published transparently, so you can check the website and also there is usually an announcement in the mailing list, so I'm sure you are all aware of it and somebody will probably read those. Thank you for that.

Now, important topics and documents and resolutions that we dealt with and approved.

First of all, we approved the activity plan and budget for the next year, that's going to be subject of a presentation of Hans Petter. Then we also approved the RIPE NCC treasury statute, we are obliged to do it annually because there are not much changes but reviewed it and approved. Not surprisingly we also approved the agenda of the RIPE NCC General Meeting, which is this one.

.

Then we made, although it was mostly two changes, related to the documents, that was the amendment of the document called cluster of members, deregistration of Internet resources and legacy Internet resources. Hike services for legacy Internet resources of RIPE NCC members terms and conditions and RIPE NCC Services for legacy Internet resources agreement. Basically, I think this change was already presented during NCC Services by Hans Petter. There was some kind of changes, more aligned with documents with the current practice, how NCC operates and also we made quite important change that the other tickets and services would be goes after 90 days but after 60 days of non‑participating invoice. That's an important change which is kind of related to all the though documents.

Then we amended transfer of Internet number resources and change of the member's official legal name. This change was mainly related to temporary transfers, you know, because we expect that those will be more than, so we clean up a little bit the continues relating to that, for example if, one of the members is sanctioned or stuff like that. So there were changes in that document as well.

Resolutions passed: First of all, we resolved to sell the exchange traded funds owned by the RIPE NCC. As you know, we reported previously we decided to change the way we deal with the financial results. We have previously it was managed by NCC staff. Now we have a professionally managed portfolio. We made an initial investment of 10 million euro with the partner and we evaluated kind of viability and also income from those two portfolios. And we see that the professional managed portfolio is a much better way to deal with your money and save your money. So that's why we decided to sell the exchange traded funds and increase at 5.7 million to the professional managed portfolio.

Also, we decided to suspend the activity called "RIPE NCC community project fund". As, you know, this was an activity which really brought some really outstanding projects. It was really successful. However there was some discussion about some other projects were funded by the fund and it was felt that the mechanism how this fund works should be reviewed. So, we decided to suspend it for 2025, in order to have time to review the way this activity is run.

Also, we resolved to retain e‑mails no longer than three months in the archives of the unmoderated members discuss list. As you might remember, it was a reaction to some hate speech in our mailing lists, so that time we decided to moderate the list, but messages that were kind of, that were censored, moderated, were still published in the archives, just for the transparency to prove that there was a reason not to send those messages. On the other hand they now stay in the archives, so those messages, so I think it's time after three months delete them, not to, you know, stay in the archives.

And also, we set up a charging scheme task force, where we really tried to have a variety of the membership people from big members, small members, middle size, also people who, for example, disagreed on the last General Meeting with us, so really to have a broad group of people that can come to some conclusion that would be probably working for not everyone, that's impossible, but for most of the members. So we really tried to have a very balanced group of people.

Resolution on the meeting number 177 was lifting the restrictions imposed by the resolution 163‑02, according to which all transfer requests from Ukraine would be only permitted if accompanied by notarised supporting documents. As a result, notarising of the documents will only be required in corners with the RIPE NCC procedural document due diligence for the quality of the RIPE NCC registration data.

Basically the transfers in the beginning of the old phase of the war were, you know, taken as kind of dangerous. There was a worry that, you know, some of the IP addresses will be kind of stolen or strangely will leave Ukraine, so that's why this restriction was imposed. But now a situation is very different, there is a public accessible business registry, you can access it from the Internet, so the situation has changed and this requirement is no longer necessary.

Important topics discussed. We discussed, of course, the way we work, but how we interact with the RIPE NCC. So, what are our duties and liabilities. I also already mentioning the charging scheme, but it's important, and we started the Working Group and then we approved the members and, of course, you know, not just the Board members who are inside the Working Group but the others who are interested in how this work is ongoing.

Then, I also already talked about the exchange traded funds. So that's done. And also Hans Petter mentioned in his previous presentation, the establishment of the RIPE NCC Middle East, so the company established, it has directors from the NCC executive team, and the plan is that it will be fully operating since the beginning of the next year.

That's, because, again, charging scheme task force, there will be a presentation today by Peter, of course activity plan and budget, and really we spent extremely a lot of time on this topic. We took it very seriously to prepare a really good document that would present the way we will operate next year.

Also, important topic, AFRINIC. As you know currently this fellow RIR doesn't have a Board, and the court of Mauritius appointed an official receiver but that was challenged. And recently, a few days ago, the Supreme Court of Mauritius ruled that this official receiver is again reinstated. So that's a way forward, Because the task of this receiver is to organise in two months, organ an election in AFRINIC, so we all hope and that's also will be a task of NCC and ICANN and other, the community to support this process so we would have an elected Board at AFRINIC, and, you know, this institution will be fully operational again.

Then another topic we discussed was the criteria for establishment of new regional Internet registries, ICP‑2. You know, there is ongoing work on revision of this document. Athina published a few days ago an article on RIPE Labs about it, and also I guess it's tomorrow during Community Plenary, there will be a report the programme on this work, I suggest you to watch it. Also I think 17th November, 11th November, there is a possibility to submit feedback, there is a questionnaire on the website where you can provide some feedback to that process. If you are interested I really suggest you to do so.

And also, aligning the RIPE NCC strategic objectives with funding, long term process, is the strategy of the organisation. Again, it was discussed by Hans Petter today, and I suggest you to read the article published by Remco on this topic as well on RIPE Labs.

Ongoing work and engaging with the Board. What we are really trying to achieve is building an organisation that will sustain, be relevant and have a future. We are working quite intensively with Hans Petter, Managing Director. We really try to share all information and being a good team, helping the organisation. One thing which we concentrated maybe a little bit more, because I think if you want to have a stable organisation, you also need to have a good and educated Board, so we concentrated a little bit more on board training and trying to be better, to serve you better of course. And we are fulfilling corporate governance and fiduciary responsibilities.

So, what kind of feedback are we looking for? I would like really to encourage you to send us some feedback. There are two main documents which are the most important of course in the life period of the organisation, which is the charging scheme and activity plan and budget. Currently today is a good opportunity to comment activity plan and budget of course, but again we will also see the progress about the charging scheme kind of future.

And also, we ask you for the input on various specific RIPE NCC Services and of course everything which is related to NCC.

How to do it: If you have any comments to those topics, or to the work of the Board or NCC in general, of course, first of all, you can now go to the mic and formally submit your comment. I know that it's not optimal for some people, but you can also inform at social events. I tried ‑‑ you know, there is always a Monday talk to the Chair and Board, the RIPE Chair and the NCC Board meeting, I twice tried to convince people to come to us and talk to us, and it didn't happen. This time I didn't say anything and many people came to me. So I don't know what strategy to take next time. But anyway it was lovely to talk to many of you and thank you for that feedback.

And it was really a good way. Of course, there is a mailing list, which you are subscribed to. And we also organise Open House to say discuss the topics with you, there is usually a specific topic which the Open House targets.

And also, we are present on some community journals. I know there are some chats which are not formal and not kind of organised by NCC, so, we are trying to read those, we are trying to respond, but those are not official channels, so please forgive us if we don't react on those chats. Also, of course, you can e‑mail us directly at this RIPE address.

Maybe, you don't have that impression at the beginning, but we really do take all feedback seriously. But please keep in mind two things. You are a very broad community and the fact that somebody provided feedback on something doesn't mean that the organisation will change accordingly, immediately. We always have to respect the broader consensus of the organisation. And also, you know, we are a Board. We need to first meet and talk together. No single individual can, in the Board, make any decision. So, it takes time, and also please understand that we need to really to listen to feedback, but it doesn't mean that we have ‑‑ we can react to every single message. But again, we read and we discuss it quite thoroughly.

The fact that we meet and discuss means that also we speak one voice, so it's usually presented by a message of the e‑mail to the mailing list, usually from me. So that's the way we answer some of the feedback.

And also, our communications try to respond to various questions or issues that are being raised, so they are very active in helping us in many matters. But again, any communication you will initiative is discussed inside the Board and we do take feedback seriously. So, that's a message I wanted to pass to you.

So that is all on behalf of the RIPE NCC Executive Board, and now it's time for questions.

.

(Applause)

We have one from remote, and...

