24 May 2023
General Meeting
At 4:30 p.m.:
ONDREJ FILIP: Good afternoon, everyone. This nice person in front of you is called Ondrej Filip is the Chairman of RIPE NCC and Chair of this General Meeting. So it's I think 16:34 so the meeting starts. Before I will introduce you the agenda I have some administrative matters to share with you.
First of all, I appointed the secretary of this General Meeting, that's going to be the Chief Legal Officer of RIPE NCC, Athina Fragkouli, on my right‑hand side. And also I would like to remind you that you can object to the General Meeting minutes according to Article 19.4, the draft will be circulated two working days after the meeting, that should be Tuesday, and then you have three weeks to submit notice of objections and if ‑‑ yeah. And unless the 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.
Nothing has changed, so I guess that's normal procedure as usually.
Let me introduce the agenda of this meeting. It's a bit longer that usual so we have more points than usually. We have some normal regular points so welcome and so on. We will have a report from the RIPE NCC presented by Hans Petter Holen, then the report from Executive Board presented by me, pretty usual point adoption of the financial report of 2022, discharge of the ex‑Executive Board. And then we will have one of the highlights of the General Meeting, that's going to be discussion or presentation about the charging scheme for the next year, there was a lot of discussion around it in mailing list and also here during the meeting. So I hope this will finish those discussions, then we have one formal voting about amendments to the Standard Service Agreement. And then the second highlight of this meeting which is the RIPE NCC Executive Board election. After this point, I will interrupt the meeting and we will reconvene on Friday when I will announce the results of the voting and also of the elections. So that is the the plan of today and we will close on Friday after that.
I guess there are no objections to this agenda; and with that I will give the floor to Hans Petter for his presentation.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Thank you, Ondrej. There was a question in the chat room about remote questions and please use the Q&A session for that. You can also request to speak, to be added to the queue and, of course, you can come to the microphones and ask questions at the appropriate times.
So, I just held a presentation in the Services Working Group that is considered part of the GM. I will not repeat that. But just to remind you the message that I tried to get through then is that before run‑out everybody was happy, we had increasing number of LIRs and the cost per member went down. Then came disruptions and we are in a situation where we see increased costs and we see less LIRs and we see increased cost per LIR.
We are listening. We do want your input. And please respond to the survey. That's the gist of what I talked then. There were more questions on the Members Discuss List and I will try to pick out some to address those as well.
Again, we are listening, we want your input, service quality and compliance come first to me. Efficiency is always important, but so far that has been my second priority, it is important the quality of the services and compliance. Without that, trust in the registry is gone, trust in the RIPE NCC is gone. And I trust that you agree with that priority.
We do need your input to make an even better plan for 2024 and we are here to save the future of the Internet together.
So I talked a bit about what the estimates for this year were and you will see later in CFO's presentation that he has a forecast of €39 million cost this year, I have put the ambition slightly higher or lower, depending on the way you put the curve, saying we should not spend more money than what we have of income and so long it looks like we have 38 million income this year so I have a target around 37.5. That would be a 7% increase from last year, but with the declining LIRs we are looking at the 13% increase in cost per member. So that's the background for the whole discussion on the charging scheme that you will also hear Simone presenting on later.
Looking at the development of the costs for the RIPE NCC over the years, we can see here that the registry has increased from when I started in 2020 and that budget was made before I started, but I had to deliver on it on the last half year, we see that we have increased until last year with 30%. If you then add this year's budget, on the registry we have an increase on 39% and that are high numbers. The reasons for that increase, you could partly find in Marco's presentation to the Address Policy Working Group today, the added complexity of transfers of documentation for members, sanctions, transfers we are investing more in RPKI and we have done quite a lot in software engineering to convert consultants to FTEs, that's one of the questions that we raised and I will come back to consultants later on.
If you look at information services you will see that is flat from 2020 to 2022; that's not really fair because we took the security area out and moved it to organisations sustainability where we have created a new department on that which explains the 12%, or in the budget 26%, which is really investing more in compliance, security and legal.
For the external engagement and community, you will see that the budget has actually been declining up until last year. Well, that's quite natural, we didn't do that much travel, we didn't do RIPE meetings and so on, although for this year compared to 2020, we are around 20%. So inflation in the same period, if you look at this, up until last year was 16% since 2020. In the budget we added another 10% for this year; hopefully it will not be that high and that will, so, hopefully, it will be reflected in our result.
So, looking at how this ‑‑ how do we spend this money; where does all the money go? Half of this is staff, actually 58%. So any changes that you want to do in significant ‑‑ significant changes to the RIPE NCC, will have to affect staff or consultants. And that means that if we are going to do dramatic changes, which then staff will fear because they would see their job be on the line, it will take a year to do that through because of legal requirements in the Netherlands to take care of staff if they have to leave.
So, I don't believe in radical changes now unless the Board tell me to do so, but please use your opportunity in the survey to tell us which services are important to you and which are not, that will set the direction for the future.
Other things that you asked about is consultancy, I will touch that, housing and then travel and office costs, so I will have a look at consults. Why do we use them? We have consultants of many different types, we have employees living outside the Netherlands, there is no easy way we can employ them directly, we are moving into employer record where we have an intermediate with legal entities in multiple countries and they will hire them and will be protected under local labour rules, that will show up as consultancy.
We have temporary projects where we hire somebody for a year or year‑and‑a‑half to do something. We have developers for core services that we are changing and we have changed and will continue to change into full employees when we can find the right competence, but that has been a problem in the past and it's been then the solution to find consultants with the right competency to do this, but that's not a sustainable solution if we need that competence permanently.
And we will always need specialist competence, in finance, payroll, security etc., where we are not hiring people on a full‑time but hiring experts for specific tasks on short terms. If somebody leaves we may need a consultant or a temp to fill that position, we may hire temps that we'll later hire and may be on parental leave, so there's a lot of different reasons for consulting.
Looking at the breakdown 28% are what we labour in‑house consultants so they are working with the RIPE NCC e‑mail address and laptop and looks like a normal employee. We have change consultants which are doing projects like implementing the RIS framework, that we've done over the last couple of years, changing the financial governance and so on.
We have a group, which is general consultants, which are auditors, tax, security and so on. We have a group here which is external engagement and community which is mainly then people that live outside the Netherlands and would be then not employed in the Netherlands, they will show up as consultants.
And then we have a fair chunk of legal, 9%, and then temps which are really short term, that is helping out with peaks in manual labour, in the reception or registry and so on. And there are 5% other categories here.
Looking at the consultants in the area, we have six people that have been in the registry, seven in software engineering mostly, six people in community and engagement and seven in organisational support and you can see here that the engagement and community is definitely stable over time, while the others we have already reduced this year and I expect to reduce further.
Another question that was asked why does the RIPE NCC have such plush offices in the middle of Amsterdam. Well, we moved offices in 2016, we entered into a ten‑year contract, so I still have some years to consider what to do. The good thing is that that contract is renewable with another five plus five years so we don't have to move. It's got 140 seats so we don't have room for everybody, we have a flexible work policy, so people can work from home and some travelling. Looking at the facilities costs, the total including maintenance and the reception and so on, in 2013 we spent 1.1 million on that and in 2021 we spent 1.1 million on that, that was before and after the move. Of course the year we moved and the year before we spent more so if we are going to change offices, there will be a year where we would spend at least half a million extra in moving from somewhere so that's not a solution to save money on the short term. Would it be possible to find cheaper offices in Amsterdam? So I got this map from our facility coordinator and looking at the centre of Amsterdam the price per square metre for office locations is between 325 and €500 and our current contract is way below the 325. So even if I look in all of Amsterdam, I would have to really go to the outskirts to find cheaper offices. So while it's a prime location, it's an old building, I recently read that they started renovating it, it is 1997 and they are going to finish in 1930, so there is a lot of work going on around us, the offices work well, we are upgrading meeting rooms with Zoom facilities to make remote work better. But yes, we will look into this, but it's not a magic bullet to change office locations.
We have an office in Dubai, there's been some questions around that. We opened that office ten years ago, and it has supported RIPE NCC's outreach activities, specifically in the Middle Eastern region. So you can imagine that going to a NOG or a government meeting from Dubai to any of the countries in that region is a much shorter flight and having people that actually speak local languages is a great advantage to us there. We have four staff members in that office including Hirsham Abraham as the chief community officer and the RIPE NCC has a business licence in and is registered in Dubai Internet city.
We have as I presented in May last year, looked into our corporate structure and we did really thorough analysis of radical changes to the corporate structure, but the conclusion of that investigation is that none of them would be more beneficial than the current. So, we will not do any big changes to the corporate or we will not propose any big changes to the corporate structure of the RIPE NCC because if we wanted to do significant changes that would be up for the GM. We will, however, do a small change which is changing the Dubai office into an independent legal entity so that means that will be what would Netherlands be a BV, sort of a company that has a limited liability, but it's fully owned by the RIPE NCC. So it will have a Board with me and Athina and Simon as the CFO and CLO. For the formal management it will employ the staff there and cover the costs that we cover from the Dubai office today.
