Daily Meeting Report -- Thursday, 19 April

Attendees checked in: 410

Address Policy Working Group II

The first session of the day began with Sander Steffann, Address Policy Working Group co-Chair, explaining how consensus on a policy is determined. Comments from attendees emphasised the importance of giving constructive feedback. Rob Blokzijl, RIPE Chair, then presented a potential policy proposal, the “IPv4 Maintenance Policy”, to simplify and consolidate existing IPv4 policies into one policy following IPv4 exhaustion. There was a lengthy discussion that will be continued on the mailing list. Gert Döring, Address Policy Working Group co-Chair, gave a brief update on the long-term project to unify IPv6 PI and PA policies into a single document, followed by Jan Žorž, go6, who led a discussion on revisiting the IPv6 “additional allocation” policy, particularly whether the HD-ratio should continue to be used as the basis for subsequent allocations (with some spirited arguments on either side). The audience reached a rough agreement on the benefit of HD-ratio in the long-term and a policy was deemed unnecessary. Nick Hilliard concluded the session with a short presentation of a forthcoming policy proposal that will change the current last /8 policy.

Anti-Abuse Working Group

The Anti-Abuse Working Group session was well attended and included a presentation from But Klaasen from the Ministry of Security and Justice in the Netherlands. His presentation highlighted Dutch efforts to combat illegal use of the Internet. Laura Cobley from the RIPE NCC also presented on the new RIPE NCC Reporting Procedure. Working Group co-Chair Brian Nisbet gave a status update on RIPE Policy 2011-06.

IPv6 Working Group I and II

Erika Heraeus, Swedish Post and Telecommunications Regulator, presented on how they are fostering IPv6 deployment in Sweden and asked for feedback from the technical community about the guidance document they published recently. RIPE NCC staff presented on IPv6 allocations that showed a fairly constant number of 70-80 IPv6 allocations per month after a peak of over 200 allocations last year when IANA handed out the last IPv4 blocks to the RIRs. After Jari Arkko, Ericsson, presented his experiences in setting up automatic home networking, there was a lively discussion about the choice between RIP and OSPF and if a routing protocol is needed at all or if bridging would be enough. Eric van Uden, AVM, spoke about how AVM is handling the different equipment profiles and standards. Tahar Schaa, consultant for the German government, gave an update on their IPv6 rollout and the recommendation document they are producing based on ripe-501, “Requirements For IPv6 in ICT Equipment”.

Database Working Group

The RIPE NCC gave an overview and explained that all DOMAIN objects from the TLD operators have been deleted. The RIPE NCC had also investigated UTF-8 support in the RIPE Database, and found that the database technically accepts UTF-8 values, but it is not recommended because there may well be technical issues, and because there is no current policy governing its use. ‘auth:’ lines in MNTNER objects had been hidden to avoid exposing MD5 hashes and concerns were raised that this change broke some automated scripts. Optional geolocation and language attributes have been added to INET(6)NUM and ORGANISATION objects. Wilfred Woeber took an action in his personal capacity to generate discussion on the mailing list on further impacts, including how to engage existing geolocation providers and the implications for content providers who restrict access using geolocation data. Robert Kisteleki, RIPE NCC, presented two new RIPEstat widgets that feature RIPE Database information – a hierarchical view of inet(6)nums, and a generic object browser showing relationships between objects.

Cooperation Working Group

The Cooperation Working Group started off with an examination of issues surrounding the ongoing revision of the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) and how this might affect the Internet community. BT’s Phil Rushton offered the choice between optimism and pessimism, but suggested informed caution as the negotiations continue through 2012. Rüdiger Martin, European Commission, delivered a presentation on the work being done by the European Commission’s Future Networks program, followed by Paul Rendek, RIPE NCC, who reported on the establishment of the Arab Internet Governance Forum, which will hold its first meeting in October 2012. There were also brief updates from Erika Hersaeus, Swedish Post and Telecom Agency, on EuroDIG (the European Dialogue on Internet Governance) and Nurani Nimpuno, Netnod, on the Internet Governance Forum.

MAT Working Group

Amund Kvalbein, Simula, gave a presentation on how mobile broadband data in Norway is measured. This was followed by Vesna Manojlovic, RIPE NCC, who gave an update on new functionality in RIPE Atlas and RIPEstat. George Michaelson, APNIC, talked about how they are using paid Google advertisements to measure IPv6. Tiziana Refice and Meredith Whittaker, Google, talked about their MLab project that will ultimately generate 500 TB of data, which can be analysed using cloud based tools. Lastly, Daniel Karrenberg, RIPE NCC, talked about the measurements strategy for 2012/2013. This involves new RIPE Atlas anchors, which provide more functionality than regular probes and he discussed discontinuing the TTM servers, which means that the DNSMON service will be offered using a different platform.