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Rinsa Cloke asks in a personal capacity: Is there a plan to reorganise the RIPE NCC community projects fund or will a committee or Open House be formed to handle this?

ONDREJ FILIP: Yeah, I think this was, I guess it was addressed in the RIPE article, yeah, the plan is to organise an Open House on it while there will be something to discuss. So, yes, the issue will be discussed.

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Two questions: On the investment partner, statistically shows, I think it was 70 or 90% of investment partners didn't do as well as just the funds. So why we pay someone to do it instead of just, you know, stay with SPM 500 and all that, there is a chance of getting high return is actually higher statistically speaking.

Secondly, would the Board consider, let's say, spend 50% of the investment return to sub‑died the membership fee. We present it back to the reserve and 50% we actually spend on the membership fees and not grow it indefinitely. And thoroughly of course AFRINIC. Since AFRINIC is, you know, in light of being reconstituted with a proper election, the rather aggressive timeline on the ASO AC, which I know the Board have no control of, will that be conceded or will the RIPE Board concede to that processes? Maybe we need a bit more time to discuss, because it's quite a serious document to pull the trigger on. Thank you.

ONDREJ FILIP: What was the question at the end, I didn't catch ‑‑ what is the question?

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: The question is: Will you guys consider to basically say that, you know, maybe we can take a bit longer time to view it, because at the end of the day the draft will go to an... which Hans Petter have to vote on it and Hans Petter he has to listen to your guys. So, will the Board overwrite support and maybe an extension of the time, seeing to give AFRINIC was properly reconstituted the emergency of that document is removed at least for now.

ONDREJ FILIP: Okay. Thank you very much. So, I'll try to answer in the order you raised those questions.

First of all, as I said, you know, although we treated this with the papers, you know, we see that the portfolio managed by professionals has much better kind of return on investment. So that's usually what you would do, if somebody is professional and somebody is not, so we believe that this way how we deal with the money is better for us, as an organisation, so for you as members as well.

So, that's the first part.

And again, we kind of tested those two variants and that's why we decided to go with the professional managed portfolio. That's the first part.

The second part was spending the portfolio on ‑‑

FREDERIC LOUI: Add the return on the portfolios. So let's say we get 8% return this year we spend 4% in operations, so we can charge a lower membership fee. And we put the 4% back to the reserve. That's what the Singapore government does with their national reserve.

ONDREJ FILIP: Okay. I understand. The reason why we have a taking care of professional portfolio is not to lose the value of the portfolio. The fact that there is some income doesn't mean that it's a real income because there is inflation. So if you gain 3% and there is 3% inflation, all you have done is kept the value of the portfolio. So, you know, spending part of it would mean decreasing technically the value of the portfolio. So, that's why we haven't considered that.

And to your third question. If I'm not mistaken and Herve may correct me, the current plan is to finish this process by the end of 2025 and then submit it to the ICANN Board. Is that correct?

HERVE CLEMENT: It was just to answer the remark. It's the projected timeline. So to end the process at the end of 2025, but the important thing, if, that the ICP to work, is not for cost specifically on AFRINIC, it's a general document to consolidate the governance system. Everything that happen in every region. Something can happen in 2025, etc., so we don't know, etc. So AFRINIC is considered as one of the regions of the systems, and one more time, if we prepare the document, it was not for specifically the AFRINIC. It's just what I wanted to say.

ONDREJ FILIP: I just kind of hope it happened, at least we're working with it, so thank you for that. Does it answer your question?.

FREDERIC LOUI: No my question is obviously ICP‑2 was inspired by the AFRINIC incident. And if AFRINIC were restored, I know the document is not specifically for AFRINIC, but if AFRINIC restored governance, the immediate urgency can be removed so we can look at it more carefully and slowly and have a wider consideration of the implications, that's all I say. Does that make sense?

So my question to the Board is will the Board consider maybe, you know, a more wider community consultation, maybe even go to the global policy process, even the lawyers...

ATHINA FRAGKOULI: Thanks for the question. The goal of this process is to have like a system with accountable RIRs and will timeline that is given is actually indicative, if more work needs to be done, it will be extended, and that was specifically mentioned.

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Okay. Thank you.

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I have only one question. Just a clarification. You mentioned about lifting this special procedure for the Ukrainian members and I understand and you said that you are now relying on, I guess, newly updated procedure, let's say, due diligence. Just to be clear, that affects, let's say, transfer Ukrainian LIR to Ukrainian LIR, other country LIR to Ukraine.

My question, I guess, is any significant updates to that other policy which happened maybe they would give extra protection? As a Ukrainian, I am concerned whether, you know, potential let's say disruption to Ukrainian company registry ability of Internet can impact that. That was raised a couple of years before and I was one the people who pushed for RIPE being extra save with Ukrainian members requests. We are ourselves my company does not initiative ate or receive any IP addresses or resources, just on behalf of my community.

HANS PETTER HOLEN: Thank you for that question and I did actually expect that to come up.

What the Board resolution put in place was a special provision for Ukraine because we could not check the online registries. If we are checking whether somebody is authorised to sign a contract, whether it's for a transfer or an SSA or other things we would look up in the business registry of the country in question and verify that that name who signs is actually authorised to sign on behalf of that person and then we would check the signature ID so on. For Ukraine we were in that situation that we no longer had access to the business registry. So we put in place a special provision for Ukraine saying that in that case you need to submit to us a printout of the business registry, and get that notarised.

Now, the situation in Ukraine changed and the business registry is once again available. So we can do all the checks in the same way as we do for other countries. Now, if that changes again, we don't need a Board resolution to roll back because we have provisions in the current procedures to do additional checks. So, you know, if we don't have access to a business registry, well then, we will ask for submitting documentation, we will ask for notarisation and so on, and that is kind of business as usual.

So we put this in place specifically for Ukraine because it was necessary to do something and we felt also that it was necessary to show the world that we are doing something. So we made it a Board resolution, but now we see this happening not only in Ukraine but also other areas of conflict and we have a framework that takes into account risk in the different areas and we do the appropriate thing.

And I don't want to be very specific on what the appropriate thing is because some people try to find loopholes and we are doing what we can to make sure that there are no loopholes.

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Thank you.

ONDREJ FILIP: Thank you very much. Thank you for your questions. I don't see any, so I think we can move to Hans Petter's presentation again.

HANS PETTER HOLEN: I will see if this thing now works and it does. Thank you.

So, Draft Activity Plan and Budget. So, I will not read you the presentation from the Services Working Group. That would be cool right. Just to give you a quick recap.

We published a draft of the activity plan and budget. We had an Open House where we have discussed it. We now have the General Meeting, and then in December at the meeting the Board will approve a final version. So based on your input now or on the mailing you list up until the beginning of December, we can make adjustments to what we have presented.

The Board direction that we got in July is based on the projected income of €41.1 million for 2025. We had several scenarios presented to the Board and the Board went with the highest investment in information and security. And that is, you know, setting the tone for what is important for not only the RIPE NCC, but for the whole community.

So of course the Board is also mindful for making sure that we don't waste any money so we will take care that we don't spend more money than necessary. So the good thing to know is that we have sufficient funds available for information security and we need so spend them wisely.

The main themes in the coming year is going to be information security and compliance. How many times can I say that in this presentation? Cost efficiency. Future approving. There is a lot of new legislation that is coming our way and we need to be in shape to take that on board and stay compliant with it.

And we need to make sure that we have income. There is a charging scheme. We need to collect income also from high‑risk countries and so on.

The total budget increases from 38.2 million to 40 million. The registry increases a bit. I said I added one FTE there for registry investigations, information services, increases a bit. We are converting consultants into FTEs, but there are also price increases. Engagement and community increases also a bit. And organisational sustainability was supposed to be a reduction but when the Board asked me to add information security, that's also an increase, and we may move some of that money into IT. We'll see what's the best organisation there.

There was a call for more transparency on salaries in the RIPE NCC, and, no, we will not publish a list of everybody's individual salary in the budget. We have increased general salaries with ‑‑ we have increased the budget for salaries by 3%, that does not mean that everybody will get the 3% salary. That's yet to be decided in January, based on the market developments and we are doing a benchmark, as every year. But we have not increased the number of FTEs from 192 to 197 partly because we are changing some long term consultants, which, under Dutch law and European law, after three years would gets rights as employees, so we do not want to have long‑term consultants. We will still use consultants for short‑term projects but consultants that have been with us for long years, we either offer them a permanent position or try to employ somebody else, which is more cost‑efficient as well.