The legal entity is kind of a next step to enhance our presence in the Middle East, just saying this to the local people, it seems, okay, we are committed to staying there but there's no plan to add more activities to this office, it's just changing the way we administer this and one of the main drivers there is tax administration of NCC staff in Dubai because currently our four staff in Dubai are employed by a Dutch association and the Dutch are the best in the world on collecting taxes they claim, so they would really like to collect taxes from our colleagues in Dubai as well, and that would have dramatic consequences because, yeah, the tax level in Dubai is really much lower than in the Netherlands and that means that none of our colleagues today can come and visit us in the Netherlands or work here, therefore they are not at RIPE meetings and we would like to change that. When they work for a fully Emirate entity, then this is not an issue.
Travel. We travel way too much, or do we? Last year we had 600 trips. That's between staff, the Board, ASO‑AC and the RIPE Chair. You can see in 2019, before Covid, before I started, we spent €1.5 million in travels. Last year ‑‑ last year we spent half a million, .6 million and this year we have a budget of 1.1 million. So I would say we are currently keeping travel costs under control, you can say 2020 and 2021 we really saved on travel but that's because of the pandemic.
I have also heard comments on our travel policy and flying Business Class and we do have in the travel which is the same but we allow Business Class if the total flight over ‑‑ is more than ten hours of flight time and that's around 20% of the trips.
And yes, we rare generous with Business Class travel after the pandemic to our service region to events where we would normally not travel Business Class but that was make it easier for staff to make the decision, yes, we will travel although it is uncertain times. We are keeping a close eye on the travel costs, but it is also something that if I send people for a meeting in LACNIC or APNIC to present and share experiences, it is a really long flight and it is, therefore, work purposes, not for pleasure.
Reports. We have now produced two reports from what we done last year, it's the Annual Report. I have the highlights in my slide decks in services, there is a link here that you can have a look at and we produced a financial report and Simone, our CFO, will present on that later.
So, yes, we do ‑‑ we are listening, you may ‑‑ you have seen I have picked up some other questions on the Members Discuss List, and tried to answer that and we do want your input and questions. Service quality and compliance is important to me, efficiency also. We need your input to make an even better plan for 2024 so that will be at our next meeting so we can shape the future of the Internet together. Are there any questions?
SANDER STEFFANN: When you showed the housing costs, I think it's really impressive you kept it at exactly the same level for ten years, so I think that's perfectly all right.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Thanks for that.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I have a small question on staffing. I see from your numbers that 58% staff costs of your total cost but with another 13% being consultancy, you also said you are moving more consultants to becoming full‑time employees, that's fine. So total that's around 71% of the NCC cost of staff, fair enough. Have we done a study on gender payee quality?
HANS PETTER HOLEN: We did benchmarking over all salaries last year so we went through all job descriptions and have then standardised on them and have them benchmarked. We haven't updated our latest social report on gender quality, so that's on our list.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: What other legal entity forms were investigated?
HANS PETTER HOLEN: So today every membership association where the members elect the board, we looked into having a SID like BV that would move all operations into that so the membership organisation would bone a BV that would do all the operations, we looked into moving into a foundation, but then the Board would be in control so all of these other construction ‑‑ and we looked into having multiple legal entities in multiple part of our service region, but that became not attractive at all after the war broke out. So we have explored a lot of these different options and most of them gives less control to the members unless one puts very specific measures in place without actually changing the liability for the Board or making it more efficient to operate.
So, right, what we have now is a really simple and easy to understand structure that is not complicated to explain so it's really attractive from that point of view.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Thanks.
SANDER STEFFANN: One question. The legal entity in Dubai will that have any impact on the sanctions and rulings and stuff like that because that's a big issue at the moment?
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Maybe. So that's a legal entity that will be under Emirati law. So if if United Arab Emirates sanction somebody, then it will be subject to those sanctions. On the other hand, it may not be subject to European sanctions. On the other hand, it's owned by the RIPE NCC that is subject to European sanctions, so there's no easy answer to this.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I have got two questions here, first from Sergei, what happened to the Moscow office?
HANS PETTER HOLEN: So in Moscow we rented an office space for one employee, and that contract for the office was terminated for various reasons, one or two years ago. But there is ‑‑ that was more a practical situation because, yeah, the situation with the war, it's not a signal in any direction of any other than that.
SPEAKER: Also got a question from Serbulov, Dmitry. The growing budget is really not a problem, the problem is that ending of IPv4 making NCC work abnormal. We must spend more money for migration on IPv6 everywhere. For this reason it is needed to, one, we must make much more work for easy teaching of IPv6 by a local specialists, needing open courses and books at popular regional languages, at first in security and under water ‑‑ number two, we need open projects to help security and routing solutions in IPv6. Three, it is needing every year growing text charge for using v4 resources to speed up migration by very big users, this text must be used to decide the first two points, for point 3 it is needed to ‑‑ it is necessary to at first time maintain a constant membership fee of 50% of the budget and a fee for IPv4 resources directly dependent on the number of such resources for one address totalling 50% of the budget, to make a refund of the budget at the end of the year only for one part of the payment and immediately plan the growth of the second part of the payment. It looks revolutionary, but this is something will really help and there's historical experience in terms of land taxes.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Thank you for that proposal and I am sure we will have that in writing in the chat, so we will make sure the Board has that for consideration when we look at further updates of the charging scheme.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Just a quick question, thank you for your Dubai explanation, I assume all of the building would be continuously done by the main entity, not by this daughter entity? So they would be strictly employment box not a charging box?
HANS PETTER HOLEN: As I said, the main reason for doing this now is for tax administration for the employees, right now it's the easiest thing for us if every member could pay directly to our Dutch bank account, easiest way. And Simone has numbers on the success of that across our service region. We do have, as you know we talked about before, not sent invoices to Syria and Iran because of sanctions and banks ‑‑ not because of sanctions also on the services but because banks do not want to receive money there. I have heard there may be a risk to happen with Russia as well, but so far that's not been a problem. Whether or not we will then use other mechanisms to use money, that's still up in the air. We are looking into this carefully, but I cannot speculate in what we would do to do that.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Not now, maybe layer, no comment on the future, thank you.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: This is more of a Meta question: If there are questions or comments regarding the proposed charging scheme should that be taken later or should that also be talked about now before it's presented?
HANS PETTER HOLEN: There is a presentation on the charging scheme later so you may want to wait with that.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: There will be a question section after that
SPEAKER:
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Yes. And to share my thoughts for initially this process with the charging scheme because I am guilty of that, I started discussing with that with the Board before I got this job because we saw that we would run out and that there would be decline of LIRs and then the question is, will the members accept and will it be fair that everybody would have to pay increasing more overtime or could we change the scheme back to the categories that we had ten‑plus years ago, that APNIC has, that LACNIC has, that ARIN has, that AFRINIC has, so everybody has categories in various sizes and forms so that we could differentiate the pain for everybody. So if we have a low fee like €500, which was my first proposal as the lowest one, a 10% increase of that is €50 and that's kind of affordable, rather than everybody paying the same.
Now, I'm pushing this forward, it's been a discussion, there is a vote now and then the members will decide which way we go further, right? And then we will implement whatever the members decide. We are here to implement a good solution for all the members, it's not what I think is best and there is no ‑‑ it's not me forcing to accept one. I can recommend you to go in that way, but it's up to you and your role there.
SPEAKER: A question from Lucas: Since Netherlands taxes and rent, etc., is so high why is RIPE not considering moving within European Union to cheaper country?
HANS PETTER HOLEN: So moving 180 employees to a different jurisdiction is a very expensive operation. So the pay back on such a move is going to be very long. Now, you could say that maybe we should open another office and have a department or specialist function in that office. In my previous job we had a development department in Romania, I think we had 500 employees there in a group of 10,000 employees. So, yes, we will look into that but it is also something that is not for free to implement. And then telling 180 staff that sorry, tomorrow you will move to Belgrade or Croatia, it would be lovely on the beach in the summer but a huge disruption for the organisation. The RIPE NCC needs to be stable and provide stable operations. We chose the Netherlands in the 80s, 90s because it was an attractive place to live, it was central in Europe and for various reasons.
The taxes in the Netherlands are slightly higher than in Norway, so it's not exceptional in other places. The cost in Oslo, Dubai and Amsterdam is roughly the same but it is possible to live in the outskirts of the Netherlands at more affordable housing prices and so on so it's not the worst place to be but moving it would have dramatic consequences.
SPEAKER: I have got another question from Sergei: As many people emphasise the NCC employees are members of our community. As far as I know, many non‑involved NCC staff were not allowed to attend the GM meeting now, so the only option was to watch remotely, but they were easily allowed to attend the GM in past years. What is the reason for introducing this restriction?
