RIPE NCC Roundtable Meeting for Governments and Regulators – A Summary

The RIPE NCC held its first RIPE NCC Roundtable for Governments and Regulators on Wednesday, 30 March 2005 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. 29 people attended from 17 different countries within the RIPE NCC service region.

Presentations can be found at:
http://www.ripe.net/meetings/roundtable/march2005/presentations.html

Summary

• International Management of Internet Resources
  Rob Blokzijl, RIPE Chair

For the Internet to function properly, a set of resources needs to be managed in a co-ordinated way. These resources include IP (Internet Protocol) addresses, AS (Autonomous System) Numbers, Domain Name System parameters, and Internet standards. These resources have been traditionally managed by a number of organisations. It was demonstrated that they have all been organised along the same lines: by a bottom up and open process of industry self-regulation.

• RIPE and the Policy Development Processes
  Rob Blokzijl, RIPE Chair

The Policy Development Process for RIPE was explained, detailing how the RIPE Working Groups reach consensus. It was demonstrated that the process is open, transparent and inclusive and all discussions are publicly archived.

• The RIPE NCC
  Axel Pawlik, Managing Director, RIPE NCC

The RIPE NCC is an independent and not-for-profit membership organisation that supports about 3,800 members in 70 countries. This presentation described how the activities and services of the RIPE NCC are defined, discussed, evaluated and performed in an open manner.

• Availability of IPv4 Address Space
  Leo Vegoda, Registration Services Manager, RIPE NCC

This presentation covered the latest results of research and analysis concerning usage of the IPv4 address space within the Internet.

• Introduction of IPv6 Address Space
  Leo Vegoda, Registration Services Manager, RIPE NCC

This presentation provided an overview and detailed statistics of IPv6 allocations globally versus IPv6 allocations in the RIPE NCC service region.

• The Root Name Server System - Operation of the K-root Server
  Andrei Robachevsky, Chief Technical Officer, RIPE NCC

The RIPE NCC has operated one of the 13 DNS root servers (K root) since 1997. To improve the regional distribution, resiliency and performance of the root name service provided by the k.root-server, the RIPE NCC have begun an effort to deploy mirror instances of the K root service throughout its service region using anycast routing. The presentation provided an overview of the root server system and described the k.root-servers.net server in more detail.

• Internet Numbers and the WSIS Process
  Rob Blokzijl, RIPE Chair / Axel Pawlik, Managing Director, RIPE NCC

In this section of the Roundtable Meeting, common incorrect myths were discussed. These included the following:

• The world is running out of address space
• Some countries cannot get address space
• ICANN makes addressing policies
• The U.S. controls root servers
• National address administration will make the world a better place

Discussion took place with opportunity for attendees to ask questions and raise subjects of importance to them.

Attendees were also asked for feedback regarding changes to the agenda and topics they would like to see introduced for the next RIPE NCC Roundtable Meeting. These suggestions can still be sent to <roundtable@ripe.net>.