We also do this in finance, where we have used external consultancy for the optimisation of the finance system. And we are adding to the security team, and we are adding to the investigation team.

We have also published the staff salary bands. This is the mid of the salary bands. All of this has been public indirectly to the job ads. So you could have put this together over the years by studying our ads. We have added the percentage of staff in the different categories here.

We have also provided a breakdown of the average staff salary cost, which is 126 k, and, no, that does not mean that staff gets 126k on average in salary, because salary cost also includes other benefits, social security, pension, health insurance and so on. So, we have provided much more transparency in this area and made it much clearer because the members have asked for that.

Budget review for the registry.

Not much more to say about that. Minor increase in all the areas, the biggest increase in FTEs is in registry monitorings, other than it's flat. The IT service that we use for monitoring of the members and so on, that increases in costs as everything else.

Accuracy. I have talked about a number of ARCs, the FTE, we will do more than 2004 ARCs, so I forgot to update this slide. Reducing the reverification time, focusing on accuracy and then continuing automation. That's the things. I thought rather than going through the whole presentation, are there any questions to the registry part of the activity and budget?

Information services.

Increased from 12 million to 1.2 million. And if you look at LIR portal, Felipe mentioned in his presentation that he is adding more stuff there on RPKI. It looks like we're doing end of reduction but it's really a stead state because we had extra consultants in there for the certifications. RIPE Database, DNS and K‑root is an increase. Atlas is a small increase. But RIPEstat and RIS together is just switching some money between them. And IT support is a reduction because the savings that we do in the data centre are allocated to the services that actually use them so we see some of that increase back in RIPE Atlas, that's why we see a budget increase there.

Modernising infrastructure. Felipe has We have already talked about this, so I won't read it out again. But I can ask again here, are there any questions to the information services and technology activity plan and budget? Please don't run to the microphone. Ulka comes. Remote question.

ULKA ATHALE: Andrei as asks: Would the cost increase for the registry services? Is that related to using services of hyperscaler? And is there a cost comparison with running your own hardware?"

HANS PETTER HOLEN: So all the costs are to the Registration Services are related to either personnel or the services we use to do ID, identification monitoring of the registry content, and of sanction screening. It has nothing to do with the services that we use like the LIR portal and so on. They are all in information services. And Felipe held an extensive presentation last year about the mix of use of Cloud versus OnPrem for the measurement services, so you can find more details on there.

So the shift in IT costs from data centre costs to a mix of Cloud services for long term storage and Bare metal is shifting from our own data centres into managed bear metal or to Cloud cost. And Felipe is nodding. So I got that right.

Community engagement. It's really steadY state here. It's a small increase of 200 K. Community building is flat. So it's more about getting more for less since prices increase. Membership engagement is the small increase. So is training and public policy and governance. So, what we are doing here, Hisham held extensive presentation on this, and to some extent the budget here is boring but the content is really exciting. It's this meeting, right and all the other meetings. Any questions or comments to the community on engagement or budget plan?

.

Organisational sustainability. Or as some people will say, the overhead.

Facilities steady state.

Human resource steady state.

Increasing legal: We did a survey saying we should increase our legal department. Maybe we need to do that but we have added some more consultancy budget there to handle legal advice in the Netherlands and other places.

Finance really steady state. Information security and compliance, this is where I said the Board asked me to put in additional money, and then the office of the Managing Director is a reduction mainly because we have taken out the community project funds for next year and then there is an increase in some of the other costs.

And the RIPE Chair we have increased the budget a bit to cater for inflation and cost of travel and so on.

Any questions on that?

.

And then I am done with even questions and comments. Thank you.

(Applause)

.

ONDREJ FILIP: So, the next is the presentation of Peter Hessler about the current progress of the charging scheme task force.

PETER HESSLER: Hello everyone, my name is Petter Hessler, I am co‑chair of the charging scheme task force with and Roy Philippe.

To give a bit of a background of what we have been doing. The task force, we are doing consultation with members, Executive Board, to make recommendations on the key issues for the charging scheme. The Board wanted a task force that was ‑‑ that represented the diversity of the membership to the greatest extent possible. The call for volunteers was in July and established ‑‑ we were established in August. You see here there is a link to get more information from the Executive Board meeting minutes.

The task force has two primary objectives.

We want to define the principles of future charging schemes. We also want to improve process for the annual charging scheme discussion and adoption. As many of us are familiar, it's been exciting the last few meetings on the charging scheme.

Of course, certain topics are out of scope for the task force. We did not discuss the NCC budget. We did not want to set or propose any actual fees or prices or anything.

We see the list of names of the members of the task force up on the screen. There are 12 members from RIPE. There are three Executive Board members. There are five RIPE NCC employees. Plus NCC staff support.

We have held four meetings so far. One in August, one in September and two in October. One earlier this week here at the RIPE meeting. We have all of the minutes of the meetings are published, the link is here, available also on the RIPE website.

The meetings are held under what's known as a Chatham house rules. If you are unfamiliar with those, the short summary is anyone who comes to the meeting is able, free to use information from the discussion, but you are not allowed to discuss who or who they represent, made any particular comment. So journalised output it is acceptable but you cannot say Peter Hessler said X, Y and Z, for example.

Work on principles and processes.

The task force took a look at the previous charging scheme task force in 2012, and we decided to use the recommendations from them as the basis of our discussions. We found that they did fantastic work back then, and had very clear explanations of why they made certain decisions. Of course, several things that were true then are no longer true now. Certain opinions of the community have changed. So we need to make different recommendations from them.

The RIPE NCC will provide us details on the other RIR charging schemes from APNIC, LACNIC, ARIN etc. We also got some more clarity on the tax ruling that the RIPE NCC has negotiated with the Dutch government. And understanding the processes around legacy resource holders.

We have also been participating attention closely to the discussions in the Address Policy Working Group specifically on discussions on charging for PI address space, and charging for IPv6. We are also aware that in a glorious near future, we will no longer be using IPv4, and so therefore there'll be no reason to charge for IPv4, and we'll include recommendations to ensure future stability for the NCC, if such a situation should occur.

Difference in membership fees. Larger members pay more than smaller members. That was one the recommendations from the 2012 task force. We believe that remains a valid principle. There are some potential tax implications. There is also complexity in differentiating fees based on IP resource allocations. Under Dutch law, under the current legal structure of the NCC, members cannot receive more than one vote regardless of what fee you pay. You may see in other RIRs, that different fees result in different amounts of votes for them. We are unable to make that available for legal reasons.

Differentiation based on a category fee versus individual fees piecemeal allocations.

The task force generally supports the idea that category‑based model. We see there is a lot of advantages to this, partially in stability, be able to predict how much your own organisation will need to pay, and then also stability in how much the NCC will be saving overall.

Membership fees cover all RIPE NCC Services.

We support the principle that the membership fees should cover all activities in the activity plan. We are, of course, open to, for discussions, on the treatment of specific services, for example like transfers or new projects that could require additional fees, subject to the approval of the Board.

A sign‑up fee. The task force does believe that we ‑‑ a sign‑up fee should remain, although it should cover the administrative costs of signing up a new member rather than be a barrier for entry. We do want to be ‑‑ welcome new members, of course, but there is also certain know your customers and due diligence that needs to be followed for all new members

Charging for IPv6. There was a recommendation in 2012 that we should be sure not to disincetivise IPv6 deployment by charging for it and making it a line item that networks would be concerned about.

We do believe that it should be approached in a way that support and encourage widespread IPv6 deployment, without creating financial hurdles. Discussions on how to achieve this are ongoing.

.

Charging for Internet resources, IPv4 PI, IPv6 PI and ASNs, we generally agree that the PI space should be charged separately with no double‑charging to the member. Discussions on how ASNs should be charged is ongoing. And whether there should or should not be a differentiation based on PI assignment size is also ongoing.

On charging for legacy and any topics around legacy, the discussions are ongoing. There is a number of legal concerns that we have to be aware of, and there is also quite a lot of details there that are a little challenging.

Charging based on a period or specific date.

There are no suggestions to change the current approach. Prorated for allocations and membership, and a snapshot of your PI or ASN holdings. As is currently the case.