HANS PETTER HOLEN: The GM has always been for members only, in the articles it says staff cannot be members. There are some staff here that has duties and all staff has access to watch this remotely. So that practice has been in the past. There may have been some years where staff at the venue has been allowed to be here, but in general this is a members' meeting and only the members have the right to speak.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: And I can just add, because I think there might be some confusion there between RIPE community members and RIPE NCC members, the RIPE NCC staff are RIPE community members but they are not RIPE NCC members and I think that's where the confusion comes from.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Yes, thanks for that clarification. So RIPE NCC staff cannot be members, that's in the articles, and are therefore not invited to the GM.
Any more questions? If not, thank you very much for interesting questions and for listening to me.
(Applause)
ONDREJ FILIP: It's me again and let me give you the report from the RIPE NCC Executive Board. Those of you who could see the presentation delivered by Christian Kaufmann, what does it mean to be a Board member, I think that was a really excellent insight into the amount of work we have, and that is probably invisible for most of you, so thank you very much for that.
The Executive Board member consists of those seven lovely people, you can see the names on the screen and the way it's written also it's from the left to the right so it's Job Snijders, Remco van Mook, Maria Hall, Christian Kaufmann, me, Raymond Jetten and Piotr Stryewski‑Secretary, unfortunately Piotr was here yesterday but he had to leave.
PIOTR STRZYZEWSKI: Nice to see you also. We are complete.
ONDREJ FILIP: We had five meetings since the last General Meeting, it was in October, then two‑day meeting in December, then of course we didn't have meeting for more than dozen days, but that was a minuted e‑mail discussion and another meeting was two‑day meeting in March and last one was on Sunday before this General Meeting. As usually all our meetings are minuted, we are very transparent in that, so you can check the URL on the screen and you can see all the information, everything that was discussed during those meetings.
Several documents since this time, not surprisingly we are finished the activity plan for this year, also we prepared the Financial Report, a Financial Report from the last year, that's one of the topics that will be voted on today, so I'm sure had opportunity to look at it. Also, we prepared the Annual Report from the last year. And one of the documents that I am sure will be discussed quite intensively again, although it was discussed before, is the charging scheme order for the ‑‑ starting from 2024 and again something that will be voted on and there will be a separate presentation about that.
And also one point again which will be voted is the Standard Service Agreement. You see there is just a formal clarification, so I don't think it's much interesting point, but it must be formally approved by the General Meeting.
We also work with some other documents. We prepared the amendment of RIPE NCC Certified Professional terms and conditions, the main issue here was to change the relationship between RIPE NCC and the subcontractor of the company which provides the surveys. We made amendment in IPv4 transfer listing service terms and conditions, or the obligation for not publishing IPv4 addresses that cannot be transferred or shifted from NCC to the members.
Then there were two let's say more formal changes, amendment of RIPE NCC LIR account agreement and amended closure of members, the registration of legacy Internet resources, more typos and purification of the text, mostly driven by the comments of Denis Walker, so thank you very much for that.
Also we amended the due diligence for the quality of the RIPE NCC registration data, it was mainly to allow the authorisation of the documents in some specific cases. And also we amended the management regulation of the RIPE NCC, it was mainly the changes related that if the number of Board members is beyond a certain threshold that a General Meeting has to be called. If Board members are not able to make it, then the management can make it. And also there is a clarification what does it mean that member is prevented from acting and also a clause about conflict of interest. So, those were the main changes in this document.
We made several resolutions since the last General Meeting and this is excluding those documents I commented already. And also minutes. So, the NCC Executive Board resolves to suspend the ability to submit new applications for the IPv4 waiting lists until further notice, this is related to the discussion related to the charging scheme because we don't know what's going to be the output and this can affect the strategy how to enter this queue so we suspended it for a while.
We also resolve to allow members and end users to request prevention of their resources from being transferred for a period of six months, this was also discussed during the Address Policy Working Group today if you saw it. This resolution is valid until 1st July so I am slightly afraid we would need to extend it a little bit because I don't think the discussion will be done but I might be surprised. We approved the request authorisation of documents supporting transfer requests above a certain risk level determined by RIPE NCC. I think it's clear. And we selected an investment partner for managing the investment portfolio of RIPE NCC.
And also last but not least, we selected seven people to form the Code of Conduct team for the Executive Board election, just to be clear it's Code of Conduct team for just those election; it doesn't have to do anything with the meeting. And those seven people are Cynthia, Arnold, Jan Jan Young, Chris Edgar, Bill White, Nat Morris and Sebastian Becker. Let me knowledge their volunteering, thank you very much, guys.
(Applause)
We discussed several important topics and I'm sure those are topics that interest you as well, protecting resources, obviously, we spend a lot of hours with charging scheme, so you can see the output of those lengthy discussions. Hans Petter already mentioned corporate governance and corporate structure thing, also something that worries us is the current situation of AFRINIC. We also discussed the requirements and expectation of Executive Board members and candidates, I think you could participate in an open house where we discuss that and my favourite topic. I was really looking forward to making the decision. I approved the voting and the GM would not include the paper bullets in my position of the Chair of this General Meeting, so I enjoyed the decision very much.
I think you saw my kind of formal letter to the members' list about the investigation of a Board member so this is, I guess, the last moment I would like to comment on that, as you recall there was an investigation of a Board member following an allegation of bullying and harassment of a RIPE NCC staff member, so of course we run the independent investigation because we didn't want to do it by us, biased people, so we had an independent investigation carried out in a good faith and the investigation found no breach of RIPE NCC Code of Conduct. So, that's the end of the case. We, of course, continue to discuss with the various parties, we had very open discussions, actually I think two of them were staff. And again we will continue to work and ensure staff well‑being and safety, that's of course our utmost priority. So, that is the investigation.
As I said, we also discuss the requirements and expectations of a Board member. We had an open house roughly a week ago, and ‑‑ where we wanted to discuss all the options, all the ideas. So there were various ideas floated, so we ‑‑ because we didn't hide anything or swipe anything under the carpet, we took all ideas we got, including the ideas we didn't think they are really perfect, and presented them to the members. The attendance wasn't particularly perfect, but still, there was clearly visible that there was no support for limits based on country or residence. And probably the only idea that kind of took some attraction was that we should place some limits on Board members being from same organisation or group of organisations that are somehow interconnected. So that's something we would like to explore in the future.
Meanwhile, of course, we are working with the general management to ensure good information‑sharing and high engagement levels. We are guiding NCC management and of course fulfilling corporate governance and Fiduciary responsibilities.
We would like to hear your feedback, one of the instruments we have for that was, for example, the meeting on Monday evening. To be honest I made a remark that this doesn't particularly work so maybe there's some time to rethink it because I can understand for newcomers it's complicated to find out who are the Board members in the large group and then to approach them, it's complicated. So, it's one thing I think we need to think about.
But anyway, we invite everyone and approach everyone to send us feedback, you can use various communication means, of course you can talk today, you can catch some of us in the corridors and talk to us directly. Of course also we attend all the social events so we are available there. There is an official Members Discuss mailing list so that's one of the very good ways, or you can email us directly to [email protected]. Of course there is also the unofficial telegram channel as you might find, at least some of you, who are using that, from time to time some of us are reacting there but this is not the official communication channel of RIPE NCC so do not expect any official answers, if you would like to get some answers please use the mailing list or talk to us directly of course, that's easy.
And that's the end of my presentation. So are there any questions?
Excellent. So I don't see any reaction, so thank you very much. And I think we can move on to some more attractive points of this General Meeting.
(Applause)
SIMON‑JAN HAYTINK: Ciao, hello, everybody. My name is Simon‑Jan Haytink, CFO of the RIPE NCC. I am here to present the Financial Report over 2022.
Lets get into it. Short recap of our financial strategy, we have not for profit funding model and we operate on non‑cost recovery basis. Our funding strategy aims to generate sufficient income so we can fulfil our obligations in a stable and predictable manner and we are committed to maintaining a low risk profile.
The financial update:
The financial performance indicators. Income has been 2% above budget and costs 3% under and we have 4% more active LIR accounts that be we have budgeted for.
The financial story: Income is over budget with €831,000, membership is at 35.7 million and the budget 2022 included the expected uncertainty with regards to membership fee at risk with 22,500 paying LIR accounts. The costs have been €990,000 below budget. Personnel costs have been over budget with €764,000 and other operating expenses under with 1.5 million. And depreciation has been under with 290,000 euro. This resulted in a positive operating result of 1.8 million and positive earnings before of 2.8 million.
Position of 304,000 which is based on fiscal result. End result for 2022 is a deficit of €342,000, which has been deducted from a clearing‑house reserve.