Charging based on the service portfolio and not on the workload the NCC is providing. Discussions are still ongoing on this topic.

Charging based on the age of Internet member resources. Before 2012, there was an understanding that the age ‑‑ the longer you held an Internet resource, a different charging model would be applied. So, for example, if you had an allocation for ten years, it would be a different fee than if you had held ‑‑ if you had just received it.

At this point, we feel this is unnecessary. It's an unnecessary complexity and in today's market the duration of OpenSource is not really as relevant as it used to be.

So the next steps is we plan to submit a final report to the Executive Board by February 2025. The Board will then discuss the report and have a consultation with members. We would like ‑ members of the task force would like input here at the GM, but also on the Members Discuss list. We also have a task force mailing list if you would like a more private discussion with the task force.

So I guess there is three primary questions that we have:

Are we progressing as you would expect?

Do the conclusions would he have reached so far match your expectations?

And are there factors we have not quite considered?

So I welcome people to come to the microphone. I welcome online questions.

ULKA ATHALE: We have an online question from Serbalov who asks: "Why again all going to categories we twice voiced against this model? Maybe let's do 24 categories, maybe it will be good."

PETER HESSLER: So, there is no ‑‑ at this point there is no specific number of categories that we would like to propose. We feel that categories has received a lot of support from people. And that the categories that were voted down were voted down for a variety of reasons that were not specifically because they were categories, in our view.

BRIAN NISBET: I am going to say again what myself and other ENREN colleagues have said before is that not all IP allocations were created equal and the holding of large numbers of IP addresses does not in any way imply a lot of money being held or generated by those organisations. So, I would just urge the task force to consider this when they are applying things, because I certainly know that we, with the IP addresses that we hold, which are significant, and are all in use for research and education, would not be able to pay what a telco that was charging for use of those addresses, for instance, would be able to pay.

PETER HESSLER: Of course. So, two responses to that comment. The first one is that if these are legacy class B allocations, as I assume is, or was relatively ‑‑

BRIAN NISBET: There are legacy addresses there, but there is also ‑‑ so the universities have legacy addresses, that's a whole other conversation which is absolutely a piece, but ENRENS themselves in a lot of cases have allocations from ‑‑ I mean we were one the first people to get from something 193.1, long ago, so they are absolutely addresses under the RIR system.

PETER HESSLER: I guess I will just finish that thought, is legacy allocations will be treated, or are likely to be treated differently from PA allocations assigned by the RIR system. In your specific case, I think it would be extremely interesting if you could e‑mail the task force directly with kind of your allocations and some of your concerns on this, so that we can look at, you know, actual details and kind of analyse this more specifically. Having specific scenarios definitely helps us kind of frame our thoughts.

BRIAN NISBET: Okay, cool.

TOBIAS FIEBIG: You earlier stated that under Dutch law it's not possible to grant more than one vote to a member. Can you grant less?

PETER HESSLER: I will leave that up for Athena. I don't know Dutch law that well.

ATHINA FRAGKOULI: No.

TOBIAS FIEBIG: It's different things.

ATHINA FRAGKOULI: Just to be clear. When an organisation or individual becomes a member, it takes six months to become a full member. During the six months, they don't have voting rights. Also, if for any reason we consider that this organisation must be closed and we follow this process, during this process we gradually also suspend the membership and the voting rights. But yes, the principle is one member/one vote.

HANS PETTER HOLEN: If I can add to that. ARIN has created a very interesting scheme with two types of member where they call some service members, and some, I'm not sure, full members. So in a sense what you would be asking for is the RIPE NCC to provide service to non‑members and having that. So that's also an option. Not that I am advocating that ‑‑

TOBIAS FIEBIG: Stop. Stop. I would like to clarify. I was not asking for something like that. I was asking for clarification on the statement on the slides.

HANS PETTER HOLEN: I am just trying to provide clarification here because often I hear after a meeting like this that something was said and it was taken away as a clear statement, so I was just providing that there are options to achieve zero votes if that is decided. Not that ‑‑

TOBIAS FIEBIG: This was not a request for zero votes. That was a clarification question.

PETER HESSLER: Clarification from the task force, we are intending one member, one vote.

TOBIAS FIEBIG: I agree with that.

PETER HESSLER: And we have not considered like is a member a LIR, is a member an organisation? We have not discussed that yet.

TOBIAS FIEBIG: The second one, the slide states we plan to submit a final report to the Executive Board by February 2025. At that time, will it also be made available to the membership?

PETER HESSLER: I believe the intention that, when the Executive Board has discussed this, then either the Executive Board edited version or the original version will be published, I am not sure if we have made a decision on that yet.

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: One question, usually fees have reasons, and in this case maybe it's a good idea to provide data on what action that members take or interact with NCC, create what costs. And then maybe focus on those areas a bit more to impose fees on areas that actually create a lot of costs with the NCC might be an idea.

PETER HESSLER: So we have had some of those discussions already. We are, you know, it's probably the most famous example is support costs, if there is an incoming ticket that takes time for support etc., etc, we are still discussing on how all those details will work. But one of the risks there is that if we should charge based on support services, or based on additional work by the NCC, that creates a very unstable income base for the NCC. And that puts the NCC at further risk, because maybe one year any budget shortfall was brought up to the necessary amount because, you know, a small number of members had a lot of support tickets. The other concern is that by ‑‑ if we did charge for support, for example, that would heavily discourage members from applying for support. And then the third point is that what if the NCC sends a ticket to a member, do they detail ‑‑ is that fair to charge them for this?

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I was more talking about things that have predictable numbers like transfers, for example.

PETER HESSLER: So for transfers, there is an ongoing discussion about a charging scheme, or about charging for transfers. There is a lot of various viewpoints on this, and we definitely want to ensure that the database stays accurate. So Cynthia, who is also on the task force, did you want to comment on this?

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Yes. I am also a task force member. So, one of the other concerns would be that while one transfer might just cost X amount of time while another one costs 5 X, and we ‑‑ it would be weird to differentiate between that and figuring out, like, we can't say like oh, service requests from the Ukrainian LIRs costs more for the RIPE NCC, so we should charge more. That becomes very bad. So, it is very tricky to charge per workload.

PETER HESSLER: I think also fundamentally the RIPE NCC is not a consultancy service. So, charging hourly like a consultancy service would be inappropriate.

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Claire Wade. One the core principles we discussed is having equal fees does not mean it is equitable, and we are in a scenario where certain members are perhaps being more expensive fee than what they can currently afford, or, you know, it takes some extra effort. And they might be subsidizing other members' activities and hence the conversation around a transfer fee because lately again, there's been an increase in working hours for the registry team as well as compliance checks and that drives costs up for the NCC. The NCC is a non‑profit; therefore we need to make sure that pricing is aligned in that. That is one the considerations we're discussing.

PETER HESSLER: Yes, thank you.

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Daniel Karrenberg. I am the first and a current employee of the RIPE NCC, just for total transparency. I have also been involved in the design of many a charging scheme of the RIPE NCC, and there is only one advice I can give you: Keep it simple.

PETER HESSLER: Yes, for sure, that is something that we're very aware of. We want to ensure ‑

(Applause)

We want to be simple for you the members to be able to predict what your budget will look like. We want you to be able what your budget will look like next year without having complex calculations, we also want to ensure the RIPE NCC can reasonably predict and accurately predict what their incoming revenue will be so that they can build the appropriate budgets for that. Thank you.

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Rinsa Cloke asks: About the option of charging on IPv6, do you consider charging based on number of allocations or do you rather charge based on the total size of allocations?"

PETER HESSLER: There is a number of discussions we're currently leaning towards the total size, because this is unfair if a member ‑‑ I guess more accurately, is in the IPv4 world, it is at this time more difficult to get larger allocation sizes and you'll need to get a lot of small allocations together, and it's unfair if you have 256 /24s, to charge 256 times somebody who had a single /16 issued to them.

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Alex: I would like first to thank the task force, because I genuinely think that to try to make your best solution that's fit for the community, but one remark: The people you send your input for the task force is not representative of the people who will vote a resolution of the General Meeting and so on, I think instead of proposed charging scheme, like you tried many time, we are failing, instead you should ask the community that we vote the finance scheme which kind of scheme they would like to see, which rule they need or not to follow to generate a charging scheme.

PETER HESSLER: So, as part of the membership of the taskforce, we do have varying perspectives on what the RIPE NCC ‑‑ the current charging scheme, that the RIPE NCC is using, some members are generally in favour of the existing one and think it can use some tweaks, some are quite opposed to it. So we feel that we do have quite a wide range of opinions on it, and I believe some of them did support the member submitted discussion from the previous General Meeting. So we feel that we have quite an interesting set of perspectives on this. We also absolutely welcome comments from the community. Please send them in either discuss this on ‑‑ again, as I said, on Members Discuss mailing list or directly to the task force. We are also monitoring in most of the communications that the members are having amongst themselves on the various Working Groups.

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Just what I say, it's that the community would take the time to make inputs to the Working Group. It's not necessarily representative of the people who vote. I see in my country many people who only vote and feel aggrieved because they think the charging scheme don't represent the best interest, and we are still failing to get a proper charging scheme because when you have a consensus inside your group, it's not a representation of the whole community and we are failing and failing again.

PETER HESSLER: I want to quickly respond before I let Claire respond. We are trying to create a framework that the Executive Board can then bring a new charging scheme to the members. We are also ‑‑ however, we are limited in what we can do if we ‑‑ if people do not like what's being done, do not communicate with anybody, we don't know they don't like it. We cannot do anything based on their dislikes or likes. So, we encourage everyone here at the General Meeting and those that are unable to be at the General Meeting, to bring your opinions to us, so we can properly understand what the concerns are.

Obviously, it is not possible to have a hundred percent approval, and we are not aiming for a 100% approval, that would be a ridiculous stance to try and take, but we want to have something that will accepted by the membership.

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Just to add that our meeting minutes are being published in the Members Discuss list. So far zero comments in all of those published minutes, so please, please comment and let us know your feedback. We are also here all week, you can find Peter and myself, Cynthia, anyone who is on the list, and give us your feedback as well.

PETER HESSLER: If I can ask the task force members who are in the room right now, quickly raise your hands, stand up, so the, you can see us, quite a few hands are up. We are here, we are available, we're very interested in hearing your opinions. If members feel Members Discuss is not the appropriate place to bring this discussion, we are open to hear your suggestions of where to bring it so we can get better input from the membership.

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: There is a question from queue miss I will, representing Cloud digital: "What active efforts have the task force taken or planning to take to reach out to members to collect wider views? Example, sending out surveys?"

PETER HESSLER: So, the active activities that have been happening have been primarily led by the Executive Board. They have been announcements of the task force being created, and then asking people to submit e‑mails. We have not done a survey as of yet.

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: "Is it possible to define and vote for a base charging scheme that does not contain numbers, only formulation? And then each year the budget gets applied to the formula?"

PETER HESSLER: That is a question better aimed at the Executive Board. We can definitely provide ‑‑ I believe whatever frameworks that is provided to the Executive Board would facilitate such a budget, or such a charging scheme. However, as I said earlier, we want this to be predictable and easily understood. So, raw numbers that you just, you know, you make a selection on a table, maybe you add a few times and you're done, is much easier to understand than a complex formula.

TOBIAS FIEBIG: Picking up on the earlier question of what the charging task force has done to facilitate input. As a personal statement, I would like to argue that being a member comes with responsibilities, and it's not a buffet. So there is also certain responsibilities for members to speak up and not only to complain, to support the task force as members of the community to reach a viable process and plan to move forward.

PETER HESSLER: Exactly. Thank you very much for that. Because RIPE is a membership‑based organisation, we do ‑‑ membership does come with responsibilities. We strongly encourage you to participate in the general meetings, in the discussions, bring us information, and we are limited in what is possible to do. It looks like there is no more questions. Does anyone on the Executive Board ‑‑

SANDER STEFFANN: I just want to say observing the task force, like I am not on it, but I see you're taking the stability of the NCC into account, the community, looking at the future, so to you and to the rest of the task force, thank you a lot for all the hard work you are putting in. I am really impressed.

(Applause)

PETER HESSLER: Thank you very much. I'll hand back to Ondrej.

ONDREJ FILIP: Thank you very much. So I think that we reached the end of the agenda point number 5 and now we have a presentation from CFO, about the financial update and redistribution of RIPE NCC surplus.

SIMON‑JAN HAYTINK: That looks good. Can everybody hear me properly?

So, hello everybody. I am Simon, CFO, but also known as chief frugal officer at the RIPE NCC.

But feel free to call me Simon. Already my eighth presentation at the GM, so time does fly. I have a bit of a long story, so let's get into it.

A quick recap of our financial strategy. We have a not‑for‑profit funding model. Our funding strategy aims to generate sufficient income so we can fulfil our obligations in a stable and predictable manner while we maintain a low‑risk profile.

The key message for this presentation.

Income is under budget by our inability to receive funds from ultra high‑risk countries. Costs are also under budget. We had a surprising cost efficient RIPE 88 in Krakow, but I also see a change in culture in which there is an increased focus on cost consciousness in the RIPE NCC. The discussions and consultations we have had with our members, has definitely had an impact. So thank you for that.

This is not to say that we are there. As this will need continued focus.

Furthermore, we do see continued decline in LIR numbers. But this is in line with our expectation. And we see stable member development. Even with a small increase here to date. And we are forecasting an operational deficit of 1.5 million to be deducted off of our reserves of course subject to the redistribution vote.

But we also forecast a positive financial result of €750,000, which is to be added to our reserves. I am happy and proud that the treasury project is now in full operation. And this will help offset the effect of inflation on our reserves and possibly even a bit more.

And lastly, of course the work with the charging scheme task force has started and will continue.

The financial update.

Our financial performance indicators to date. Income is 4% below budget and costs are under be 7% and we have less LIR accounts than budgeted at the end of Q3.

The financial story so far. Our income is 26.4 million euros. 4% under budget. We have a net decrease of 247 LIR accounts. But we can still report a slight increase of 68 members.

Expenditures are 7% under budget at 26.3 million. We have 184.5 FTE and 3.8 EOR employed at the end of September, with an average for the year of 187.5.

Resulting in operational surplus of €100,000. And a surplus of 0.8 million including the financial result.

We still have one main concern financially speaking, and this is the membership fee at risk. The membership fee at risk we define as membership fees of which the collection is uncertain, and consists of ultra high risk companies, income from members who are under sanction or sanction investigation and any current or POP future conflicts in our service region.

Our balance sheet.

Tangible fixed assets show a decline due to less capital investment over the past few years, or office is currently eight years old. So we do expect investment will be needed at some point in the future.

Financial fixed assets show an increase and cash shows a decline, explained by our treasury project.

Total current receivables increased significantly, same as last year, this is mainly due to 1.2 million euros to be invoiced membership fees for ultra high risk countries and an increase interest receivable.

Capital and liabilities.

Stead clearing house reserve over the years, 305,000 euros still to be to be redistributed. Owner current liabilities include three months of unearned membership revenue for 2024.

Dally, this includes 3.6 million of postponed income from ultra high‑risk countries for 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 which we cannot report as income. The balance sheet growth compared to September 2023 is mainly due to this ultra high risk income balance sheet entry, but all in all, happy to report a healthy balance sheet yet again.

Moving on to our income.

The income details. A total of 26.4 million in income. 25.4 million in membership fees compared to 27.6 in 2023. Sign‑up fees are at 700,000, compared to 600,000 in 2023. Considerably less new LIRs than expected in 2024. This has been corrected for the budget 2025.

RIPE meeting income and other income is also below budget. And other income consists mainly of sponsorship income.

New LIR accounts and closures. We do see continued interest in members of the RIPE NCC as shown by the inflow of new LIRs. As you can see the 2024 inflow is comparable to the 2023. Looking at closures, we do see reduced closures compared to 2023 although we do still have Q4 to go. I expect we will end 2024 with between 20,000 and 20,500 active LIRs. Meaning I expect about 700 to 1100 closures in the remainder of the year.

Members and LIRs.

Starting point of LIR accounts in 2024, was 21,570. And at the end of September, this is 21,323. So a continued reduction in LIR accounts but as forecasted at the lower pace than last year. Looking at our members, we started the year with 20,077 and have 20,145 members at the end of September. So we can report a slight growth with 68 members.

Payment behaviour: As always we can report positive payment behaviour; that being said, a significant part of our members paid their invoice after the 30 day payment term so there is room for improvement.