As you will have noticed there's been no redistribution this year caused by the deficit over 2022; main reasons for this have been: The uncertainty in collectability for income from ultra high risk countries; lowering of revenue by €1 million; lowering of the sign‑up fee in the 2022 charging scheme has reduced this income by 1.6 million; competitive job market, investment in retraining staff and inflation. Volatile market circumstances resulted in 177 million on our clearing‑house reserves and lastly the taxes payable on fiscal result of €403,000.
A quick update on banks and sanctions. Our banking environment remains complex, due to sanctions and the bank's definition of ultra high risk countries. Solutions unfortunately no solutions at this point in time, but we continue to work on this issue. Accounting‑wise we are not allowed to record this income in our profit and loss statement as it remains uncertain that these funds will actually end up in our bank account. All payment obligations do still stand and have been recorded in our balance sheet.
The balance sheet of 2022, it does show a significant decrease in value from 2021 to 2022 of about €11.3 million, main contributor here is at year end 2021 we had 13 .5 million to be redistributed to our members in 2022. For 2022 there is no redistribution, which explains this reduction in cash and reduction in current liabilities in 2022. So therefore, no reason for concern.
Zooming in on the capital liabilities of our balance sheet, we clearly see the reduction of the to to be redistributed member fees and increase in other current liabilities explained from the deferred income, the payable corporate income tax and inland revenues from new LIRs.
Our income:
Income is at €36.4 million and 2% over budget, annual membership 34.1 million compared to 36.4 in 2021. Signup fees are at 1.6 million compared to 7.1 million in 2022. RIPE meeting income was 29% below budget and other income was 20% over budget, other income consists mainly of sponsorship income.
Member and LIR details:
We had 20,231 individual members at year‑end, a modest growth of 216 members compared to 2021; 23,393 active LIR accounts at the end of 2022, of which 617 are from ultra‑high risk countries and net addition of 174 LIR accounts. We had 1,732 new LIR accounts in 2022, while we recorded 1.6 million in signup fee income; this difference is explained by new members from ultra‑high risk countries. 1,558 LIR closed in 2022 which is in line with the expected consolidation.
A visual overview of the LIR count versus our members which clearly shows consolidation risk, a relatively stable development in our membership.
Membership income 2022:
Membership income is defined as income directly derived from the membership. Years prior to 2022 are high due to the signup fee of €2000 per new LIR account in the high inflow of new LIR accounts. 2022 average is lower as we have not been able to collect from ultra high risk countries and the lowering of the signup fee.
Membership fee and risk: We define as fees at risk from non‑payment outside the regular business scope. Ultra high risk countries are defined by the Dutch banks and for this for our members this was ‑‑ of course members who are affected by sanctions. Additionally income from the Ukraine where the invoices have been issued and payment extensions have been applied. Due dates currently is 30th June 2023 and additional payments are possible.
To quantify these numbers, for 2021 we still have €133,000 outstanding, for 2022 this amounts to just over €1 million, overall this means €1.2 million of membership fee at risk at year end 2022. We continue to do what we can to be in a position to collect these funds without putting the RIPE NCC at risk but however we look at this we have a significant portion of our income at risk.
Expenditures.
To start with cost break down, total expenditure for 2022 was 34.6 million euro compared to 29.6 in 2021, which is 3% or 990,000 below budget. Main cost driver for the RIPE NCC are personnel costs with 58% or 20.1 million euro of the total costs. IT ‑‑ consultancy with 13% or 4.3 million. IT infrastructure at 11% or 3.8 million, all other categories are 6% or less.
Zooming in on the cost variance compared to the budget. Almost all cost items have been under budget ‑‑ personnel expenses IT infrastructure and bad debt have been over budget. Bad debt is explained by the uncertainty around income from the Ukraine as we have increased our bad debt provision there.
Personnel costs:
Personnel costs of 4% or €764,000 over budget. Average total cost per FTE increased from 110,000 to 117 against the budget of 104,000, actual average FTE has been 172 compared to budget of 186, the labour market have got tighter ‑‑ this investment consists of one‑off regarding to inflation, working from home allowances and variable performance pay. We had the regular performance and market related increases and incidentals related to severance. Unfortunately as in 2022 budgeting error related to staff health insurance could not be corrected in a timely manner. We have corrected this for 2023.
Next item that has been over budget is IT infrastructure. Just over budget with €74,000. This has been caused by an over‑spending in Cloud but has been compensated by reduction in the hardware expenses, additionally we have seen a lower capital expenditure resulting in depreciation being 290 K under budget.
Outreach and PR, €720,000 below budget, this is explained by the Covid 19 restrictions in Q1 of 2022 and the start‑up of our face‑to‑face engagement efforts which could not be reinitiated immediately.
Overall, €990,000 under budget, average cost per LIR 1,480 euro has gone up compared to previous year as costs in 2020 and 2021 have been artificially low due to Covid.
New in Financial Report is the related party disclosure. This replaces the procurement report in my presentation as it will disclose any transactions related to our Executive Board or any other related party. Another step in the increased transparent for our members. We have had transactions with cz .net, Akamai and all amounts are modest and fit in our regular course of business.
Treasury. Financial income and expenditure, a volatile year, tp say the least, we have to report a 1.7 million negative financial result for 2022, a significant negative result of which the majority is unrealised. 36,000 negative result on interest income explained by the negative interest rates charged by the banks in 2022 and 110K negative exchange result and last but not least 1.6 million unrealised valuation result on fixed financial assets. This result is explained by our exchange rated funds, based on government bonds taking a hit in this volatile market.
Our investment portfolio was valued at €7.6 million at year end, compared to 10.3 in 2021. One of our government bonds reach end of term and the unrealised revaluation result. Overall a 5.4% loss on clearing‑house reserve which is not a good result but could have been worse as we kept significant part of our reserves on deposit with banks limiting the loss here to negative interest. Overall, we have been able to limit it down side to an extent, but I'm happy to be able to report we are currently in on boarding process with the financial institution to ensure our investment portfolio will be managed professionally. Aim is to make sure that within our risk profile we maximise the upside and minimise the downside to increase our chances on a positive result in order to offset inflation on a clearing‑house reserves.
Taxes.
Corporate income tax, over 2022 we had an effective corporate tax rate of 650% and payable tax position of €403,000, our fiscal tax rate has been 23%. The effective tax rate is very high, as per our agreement with Dutch tax authorities, any result on our clearing‑house cannot be deducted from the fiscal result. Although this year it has been a disadvantage, in years with positive result on clearing‑house, these reserves are free of tax. We aim to take advantage of this with a treasury project in the coming years.
Capital and liquidity, we remain balanced and healthy. We have a clearing house reserve of 32 million to respond to uncertainities. Membership fee at risk remain a concern. Our clearing‑house reserve has remained stable but with the high inflation and challenges we have faced our cost base has risen. Explaining the capital expense ratio showing a decline. However, we are solvent and in robust financial position and with that, ready for the future and as you all will know we have a charging scheme vote coming up.
2023. Just a short update, a budget of 40 million for income and costs we expect to see further LIR consolidation which will impact our financial stability. We do see stable member development with even slight increase, we continue to engage with our banks and try and resolve payment issues and banking regulations, we will ensure we can deliver a promise to our members but uncertainty in our service region remains a concern.
Payment behaviour:
We see comparable payment behaviour from our members as compared to previous years. That being said, we still have 566 invoices outstanding or 2.5% which represents €934,000. 39% of this represents our Ukrainian members who have an extension until 30th June. Leaving about 342 members eligible for disclosure based on non‑payment.
In previous years we have closed between 0.5 and 1% of our LIR accounts due to non‑payment which are about 110 to 230 LIR accounts.
Membership fee at risk 2023:
At this moment amounts to €176 million, overall this means 2.8 million of membership fees are at risk at this point in time. Whatever way we look at this, this is significant. And as you will understand a priority to solve this for us.
2023 P&L figures.
Income is under budget €600,000, explained by fewer new LIR accounts than anticipated. Expenses are under budget with €1.3 million as first quarter of year is traditionally slower in costs. All cost categories are under budget year to date including personnel costs.
The 2023 full year forecast:
Income is forecast to be under budget with €2 million. New LIR applications expected to be lower and the freeze of the waiting list will also affect this. Membership fee at risk remains an issue and we have excluded this income from the forecast.
Expenses are forecast to be under budget with €1 million. Personnel costs are expected to be on budget as job remarket remains tight and competitive. Other operating expenses are forecasted to remain under budget even with more expensive month ahead of us resulted in a forecasted negative result in 2023 of €900,000 which we expect to be compensated slightly by a positive financial result.
As every year, our auditors have audited our Financial Statement and provided clean opinion, and confirmed our Financial Statemetns give a true and fair view.
RIPE 87 and the next GM, please do expect a redistribution vote at the next GM and this could well be vote to redistribute a negative surplus or deduct this from our clearing‑house. Additionally we plan to submit a vote for a new IPv4 allocation fee which remains to be determined.