In 2024, we closed about 150 LIR accounts due to non‑payment, representing a value of about €228,000, which is about 0.73% of the total.

The remaining outstanding amounts for 2022, '3 and '4 represent the payment extensions we granted for Ukraine.

Zooming in on all the countries with active payment extensions. In 2024, we changed our payment extension approach. Members now need to actively request an extension. For Palestine we currently have one outstanding invoice for 2024, for which a payment extension was granted. Ukraine, 117 invoices are still outstanding. For 73 of those, members requested an extension, meaning that 20 LIR accounts are formally eligible for closure, but as you will understand we are very careful with closing these members.

Please note that this overview only shows LIRs with outstanding invoices and granted payment extensions. We have granted multiple extensions in 2024 that have been paid by this point in time.

An ongoing concern for us is the membership at risk. A short recap. Ultra high‑risk countries as defined by three major Dutch banks. Iran and Syria, invoices have not been issued as our banks apply a zero tolerance policy on funds from these countries. The payment obligation still stands but has been postponed. But we do see positive development in regard to this issue. Due to our extensive compliance efforts we have earned the trust of our banks which opens up the floor for solutions. But we do not have a solution at this point in time, but it is looking significantly better than a year ago. For Ukraine, all invoices from been issued but the payment due date will be extended to the end of year upon request. With requests members to actively ask for an extension we can make better accounting judgments in estimating our bad debt.

Lastly sanctions. We cannot collect fees from sanctioned entities. But as soon as we can rule out any sanctions, we will issue the invoice.

To quantify the membership fee at risk. At this point in time it's just over €4 million. Consisting of 3.6 million for ultra high‑risk countries. On average about 1.2 for 2022, '3 and '4, which means an expected 4.8 million overall total for 2025. Uninvoiced membership fees due to sanctions or pending sanctions investigation is 259,000 in total. For the Ukraine, we have outstanding €172,000 for €202,476,000 of €20,231 /# thousand for 2022.

For 2024, the total membership fee at risk is 1.5 million. But overall, a significant amount of membership fee at risk with 4 million at this point in time.

Invoices for 2025. We will issue all invoices for 2025 with the exception of ultra Hi risk countries and sanctioned or possibly sanctioned members. Basically we will not send an invoice if we are not certain we can collect the fees in a risk free manner. And of course we will continue to do what we can to be able to invoice and collect the membership fees from all members.

/KPEPBD tours.

The expenditures September year‑to‑date. Total expenditures of 26.3, payroll and personnel are under budget with 2%. We employed 183.7 FTEs and 3.8 employees of record, compared to a budget of is 92.5. Other operating expenses are 16 percent under budget at 8.6 million. Depreciations and bad debt are 11% under budget at €737,000.

Zooming in on the budget variances. As per September 2024 we are 1.9 million under budget. All cost categories except housing an insurance are under budget. Housing an insurances is over budget with 58,000 euros,, explained by our 2023 final settlement invoice from a landlord for utilities. We are already questioning this invoice as these costs came as a surprise, while we realised the energy costs have gone up.

Outreach and engagement is significantly below budget, partly explained by the surprising cost efficient RIPE 88 meeting.

Looking a bit deeper at the budget variations for information technology. €13,000 under budget to date. Hardware and related support is €35,000 over budget. Explained by the under utilisation of the budget by information services external anonymity and community and organisational sustainability. The

IT Housing, is 212,000 over budget. Due to the delays in the reduction of the data centre fingerprint and lastly Cloud expenses are 75,000 below budget. Overall, we are slightly under budget, so the delay in the data centre is over compensated overall.

Related parties September 2024. The intent of the related party is close disclosure is to provide insight to our stakeholders in any potential conflicts of interest based on financial transactions with a /ELT ared party. In this case specifically our Board members.

We paid 10,000 euros for the...... and 1,000 euros support for the CS nothing. For ACK nigh, my we do have transactions but since Christian Kaufmann left the Executive Board this is no longer a related party. For PeeringDB, and Internet Society, we have not had any transactions so far. CZ NIC is the host for RIPE 89 we will of course disclose in our 2024 financial statements any trust anchors in relation to RIPE 89.

Moving on to treasury.

Overall, unrealised positive financial result of €679,000 to date. Which is a 2.1% return on our reserves. This return is significantly better than our September 2023 result of negative €65,000. Of this €679,000, €338,000 is on interest income and includes expenses related to our investment portfolio. And we have a 348 positive result on our investment portfolio. Unfortunately we do also have a negative result on exchange differences of €27,000.

To provide a bit more details on our current treasury portfolio. We have an investment portfolio of 18 /‑PB 7 million, compared to 6.6 million in September 2023. We currently have 24.4 million in cash, with our banks, which results in the interest income of €338,000. I am proud that we are seeing the results of the treasury project already. Our investment portfolio of 16.2 million managed by Dasim as provided a return of 3.62% year‑to‑date or €442,000. As per today, this is 456,000. And we are projecting a result of 4.47% or €545,000 per year end.

As already mentioned with Board approval, we sold our exchange traded funds. As this was the most volatile part of our portfolio, and ensured major value fluctuations throughout the past few years. The result of this sale was €112,000 loss in 2024. And from the purchase date in 2027, a 35150 thousand euros loss. The value of the ETF sale was transferred to our managed portfolio and I am very happy with the result so far. And I am looking forward to the years to come.

The plan is that we can increase the factual of our reserves to offset the effect of inflation, and with a bit of luck, even more.

The goal of our clearing house reserves. I will be working on a document to be submitted to the Executive Board. The plan is that this document will describe our general goals and purpose of the reserves. This document will also include a financial goal, which is to be agreed upon. My current thinking is to set a goal at 100 percent of our yearly expenses and achieve this goal with the returns we achieve with the treasury project. In other words, to ensure an increase of value while assuming a yearly distribution of any excess membership fee funds. A financial result of about 1 million, or 3.35 percent annually is a realistic possibility. But it is of course not a certainty, as it remains investing.

Do to our low risk appetite we do have a decent chance on reasonable returns with a relatively high degree of certainty.

The overall goal of our reserves, operational stability. They allow us to continue to providing services during unexpected events or economic down turns, which is essential as the stability is crucial for maintaining service that supports the global Internet infrastructure.

Overall, our reserves mean that we can adapt to challenges while maintaining a stable and reliable service for the Internet community.

Moving onto the overall result.

To start an overview of the profit and loss statement, as per September year‑to‑date. As mentioned, we are currently under budget in both income and expenses. Leading to an operational result of €100,000. A financial result of 6 /# €0,000 resulting in an overall surplus of €780,000 as per September 2024.

The 2024 forecast. Please note in this forecast I have assumed that there will not be a redistribution over 2024. As I am forecasting an operational deficit. For income, I forecast the trend of Q1 to Q3 to continue and although things are looking better I do not expect we will be able to collect income from ultra high‑risk countries in 2024.

Looking at expenses, I do forecast increased expenditure in Q4. This has always been an expensive quarter and it will include the costs for this current meeting.

A forecasted financial result of €800,000 will overall result in a forecasted deficit of €700,000. By €2,025 contribution for contributing LIR accounts is between 20,000 and 20,500. Overall, if we could have collected the membership fee at risk from all members, including the 2024 membership fee at risk of 1.5 million, we could have achieved a break‑even year.

And now my favourite slide. The capital and liquidity slide. We remain balanced and healthy. A clearing house buffer of 32 million to respond to uncertainties. We are solvent and in a robust position financially. Membership fees at risk remains a concern, but we are in a better position than the past few years. And our treasury will allow to us to protect our reserves and possibly even increase the value.

Then, the redistribution vote for the 2024 financial year.

The information used in the next few slides are based on a forecast as we still have a full quarter to go financially.

This year's redistribution vote is different than in previous years. Reasoning is that we are forecasting a deficit and we understand this could have an effect on your vote. If as in previous years, we would have voted yes or no to a redistribution, a no vote would mean no redistribution in case of a deficit. But it would also mean no redistribution in case of a surplus. And the operational surplus would be added to our reserves. Now, I do not think a positive operational result is realistic, but if we could indeed collect the funds from the ultra high‑risk countries in 2024, a surplus is technically possible. Therefore, this year the redistribution vote is: By voting yes, any excess contribution will be redistributed to the members in 2025. In case of a deficit, which is the most realistic situation, this deficit will be covered by the RIPE NCC reserves.