To wrap up, a short recap:
We remain in a stable financial position. Income has been over budget with 2%, costs have been under with 3 resulting in positive operating result of 1.8 million. After the negative financial result and corporate income tax, we end up deficit of €342,000.
We have a significant reserve to cope with uncertainties but we also have legitimate concerns. Decrease of income, inflation, volatile markets and membership fee at risk and of course the tight labour market.
And with that, I reach the end of the presentation, I am happy to answer any questions you may have.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Can you please explain the 650% corporate tax rate, that seems a bit ludicrous to me and I am not quite sure what you were saying with that.
SIMON‑JAN HAYTINK: It's calculated on the commercial result which was €61,000 while the fiscal tax rate is calculated on the fiscal result and we were not allowed to deduct the negative financial result, meaning that tax rate ‑‑ the fiscal tax rate is calculated over 1.7 million and the €403,000 effective tax rate is calculated over the €61,000 which resulted in 650%.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: So because the assets depreciated that calculated into the tax?
SIMON‑JAN HAYTINK: Well, we have an agreement with the Dutch Tax Authorities that any result on our clearing‑house reserve is not deductible for tax purposes so that explains the difference.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I think I understand, thank you.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: From Interlan. Can you go back to the slide 25, please. So I see notes there only ‑‑ a few NOGs. Where are the other NOGs?
SIMON‑JAN HAYTINK: Sorry?
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Where are the other NOGs? I see only CS NOG and ‑‑
SIMON‑JAN HAYTINK: We only present here the NOGs that are related to any related party, for example the Executive Board.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Okay.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I actually have several questions, do you want them in one go or one at a time?
SIMON‑JAN HAYTINK: One at a time.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Very simple one: You mentioned personnel was over budget and you explained that's because it was for the purpose of attracting talent, it cost a lot more than expected. However, earlier to one of my questions you said we did not benchmark salaries recently when I asked about gender equality. So I know we did not benchmark salaries recently for gender equality, but we did in 2021, it's fine, it's a close period of time. How do the packages for new talents compare to packages for existing talent because if you had to overpay for a new talent are their packages fair in comparison to existing staff or did we have to make exceptions just for a certain group of people to attract them more recently? That's first question.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: If I may, could I have a microphone, please? Thank you. So, to clarify, we did benchmark all salaries; we have not created any social report to look at gender differences or other differences, but everybody with the same job description is now in the same pay band for that job.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Understood.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: So all salaries were adjusted to the new system from 1st January this year. Last year, we did one of compensations for the high inflation and that's also taken into account to a large extent for this year. I think we are now in a good position for existing staff and for recruiting new staff. However, my staff will always tell me that they want more money.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Of course. My other question is, why is the Cloud services over budget? That was not clarified. I mean, we talked about the other stuff but not that.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: It could very well be that the Managing Director was very restricted when the budget was created so it may have been lower than the run rate when we went into the year.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I see, so we blame you.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: I could blame them for over‑spending but it's a combination of me being very stingy on the budget ‑‑
RAYMOND JETTEN: On the other hand the IT investments were lower.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Absolutely, you know as people sitting on this side of the table will blame you for the parts over spent, maybe a day after tomorrow I will be on that side of the table people and will blame me for the overspending, so it comes with the job. I am not really blaming, I just want to understand.
RAYMOND JETTEN: No, it's just a remark.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: The last two questions, you mention that ‑‑ I wasn't clear, are you saying that the bond you will be heard to term and the losses will remain unrealised because you have engaged a fund manager who may choose not to hold the term and may choose to make alternative investments? I was not clear on that part.
SIMON‑JAN HAYTINK: The current, what's the word ‑ of bonds that pay direct interest to us, those we plan to held until end of term. Additionally we have funds based on long‑term government bonds.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Of course. It's up to the Board but I would seek advice from the financial management company you hired, if the interest rates keep going up by the ECB it's very likely you will see more losses on those bonds; and yes, if you hold them to term you will recover all your money that's an opportunity cost on income in the meantime if you divest from them. It's something for financial adviser maybe.
My last question is on related party transactions. You said that was newly introduced but our standards required it, so why did we not have this in the past?
SIMON‑JAN HAYTINK: Actually for associations in the Netherlands, it's not a requirement, so for us it was an option to add this and we thought it was right to do ‑‑
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: In that case I thank you for adding it, I always assumed it was there, thank you for adding it; it's a good thing.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: To add to that it was raised by a member some years back to have more transparency in the purchasing, and there's no way that we can publish all contracts with all vendors. But looking at the issue behind here is that, are there any transactions to any companies or entity that Board members are involved in; and therefore we decided to follow the reporting practice for larger corporations which is disclosing transactions to any entities like this. So, this is to adhere to rules that apply to bigger entities than ourselves
Harry Cross: Speaking with my own hat. Just going back to the Cloud spending was there some sort of month‑by‑month analysis done to figure out what the spend was going to be and figure out why budget was not hit? Or this was sort of averaged out over the entire year?
HANS PETTER HOLEN: It's a very simple answer to that: Yes. I do have monthly Cloud spending reports and we are reviewing them monthly in the management team. And yeah, there are various reasons why Cloud costs go up and down as you may misunderstand but the real underlying cause is that I was really hard on that budget because I wanted to see the plans and the value. And then well, you know, when the bottom line is only X something needs to be cut so I think it's more a problem with the plan than with the execution.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I am guessing now we have got some reutilisation data we should start to see that become a lot more realistic, now we now this is what our actual spend costs.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Correct
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Perfect. Thank you.
PETER KOCH: Inspired by your suggestion of negative surplus versus accessing the reserves ‑‑ and I am pretty confident you mentioned it, I just missed it ‑‑ are the reserves still subject to negative interest?
SIMON‑JAN HAYTINK: No, no, actually, maybe increased interest rate to .57% just recently.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I have a couple more questions, they are very smart and I won't take credit for them. You said the office can hold 180 seats. Do we have average occupancy, number of seats over a period of time, how often is it being used? Because a lot of people work from home and that's very cost‑effective for us. Do we have statistics on this?
HANS PETTER HOLEN: I have 140 seats, not 180 seats. We have a policy saying that I encourage people to come to the office twice a week, I really want people to meet; I do not want to force people in the office. So ‑‑ and I do not have registration of who is physically there. However, IT has made a fancy script that counts Mac addresses for Mac books so I know how many has been on the day, I think we peak at 90 on the days we serve lunch. So we are considering adding more food to increase the participation or find other ways to lure people back because I think social interaction is really important. But I don't believe in the stick here, I do believe in the carrot. So you could sort of wonder why don't we then cancel half of the office, simply because it's a ten‑year contract and I can't get out of that before that.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: The last question, I am going to phrase that this a little bit, but the point will be there: You mentioned earlier about some members mentioned moving out of the Netherlands for cost savings and potentially efficiency and there was a good argument about the move itself or the year you move you will incur higher cost but then mentioned that the costs in countries like Dubai and Oslo are very similar to the Netherlands, that's actually entirely true but in places like Spain, in places like maybe some Hungary or Bulgaria, the costs are substantially lower and a little bit of moving costs one year might more than ‑‑ more than justified by the cost savings over the next five to ten years. Has that been considered?
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Since staff is listening now I would be very careful with what I am saying, otherwise I will have a riot when I come home. So what I said was in my previous job we did actually do this by establishing a hub in Romania, right? Since I have left, they have one in Portugal and I think they have several others in Lithuania and so on. There is a scale to this so moving 140 employees, I don't think, but maybe migrating over time so this is not about forcing people to leave, then maybe we will look into that.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Since staff are listening don't pick Portugal or Spain because they will kill you to go there and youll have a riot if you don't let them go.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: I actually have a colleague that wanted to come back from Spain but anyway.
SPEAKER: I have got about four questions here. Tobias from D.WYBT, giving the progressing Cloud strategy, the recently observed price adjustments by major operators of public clouds, is it expected that Cloud expenditure and overspend future increases in the future and are we expecting this budget item to be more volatile?
HANS PETTER HOLEN: I think I have answered that a couple of times already, that for next year the plan will probably be more realistic, but we need experience with actually what the workload we move to the Cloud and what it costs and that will take time, it's difficult to predict that before we have the experience.
SPEAKER: From Serbulov Dmitry: Sorry I will ask again: How much risk do you see in not being able to pay in euros next year, primarily from Russia? What will be done to solve this problem?
HANS PETTER HOLEN: How much risk, probably too high. What we will do about it, we cannot give a solution right now but we are looking into different options. I am sorry about that. But we are doing what we can to be able to make sure that everybody can pay.
SPEAKER: Randy Bush asks: The Cloud if it trades CAPEX for recurring OPEX ‑‑ does the Cloud if it trade for recurring OPEX?
SIMON‑JAN HAYTINK: We have lowered the CAPEX budget for 2023 but that is still in discussion.
SPEAKER: Serbulov Dmitry said: We must not do alternative investments in bonds, better to buy gold or Jan for the next five years at least.