By voting no, any excess funds will be added to the RIPE NCC reserves. And in case of a deficit, this deficit will be redistributed to the members which will increase the invoice amount per LIR in 2025.

So based on the current forecasted deficit, a yes vote would result in a deduction of the operational deficit of 1.5 million from the reserves. And in addition of the financial result of 0.8 million to that same reserves, being an overall reduction of our reserves by approximately €700,000. Our reserves would still then be at a healthy 32 million euros.

A no vote would result in a redistribution of 1.5 million deficit to the members, effectively increasing next year's invoice with an additional €75. And the addition of a financial result to our reserves increasing them to 33.5 million.

Before ending my presentation I just want to share a multiple‑year budget forecast.

For any forecast assumptions will have to be made, and these are the ones I made. The charging scheme will remain unchanged from 2025. Members will remain stable at 20,000. Activities continue at per activity plan and budget 2025. Staff levels will remain stable. Any staff increases will result in a reduction in other operating expenses and annual 3% general salary budget increase, continued inflation of 1.5 percent applicable to all non‑salary expenses only.

With these assumptions, this is the forecast for budget 2026 and 2027.

The current charging scheme will be sufficient up to 2026. For 2027, we would rely on the financial result to cover the operational deficit. I wanted to share this overview with you all to show that we have a stable financial outlook for the coming years which does provide the charging scheme task force to do their work, and that is not to say that the task force should take all this time, but it is there if needed.

And that brings me to the end of the presentation. And I just wanted to show the key messages one last time.

We have stable MEP numbers, showing a modest increase, we forecast an operational deficit of 1.5 million. And a positive financial result of 750,000. The treasury project is looking good and I am confident that we can increase the value of our reserves over time. And the work of the charging scheme task force has started and will continue in 2025. And with that, I would like to open the floor for any questions.

(Applause)

ULKA ATHALE: There is an online question: "Will we have an account outside the EU jurisdiction and not in euros for payments from Russia? Every year it becomes more and more difficult for Russia to make a payment and more and more expensive. This year we have paid almost €100 in fees only for making the payment. We need an account in some jurisdiction outside the EU."

SIMON‑JAN HAYTINK: With the Dubai League entity mentioned we will an account opened in the name of that legally entity, but I do not expect that that will make the payment any easier, because in the end it is the RIPE NCC is the entity issuing the invoice. So there will still be issues to collect those fees. However, we look at it. But we'll definitely continue to monitor and look into any options to help out in that sense.

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Nick Hilliard I have two questions. Firstly, the ratio of reserves to operational expenditure has dropped from 109% to 82% over the last five years. Do you have a goal of dropping it to a particular level, and if so, what is that level? Because I think everybody in the room would be quite anxious to ensure that it doesn't drop below the, what's sensible to have in the longer term.

The second question I have relates to the ultra high‑risk countries. Is there a long term plan to ‑‑ not is there, what is the long‑term plan to try to engage with these countries and what legal options are there that are open to you?

SIMON‑JAN HAYTINK: With regard to the capital expense ratio first. Yes, it's been dropping slightly of courses could says have been GOG up and our reserves has remained stable. My current thinking for the goal is to have that at 100% but as said, I will work on a document to be presented to the Executive Board, and that aim or goal will have to be discussed and approved. So at this moment, that 100% is only my thinking.

NICK HILLIARD: Is that document going to be published?

SIMON‑JAN HAYTINK: I would expect so. But I would first like to share with the Executive Board so they have a chance to review and if they approve, I would assume that it would be published, yes.

HANS PETTER HOLEN: If I can take the other question, our long‑term strategy with the ultra high‑risk countries is to come with an arrangement with the banks in the Netherlands or otherwise, to be able to collect the money. Of course, this has taken many years, and if it takes too long, we would have to look into a different plan. But the current discussion with the Board has been go for the low risk solution, do not be overly creative, stay clearly within Dutch law, and see if you can convince the Dutch banks of collecting the money. So, engaging with the governments in those countries will not help us, this is a Dutch banking issue.

NICK HILLIARD: Is there precedence in the Dutch banks to engage with banks in these countries?

HANS PETTER HOLEN: Yes. But there was a scandal in the Netherlands in the Dutch banking system some years back that made the not so risk‑averse banks being very risk averse and that is what we have been caught in the middle of. So, you know, with the focus of anti‑money laundering across the world and the world getting rougher, that's caused the banks to be extra cautious and we are kind of squeezed there. With our significant investments in compliance and documenting what we are doing is avoid sanctions and know your customers and our customers also goes into the PI holders and the individual ASN holders. So yeah, we're not invoicing for here, we're invoicing for doing compliance on all our customer base. That is paying off with the banks now. We may have a solution, as Simon said, but not completely done yet.

TOBIAS FIEBIG: I was wondering in the budgets for '25/'26 onward, the number of LIRs seem to be stable even though the key message from the presentation was that decrease continuing in the number of LIRs per year. How was a decision made to not account for a projected reduction in the number of LIRs for the future budget?

HANS PETTER HOLEN: So I gave those directions to the CFO, please in the projections use the number of members, not the number of LIRs, to protect the income. We have seen today that we have more LIRs than members, but the number of LIRs, multiple LIRs per member, and that's declining, because people get IP addresses from the waiting list, they have the LIR open for two years and then they close them. And I think that that will have to end at some point. Either naturally or because we change that, so to do conservative income planning, we have spent a number of members as a driver for the income. So, if we don't change the current charging scheme, that will probably be a very conservative. So it will be higher. We do not see a decline in member. So the number of members is slightly increasing.

TOBIAS FIEBIG: Okay, so I would have argued that maybe an even more conservative approach might have been better, but... I see your reasoning. Thank you.

HANS PETTER HOLEN: And also, the projections we have here now is something we have to update when we see the outcome of the charging scheme task force, because then our projections into the future will be very different. And then we will also discuss the new five‑year strategy and then I have set out for myself to make an operational plan along with that. So that means creating a five‑year budget along with that so that we have clarity on that what this strategy means and in that setting we will definitely have that discussion on those projections.

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Remote: Just to confirm that I understood correctly. If we vote in favour of the redistribution resolution, the surplus will be redistributed while deficits will be covered by the reserves. If we vote against, the sub‑loss will be added to the reserves while deficits will be distributed. There is no option to vote for giving a surplus to the reserve and having a deficit covered by the reserve."

SIMON‑JAN HAYTINK: Yes, that is correct.

ULKA ATHALE: There is another question: "Can we please sum up the reserves in Yuan'an or Hong Kong or China, have you considered this option?"

SIMON‑JAN HAYTINK: We have not considered this option and I am also looking at the Board, I don't think we will do this in any short‑term.

TOBIAS FIEBIG: I would like to point out that there is also a fourth option. I would basically personally be in favour, which is adding a surplus to the reserves and charging us if ‑‑ well it doesn't realise, which I think ‑‑ or ‑‑ I miscalculated but I think it is basically the inverse of the one currently posited.

HANS PETTER HOLEN: So my very simple characterisation of this vote is that the Board wanted to be nice to the membership, so if ‑‑ the Board always wants to be nice to the membership, so if you want to make sure you don't have to pay extra, you vote yes. And in the case you want to pay extra, you vote no.

TOBIAS FIEBIG: Thank you for that clarification.

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: One thing was mentioned was like a few meetings ago, there was a Dubai entity being set‑up for receiving money. Is that still on the table because he is not particularly... what the lawyers says about this?

HANS PETTER HOLEN: So, we mentioned several times today also that we have set up a Dubai legal entity and we're currently working on prioritising it and we plan to have it fully operational from the 1 January. Whether or not we will invoice any countries in the Dubai entity is yet to be decided. That requires significant work on intercompany agreements and has tax consequences and so on. We are currently investigating that. So, it is an option. But, as Simon said, it's not likely to be ready for the January billing run which goes out on the 8th January, if everything goes well. So, yeah, we are looking into those options but we don't have any firm ‑‑

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: But twelve months should be a reasonable cycle to get that done, so maybe 2026, that we can actually collect money from those countries, at least in Dubai entity because they cost money anyway. I mean the RIPE NCC have a Dubai office for a long time, that costs money as well I presume. So we can spend money there and we can invoice there that's probably cover part of the deficit.