He has another, maybe more like a statement: There is a saying in Russia, surviving a move is like surviving a fire, I think now is not time to set fire to the NCC by moving.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Thank you for that.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Alastair Woodman: In reference to the whole bond thing, have you actually benchmarked yourself in comparison to other organisations like Silicone Valley bank? You seem to be beating yourself up a little bit too much over the loss of your bond portfolio and it's probably going to recover over time, so I don't know if you really need the advice from external financial institutions, be careful of them.
SIMON‑JAN HAYTINK: Thank you, all.
(Applause)
ONDREJ FILIP: We have another discharge of the RIPE NCC Executive Board members, this is a resolution. To be honest I never understood when I was just a regular member so I think I have some better insights "the General Meeting discharges the Executive Board with regard to its actions as they appear interest the Annual Report 2022 and Financial Report 2022"
The voting for this resolution takes place under agenda point 9 of the General Meeting. I guess this doesn't need further explanation, we do this every year. If you don't mind, I will move on. Any comments?
I hope I will not get any. Excellent, thank you. That was short.
SIMON‑JAN HAYTINK: Hello again, here I am again, this time the charging scheme, some may say a hot topic, to start off with a quote: "There are as many ways to charge as there are IPv6 addresses". So, let's get into it.
My first few slides actually try to say less eloquently than what CK said, so I will just go ahead and do it.
To start off, I would like to begin with a short recap of what the purpose is of the Charging Scheme, it's the means by which we as RIPE NCC ensure we collect sufficient and sustainable funds to execute a promise to our members. A redistribution policy, acts as safeguard any access funds or shortage of funds can be redistributed to our members. The redistribution will always be subject to a General Meeting vote. This is to ensure the RIPE NCC operates on a cost recovery basis or, in other words, operates as a not‑for‑profit.
The charging scheme does not define the cost budget for the RIPE NCC, but of course there is a relationship between the two as you all understand. The activity plan and budget defines the plans of the RIPE NCC and the associated cost budget for the financial year. For the longer term we have developed a five‑year strategy. These documents are published, communicated, presented and input is requested from members and community.
How do members influence the activity plan and budget? We publish a plan and budget each year in the autumn. Additonally, this year you as a member have the extra opportunity to provide input via the RIPE NCC survey, and I recommend you all to do so. The activity plan and budget is the best way for members to learn about their plans for the following year and to contribute to the direction we take as an association.
Final approval of the draft and activity plan and budget is with the Executive Board of the RIPE NCC.
All projections for required income for the next financial year are based on the last approved activity plan and budget. As the 2023 activity plan and budget is the best and most recent indication of what members can expect from the RIPE NCC, that being said this does not rule out any changes in the next activity plan and budget and just to highlight, efficient and effective use of membership funds will at all times remain a priority for the RIPE NCC and its Executive Board.
Now, the actual Charging Schemes. I would like to thank ‑‑ start by thanking all the members for the input given and we tried to incorporate what we could. Back in 2021, we started consulting with our members; due to the war we postponed this project. In 2023 we restarted this consultation based on two models, option A, a category model and option B, a continuation of the current model with a 10% LIR fee increase. We added two additional options as several members indicated they wanted a no‑change option. Option C provides a no‑change vote, based on total projected income income being equal to 2023, to do this we would need to increase the LIR service fee with 5% due to the expected LIR expected consolidation. Option D is full no‑change vote keeping LIR fee as is.
So what did the different models mean for projected income. Model A and B of 42 million, a 2 million euro increase compared to 2023. Model C projects 40 million and D is 38 which is reduction of 2 million. If we were to include 5% inflation model A and B would project equal income as in 2023. Both C and D would project a reduction in income, of which model D would be the most significant one. Adding the ASN vote to the selected Chargning Scheme would add additional 1.8 million to the projected income.
The transfer fee request would add additional 1.2 million in projected income, it must be said that this income is dependent on the number of transfer requests and therefore considered less sustainable or predictable. If both separate charges were to be added to the charging scheme, we project an additional 3 million income to the approved charging scheme model.
So why are we proposing change? We need to ensure sufficient and sustainable income. We need clear separation between the charging scheme and RIPE policies and want to express the unfair in the current model and be ready by providing increased adaptability.
What are the issues we are facing? Multiple LIRs have created significant uncertainty in the ‑‑ we expected between 1,200 and 2,500 in 2023. The associated loss of income will be between 2.3 and 3 €.8 million.
Income from the charging scheme is based on LIR accounts. LIR accounts do not reflect our membership as members can hold multiple LIR accounts. The high market value of and the demand for IPv4 addresses strongly drives the need for multiple LIR accounts. These multiple LIR accounts have a limited lifecycle making this income unsustainable. Result is there's no clear difference between income from membership and income derived from the IPv4 waiting list.
To provide a visual overview of the unpredictability of income from new LIR applications, in blue the signup fees over the years when it was €2000 per new LIR, in Orange the signup fee restated as if it would have been €1,000 per new LIR, of course in 2022 we actually charged €1,000 per new LIR. This clearly shows the ups and downs of this income.
Next, due to the high inflation we propose add price increase in charging scheme for 2023 which the GM approved. Any future price increases or decreases will be applicable to all LIR accounts equally. Members addressed unfairness in the current model as it only allows limited differentiation between members, the currenct scheme does already differentiate between memebers, but this is based on multiple LIR accounts.
To officialalise this current differentiation between members, the main charging differentiation is based on LIR accounts. A relatively small member based on resources held pays €1,550 per year as does member with significant larger number of resources, contribute significantly more are those are multiple LIR accounts. The current charging scheme does not provide any many options for change. We can propose to increase or decrease the LIR service he is fees, add or remove, although the sustainability of those remains a question. Additonally they only represent a modest part of our income, in short we have limited options to adapt for changing circumstances in the future.
Model A, the category model, the characteristics: Base membership fee for all members at €250, category prices ranging from 400 to €10,000, the category fees applicable to all members that hold IPv4 or IPv6 resources. Excluded from the category calculations are provider independent and legacy resources. And with this model we can distribute the contribution burden more evenly than the current model based on objective determinant of size.
The benefits of the category model:
Member based invoicing will ensure sufficient and sustaining income as it decreases uncertainty by removing consolidation risks by multiple LIR accounts. It will increase transparency in reported income as we can distinguish between income derived from membership and income derived from the IPv4 waiting list which allows a clearer separation between RIPE policy and charging scheme as the LIR account is no longer the basis of the charging scheme. Policy defined by the community and membership fees based on membership.
Differentiation between members: Based on objective definition, the quantity of resources held by a member.
If future price increases are needed we can spread this burden more evenly. The category model also provides the opportunity to further differentiate in the future if that is needed. We do need to be cautious as this must remain within reason. We cannot become too dependent for income on a subset of members. As we need to ensure the independence of the RIPE NCC and we need to ensure we stay and continue to act as a membership association. As we must remain true to the "one member one vote" principle that has made sure everyone has a vote.
To officialise this, hear are an overview of the intended result of the category model, a small member based on resources held would pay significantly less than the member with the high amount of resources. The number of LIR accounts you may hold would no longer affect your charges.
The category model can better facilitate any future need for change, as we can adapt category prices and limits and resources included in category calculations. And with that, the opportunity to refine this model over time. Of course any changes would remain subject to GM approval. And the base membership fee will provide an opportunity to attract new members as the entry barrier will be lower.
Moving on to option BC and D. As these three models are based on the current well understood charging scheme model I will not spend too much time on these. Option B would increase the LIR service fee to 1,700, option C to 1625 and based on the same projected level of income as 2023 at 40 million I would consider this a no‑change vote.
Option D keep the LIR service fee as is, at €1,550.
Next vote on the agenda will be the ASN assignment charge. €50 would apply to all ASN assignments on yearly basis, the reasoning here is there is a strong preference from the registry to charge for ASNs as there is significant workloads, unused or unneeded resources, as Marco already shared this morning in his presentation. This proposal did also receive some push back with consultation with our members as this resource is not scarce. I would consider this income sustainable as assignments are relatively stable.
The transfer fee request vote, a €500 charge per transfer request, would be a once‑ off fee for all individual requests, this would be based on request not on number of resources transferred. And this fee is payable by the receiving party and applicable to all transfer requests. Reasoning: There is a significant workload associated with transfer requests and compliance requirements. Income will be very dependent on the number of resources and is therefore considered less sustainable or predictable.
Due to an oversight on our part, there is a mismatch between the resolution and the supporting document. As a GM we will be voting on the resolution, this of course will prevail, meaning this fee will apply to all transfers that are accepted.
The IPv4 waiting list. The current situation:
Although well understood by all, it brings unpredictable costs for members on the waiting list. This is due to the unknown waiting time and the fees payable on yearly basis. Additionally there is a policy obligation to hold these resources for two years. Furthermore, income derived from the waiting list is not transparent at this moment as it is part of the LIR service fees.