HANS PETTER HOLEN: So for the ultra high‑risk countries we do not have solution in Dubai either, therefore we have continued to work with the Dutch banks, and even if we were to find a solution with the ultra high‑risk countries in Dubai, we would not be able to transfer the money to EU where we actually have the major costs. Therefore we are focused on actually be able to get the money our Amsterdam office. But it is an option to collect money in the Dubai, it just requires even more paperwork, but ‑‑

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I think the CFO can do a study on the cost outside the EU, like the Russians, the EEC meeting supporting the Russian members ended in the Iran members, also the, all these expenses outside the EU do we need to bring the money into the EU and send it back again or just spend it locally, as I say the CFO should see how much it costs. If I look at the slide it will be a few million dollars, less than 5 percent of the budget that actually collect from those places. So, maybe that would solve the problem.

HANS PETTER HOLEN: Yes, that is an option and we do have spreadsheets with those numbers. But it has consequences in taxes, but yeah...

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I think that should be presented to the members.

HANS PETTER HOLEN: There is no such thing as a free lunch here.

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Thank you.

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Rob Evans, back in May I had a brief discussion with the Board about reserves policy. There is the clearing house procedures which largely talk about how it's built‑up, but whether there is use in having a more detailed reserves policy in what is what the target and profit is, how it's managed. Any more thoughts on that?

SIMON‑JAN HAYTINK: I'll be working on that document this year, and submit that to the Board, and assuming their approval after discussions, I expect that will be published.

ROB EVANS: Thank you very much.

SIMON‑JAN HAYTINK: All right, I see no more questions.

ONDREJ FILIP: Thank you very much.

(Applause)

After this detailed information I would like to ask Karla to come on stage and her task will be to guide us through the voting procedures.

Karla Liddle‑White: I am from the comms team for the RIPE NCC and I am here to take you through the voting, the most exciting part of the GM I think. So let's get going.

I am going to take you through the procedure and the platform. So, admin first. Unfortunately, in line with the Articles of Association, the Chair of the General Meeting has said that it would be electronic voting only for this GM, so fortunately, unfortunately, there will be no paper ballots at this GM.

Voting analysis. This is slightly different than what we usually do. We have listened to feedback from members and we're going to have a more detailed voting analysis of the GM post GM. So, not my slides here. So you can, if you are really interested, it is very interesting I think. My colleagues Ulka and Rene have created a voting analysis from the May GM, so go and have a read of that until the October GM analysis comes out on RIPE Labs.

Voting on the resolutions:

.

There is one resolution to vote on. Resolution 1 requires more than 50% of yes votes to pass. And abstentions are noted but do not count towards the result.

How to vote:

So, you are going to receive two e‑mails from assembly voting. The first e‑mail contains voting code 2. Now, I will clarify here, there was a slight hiccup with assembly voting just now, and we started sending out the e‑mails and about 611 got the first e‑mail with the voting code 2. But then the system froze. Assembly voting are looking into this, but we decided to then send it again. So you may get two e‑mails with voting code 2 in it. They are exactly the same. But we'd prefer you got three e‑mails than none. We are investigating so we will find out what happened there.

So this is your GM registration number. You need this to log into the platform to vote. So that's your first e‑mail. And then you get your second e‑mail. And this one has the link to the platform in it. So here, you can just click vote now, that will take you to the platform. It's got a pre‑filled code in it. That's voting code 1. So, click "Vote now" and then the top code there will be pre‑filled, and then you'll need your voting code 2 or your registration number to log in. And then click go to ballot. There is a timer, some confusion last time. The timer begins when you log in. You have got 40 minutes, but if you stop the process, you come out and you go back in, you can just ‑‑ the timer starts again, it's not 40 minutes forever. So you have got that one.

And there is only one resolution to vote on. You can chose yes, no, or abstain. But you must chose one option to continue, it won't let you continue without choosing something. Click confirm selection. Assigning votes. So if you have got several votes, you can use those little arrows there to go up and down and then click confirm and cast.

And then you can see how many votes you have got left. So if you have got ten and you have done five, you can then add new ballot to add the other five and then assign these votes and then click continue. There is lots of continues.

Click continue. Once you have assigned all of your votes. So just give the page a quick check, make sure you have done all your votes correctly. And it will take you to submitting your vote.

Again, have a look at the resolution you have done, check your votes, and submit.

And then you have voted.

So then you can track your ballot. So you can track your ballot using the tracking code or there is a QR code you can use there. Save the code, because you can go back and have a look later to see what's going on.

And it will take you to this page, which is where you can see all the history of what's happened with assembly voting and your ballot.

Important information:

You need to do the entire process. So all those continues, submit votes, you need to get to the end for it to be validated. If you leave the platform before casting your ballot, the votes won't be registered. Just log in, start again, carry on.

Your e‑mail server does need to be TLS 1.2 compliant. You'd be surprised. I have dealt with a lot of e‑mails. And there is a tracking pixel. Assembly voting don't use this for anything, they just use it to send out the reminder afterwards, and again there is no paper ballots.

Troubleshooting: Please check your spam for the assembly voting e‑mails. If you are using Safari, the pre‑fill code might not go in there, but you can just copy and paste it. The e‑mail will come from this very rememberable e‑mail. Please use a modern browser to access the platform and not Internet Explorer.

For any questions at all about the GM, e‑mail agm@ripe.net.

And this is where you can find us. If you have not received your voting e‑mails by about 7:00 p.m. UTC plus one today, please contact us. If you are on‑site, I am at the GM help desk along with Daniela, we can always help and we will be there from nine till five. The results will be announced ‑‑

Voting will take place once the Chair declares it open at the end of this session, that's what Ondrej is going to do. And you can cast it until 9:00 a.m. on Friday. And that's UTC plus one. And then the GM results will be announced at half past ten UTC plus one on Friday.

We'll be live‑streaming with the same link you got in your Meetecho e‑mail, and on site it's going to be in the main room. And then if you need support, you can go to the how‑to‑vote page, that's got all our troubling shooting from this slide and it's also got our contact details. This presentation is in the presentations log on the GM web pages. If you can't use the QR code up there.

And any questions for me? That's got to be a first. None online? Okay, great. I must have explained it well.

(Applause)

Thank you. I will pass it back to Ondrej.

ONDREJ FILIP: Thank you very much. So we are really approaching the final of this General Meeting. My final task is to again read out the resolution, so please let me do that.

Resolution number 1 and the only one.

"The General Meeting approves the redistribution of the excess distribution/deficit paid in the financial year 2024 in the following way:

In in case there is an excess distribution, this will be redistributed to the membership in 2025 according to the RIPE NCC clearing house procedure.

In case of a deficit, this will be covered by the RIPE NCC reserves."

Again very nice resolution, and I strongly advise you to vote yes.

There is a note: "If the membership does not approve the resolution, the excess contribution paid will be added to the reserves and the deficit of the contribution paid will be redistributed to the membership in 2025"

I will wait a few seconds. If there are no other question, because if I switch to the next slide, the voting will be open. And I really want to enjoy this moment. I have two kids at home and it's rare for me that I say something that it happens that I really want to make it a little bit more dramatic.

No questions? So be it. The voting is open!!!!

And also that's the end of today's agenda. We will reconvene on Friday, 1st November, at 10:30 local time.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)

LIVE CAPTIONING BY

MARY McKEON, RMR, CRR, CBC

DUBLIN, IRELAND.

RIPE 89.
1 November 2024
10:30 am
Main room AGM.

RESUMPTION OF THE GM ‑ RESULT OF VOTE:

ONDREJ FILIP: Thank you very much, I think we should wait until 10.30 is announced for the remote

participants, so give us a few seconds.

KHALID SAMARA: All right, thank you. That's the end of the presentation, thank you everyone.

(APPLAUSE.)

ONDREJ FILIP: Good morning everyone. If I can get a little bit of attention, I have a very simple task just to announce the results of the voting. It was not very dramatic this time, we had just one resolution and the result is as expected. So the general meeting approved the resolution as proposed by a really vast majority of votes; it was 92.6%. So the resolution is approved, and I think it is a very smart decision. Thank you very much for that.

I have one more thank you to Carla Scada from APNIC who was the independent observe of the general meeting results. Thank you very much for that, Carla. I thank you all who participated and see you next time. Thank you.

(APPLAUSE.)

Offee break.