To provide some insight in current cost associated with the waiting list a signup fee to open a new LIR account two LIR service fees, the average waiting time is 1.5 to two years, €4100, and a two‑year no transfer period meaning additional 3,100 euros, totaling 7,200 euros in an optimistic scenario and in a pessimistic scenario these costs could go up to over €10,000 for /24.
The desired situation is predictable costs for members, an initial fee to join waiting list at €1,000 and additional fee at the time the resources are allocated to a member. And with that, we can eliminate the cost element based on time. Meaning that we can ensure transparency in income from membership and income derived from the waiting list.
This additional fee or /24 IPv4 allocation fee is still to be determined, reasoning for this, this fee will strongly influence who applies for the waiting list as very high fee will attract a different type of applicant than a low fee will and we will need time to work out what we do with the fees already paid by multiple accounts already on the waiting list. Additional is to be determined will have an impact on the income RIPE NCC generates, this cannot be considered sustainable due to the dependency on perceived availability and market value of these resources and under the assumption this would result in access funds for the RIPE NCC, our safeguard, the redistribution, GM vote would remain in place. To sort out all these details we will need time to consult with you our membership.
The desired situation:
A fee to join the waiting list, the no costs until you as member are next in line for /24. All applicable policy requirements will still stand as this is up to the community not us as the RIPE NCC.
To be clear, these costs would not be additional to, but replace the LIR account fees associated with the IPv4 waiting list.
Advice from the Executive Board:
For the Charging Scheme vote preferentially for option A then B, C and then D for the additional votes advice is to vote yes. Please note any combination that would result in reduction in projected income would mean we have to revisit the services we deliver.
And last but not least, how to vote:
Please rank your preferred model at number 1. If you oppose to any specific model, rank this model at the very bottom or leave it off the ballot completely. The additional votes are a yes or no vote.
And with that, I will end my presentation and I am happy to try and answer any question you may have.
(Applause)
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: So, I want to say that ‑‑ not being scared is only a very, very small part of why I and others oppose introducing a fee for ASNs. Being able to get sponsored ASNs for a very low cost and free to LIRs, have enabled a lot of younger people to get these ASNs sponsored, basically by goodwill of LIRs. Introducing a fee would, well, not only ‑ because some of these people who are only getting sort of ‑‑ would ‑‑ might not be able to spend that money especially when they are just starting out, but additionally, it's a lot ‑‑ it's a lot more paperwork to deal with when we are talking about charging. Like, I would have to consider more VAT implications if this went through, and other such things that, because well, then yeah, I have to start charging individuals in other jurisdictions, which complicates things and I want to say this is very important to get new, younger people into the space because I, along with many other of the people here who are below 25, got started in the community by this exact method of basically being able to get ASNs for free, that's how I got them ‑‑ I got my first ASN about five years ago and that was when I started get involved and I am far from ‑‑ so, that's the really important part here, and like, do you think it's worth subsidising this to get more young people in? It's not ‑‑ yeah, it's not about not being scared, it's about being very important to get more people into the space, and when everyone votes for this, I hope they keep this in mind because it's very important. Thank you.
(Applause)
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Thank you for that, I heard a question in there, and I don't think the RIPE NCC has an opinion on that. It's up to the members to have an opinion on that. There has been different views in the community for a long time on ASN fees or not and now we are putting it up to a vote again. There was a vote some years back and now it is up for a vote again and it's up to the members to decide.
GERT DOERING: It's interesting that we are standing directly after each other because I want to make a very strong point that AS numbers should be charged for, because I heard the arguments and I do like bringing in new young folk, but AS numbers are not free today. So if you request an AS number to have it for 0, it's still a few hundred bucks in work done by people to make that happen, so if somebody decides to sponsor an AS number for you, sponsoring the €50 is not making the package much bigger. But we heard today that the NCC Registration Services is spending quite a bit of our money on work because our ASNs are too cheap. We do not want to make the policy more restrictive to discourage people from applying AS numbers, we want to loosen up the policy, but that brings an inrush from people all over the planet because our AS numbers are free; they are not free but they are paid by the members and people from all over the world think they can have them. Yes, there is sufficient AS numbers, but doing these costs money, and this is the money paid by member fees. And I think that those members that hand out AS numbers like there's no tomorrow, should pay more for that burden they put on the NCC. So, I am very, very strongly in the camp that AS numbers need to cost a yearly fee, as an incentive to give them back and also as an incentive to not ask for it if you do not really need them.
(Applause)
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: From open factory here, yeah, I hear very strong argument for further gate‑keeping in the community. How this realistically will pan out is that due to the recurring charge, the ‑‑ this is a higher four‑digit number for us in our earlier account, this means we will have to terminate all the sponsorship agreement by the end of November, which will place a significant amount of work on the RIPE NCC by the end of November for all the members who will ‑‑ for all the sponsored objects that have not replied in time, not paid in time for their ‑‑ suddenly now charged resources and I ask how is this considered as a stable income? Because I believe they will be returned because it's not a stable income because I hear an argument for please return them, we don't want people having ASNs, so how is this considered a stable income?
HANS PETTER HOLEN: So any change will cause additional work for the RIPE NCC. My software Engineering Department and my registry department is really kicking me for proposing any changes because that costs time and money, right? The arguments put forward for Gert and for Cynthia, I fully realise those but it's not up to us to make that decisions, it's up to you to make that decision.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Fahad. If I may start by saying I think coming up with a Charging Scheme that makes everybody happy is practically impossible and you know you have a very difficult job. I have a member ‑‑ a question from a member that I'd like to ask. Earlier you mentioned that there's other proposed ideas that you yourself have as a Managing Director for potential Charging Schemes but they are not really ready to present, I think. But in any case, the member was asking that there was several discussions online for alternative Charging Schemes, but yet the Board saw fit not to present those and there must be a good reason and that's okay, but the member's inquiring what's that reason, why were only those selected to put forward rather than alternative potential options?
HANS PETTER HOLEN: I started this before I became Managing Director and looking into different ways of differentiating. I started with very few categories, so my proposal on the table when we started the discussion, was three or four categories and trying to be cheaper than all the other RIRs, and making sure that as many as possible paid as little as possible, right? Now, we did look at the model where you would pay linearly to your space. As I mentioned earlier today I believe that less than 1% of the members would then pay more than 50% of the income. That's a huge change. I don't believe in revolutions, I believe in evolutions. So if the membership want us to move in that direction we should do it step by step. So if you believe in such a scheme, vote for the ‑‑ for the categories and then advocate for us to extend it into more categories that goes upwards, right? Whether you have a binary model with steps or whether you have a lineary model, if you go on a distance and you have enough steps it becomes linearish, that's what we have been told by the digital music industry, right, we don't lose anything there. So I think we did a lot of different things. We looked at models where ASNs were part of the categories so they wouldn't be directly charged, we looked models where we didn't differentiate with difference of ‑‑ different PI and PA address space but based on the membership feedback what we have for vote is what we took out of those as the most likely models to go ahead. Personally I am not happy that we have ‑‑ don't have two models that gives exactly the same amount of money to us because it should really be a vote on the method rather than the amount of money that the RIPE NCC would be spending because the amount of money the RIPE NCC should be expending in the activity plan and budget we will do towards the end of the year and finally is the RIPE NCC's decision but we will listen to you and the result of what of what we heard is what's there. If you said something else you are telling us so we will try to be better at listening next time.
Harry Cross: I just wanted to touch back on the point where we were just also going back to the services earlier today, there was a graph that was presented about the number of idle ASNs where they have been set up and created and nobody has ever used them or renounced them. Do you do we know how much in time and fiscal effort it takes the RIPE NCC to handle an ASN application? Because I am thinking we need to think about something to incentivise use of this and maybe a dormancy fee in the future?
HANS PETTER HOLEN: We have not calculated those numbers so we can present them here and we can take them back and have a look.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Yes, please, I would be quite interested in the future maybe something like that.
Tina Morris: Overall I support the change, the tiered system, where those that hold more addresses pay more; frankly I think that's fair, and that will put a larger burden on my organisation, of course. However, I think the way this was presented is quite confusing. I really appreciate the presentation today, it's actually the best way I have seen it explained. I had to do a lot of digging to figure out the differences in the programmes and I probably am not the only one, perhaps a calculator or something to see what your org will pay in these situations would be helpful for future schemes and thoughts. And likewise, as you mentioned a moment ago, I don't like that there's different options that give a different budget because your budget and your work plan needs to be stable based on what you are bringing in. So that is problematic as well.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: As an addition to Harry Cross's point I would like to request the RIPE NCC also calculate how much an ASN costs them to maintain, so once it is assigned how much additional cost does it incur for that to be in the database and for the end user to it be reverified however often that happens
HANS PETTER HOLEN: We will make a note of that as well. I will, however, ask you to be cautious with us asking to calculate things like this because I do not track in detail what my staff takes ‑‑ spends their time on, right? I do not have clock‑in and knowing how many hours we spend on things and how many CPEs cycles we use in the database to store this number and that number. I built those charging models in my previous jobs, I don't want to do it again. Yes, we can do some estimates but there is a limit to what makes sense.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I don't want to suggest we calculate how much storage space each ASN takes up in the database but an estimate might be useful.
SPEAKER: I have a question on the Charging Scheme voting, we can decide between two models, the current flat rate model and new resource based model but we have the choice of three different flat rate models and only one resource space option. If I understand the voting correctly, the votes for the flat rate scheme will be split in three options, when the votes for the resource space modes are Will all go to one option. Is this correct and do you think this is a fair‑minded voting?
HANS PETTER HOLEN: So we are going to have a presentation on the charging ‑‑ on the voting method afterwards, but remember it's a preferential vote, so you rank your preferences and if your first vote, like one of the three, is ‑‑ gets less votes then your vote will be reallocated to your second and third and so on, unless there's one of the options that gets a majority. So I do believe that the method that we have been using for electing Board members for years actually takes care of this issue.
SPEAKER: Another question from Ben ShellCroft, integrated network services. There seems to have been many members requesting resourceheld based fee where you pay exactly what you own, this seems to have been ignored by the RIPE management. Can anyone suggest why there is a reluctance to go with this model as it would make the members' contribution proportional to the number of resources held?
HANS PETTER HOLEN: So I think I just answered that question so I will refer back to that.
SPEAKER: I will just note that the same question basically came from Markus speaking for himself. Serbulov Dmitry again I think, yeah.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I understand, I want to make clear I understand there is a cost to the NCC especially for the initial assignment of ASNs or assuming that there are new end users and already have all the PI resources. However, I don't know, but like I would assume that the upkeep fee is not that high, like the main cost would have to be like initial one ‑‑ and also once again I, while I am very biased of course, think that it's worth subsidising that cost. Yes, I know it's out of your hands now, but yeah, I want to members to think about this when they are voting, just that ‑‑ yeah, do you think this is worth subsidising this even if it does cost some but ‑‑ yeah, I would say yes.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Thank you for that. And to make it clear, in the first models we had bundled the ASN fees with the primary Charging Scheme. Based on the discussion we separated it out as individual vote so members could decide on this. So we don't have a strong opinion on one way or another. Of course my registry will have a very strong opinion on anything that causes them more work, but in the greater scheme of things, I think we can live with those alternatives. However, I am asking you to please give us sustainable fundings for the coming years; it's very important that the RIPE NCC remains stable. I will do whatever I can to be prudent in spending and save wherever I can, but revolutionary changes, I don't believe in that, I believe in evolution and small adjustments.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I do want to thank you for that, I believe I suggested on the mailing list and I do appreciate you doing that. And yes, we do need to fund the RIPE NCC appropriately, it's just where do we fund it and how.
ERIK BAIS: I am here as the co‑chair for Address Policy, we really need to have some additional push for the NCC registration to reclaim unused resources. The amount of times the RS department is busy on chasing people, not responding on their e‑mail with that used, that e‑mail address, to claim an AS number for the cost of 25 euros per week, that's what we are talking about, €1 ‑‑ you kinow, €50 in total. This is ‑‑ what are we talking about here? I have a 20‑year old who is his birthday today, this is definitely something he can afford. And having a discussion that this should be affordable, this is affordable, this is us being very affordable. So I would strongly recommend to have the AS number fee implemented because it will make their life a lot easier because if the fee is not paid and the AS number is not used, they can simply deregister it. That's how it works. There you go.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: From Larouse limited, and couple of comments here. First of all I agree with Peter said RIPE NCC needs to be stable, this is essential service today, it's like water and electricity to every human being in every company. But one thing, the first comment I make is not everything RIPE NCC is doing today is the essential service. The essential service is its restriction database maybe on a debatable scale, RPKI, everything else, RIPE Atlas, RIPE stat, well my company using those services and ‑‑ this is not part of essential service. So, the first thing I want to make comment on the budgeting and Charging Scheme before we go into it, is why you need this money ‑‑ you know, how you charge people is one discussion but why you need that much money. So on the transparency scale I like RIPE NCC to publish how much each activity is actually costing it and if certain administrative costs, for example supporting staff member like accounting and finance, they will be calculated as a portion of service, if I reduce this 20% staff will be reduced as well. So being transparent to the entire membership how much cost you to run, number one, the essential service, the restriction database and maybe the RPKI depending what member decides, you do RIPE Atlas measurement network all those services, while they are wonderful but they need to be laid out on the cost, that's the first comment, transparency. I want RIPE to be more transparent, it's ‑‑ it's not one accounting representation that we saw, we don't understand this, most people don't understand this. We need to know how much it's relation to the budget and then secondly, I believe the members should vote and deciding on which service the RIPE NCC should and if certain doesn't receive enough support it can be separated to a different foundation or like, for example, Open Source routing, which my friend Martin does, they go around those company and beg for money and that should be for those staff member to do as well. It's possible to carry around and I believe the visibility of those services they can be survived independently they don't need to be associated with the core and essential service. That's first comment.
Secondly, RIPE region is probably the biggest region across the globe and it started, if I remember correctly, and the vast different in per Capita income, where Hans comes from, that's Norway, million euros ‑‑ million dollars which I read in the news with some wealth ‑‑ if you look at some Bulgaria, Romania and nowadays Ukraine which most of its nation in the infrastructure has been destroyed because of a war, asking a universal justifiable cost across this vast different economic and reality region is unfair. Erik just said his son, €20 is nothing to his son, but can save a family in Ukraine today. So the very question is: Why are we charge everybody the same across the vastly different realities, across 20‑plus thousand memberships? So I believe the fees and the Charging Scheme need to take into account the per GDPR income of the GDPR of each of the nations or each of the economic situations, rather than purely look at how much you are selling the registration for. Because if you look at pay proportion that have you are saying RIPE is not‑for‑profit and RIPE is providing a human essential service today, which the Internet accepts without IP, you don't have that because this is so essential and for any essential service like food, water, electricity, I don't believe the cost is what's matter to charge the people, it's all about fairness across we as humans that make sure everybody has access to it. That's more important than we pay ‑‑ everybody pay the same fees or the people in Norway pay the same fee as people in Bulgaria or Ukraine. It's not about fairness. We make sure people in Ukraine can also pay it as people in Norway pay it. That's the second thing.
The last thing which is on the separation of service, and I want the RIPE Board to decide and it should be more transparent and have this done on timeline basis and if member wants to know it well I want to know more transparency on those services and if we have a time on that and based on these discussions we can see how much RIPE actually costs to run, because I personally believe RIPE database today like last time I checked, 400 something megabytes, it's smaller than USB stick... storage today so it shouldn't cost more than couple of hundred K to run its essential service and make sure it didn't get get disrupted, we can find different funding model or have discussion on this. The question is about transparency.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Thank you very much for your comments, Ondrej is telling me here he is closing the line, we will take the four ones that are at the microphone now ‑‑ I can't count.
As to your question for transparency, I would refer you to my presentation from the last year in the autumn meeting, there is a detailed breakdown per service on cost for each of the services and there will be a similar break down when we discuss this in the autumn.
As for the question of putting this to a vote for the membership, I will certainly take that to the Board and it will be up to the Board.
I will also point you to my presentation in the Services Working Group, RIPE NCC was set up not only to be an RIR but to be the secretariat of the community and do other projects that's in the by‑laws. So I do understand that some people feels that it should just be an RIR, but that was not what the RIPE NCC was set up to be; it was set up to be more, that's in the Articles of Association. So just to stress that.
Of course if the members want to change that, but that requires a vote.
(Applause)
SANDER STEFFANN: I remember like the previous votings on previous Charging Schemes like a decade or a decade and a half ago, where the Board just presented two options and that was it. I just want to express my thanks to the Board for actually engaging with the community but also for putting things like the AS fees up for a separate vote so people actually can make detailed choices in what they want. And even though I fear the vote will not end up as I want it to be, I greatly appreciate the Board giving the members those options. Thank you.
(Applause)
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I had one comment about the proposed transfer fee. Transfers cost money to do the research, all of that, registry accuracy is important, that's why we want them to occur and be done in the open air, however, RIPE is not firm necessarily with their transfers, they will consider more data if it's presented later, and that makes me nervous about doing transfers in the RIPE region; and therefore, as of right now, I don't want to vote for a transfer fee if that isn't changed.
SPEAKER: I have a few here. Andreas from Coronet, if we adopt the category based Charging Scheme and it is subject to the potential redistribution of excesses or losses, how would those be calculated? Also, if we vote for RIPE to start selling resources with an ASN charge, would that have any legal or tax repercussions?
HANS PETTER HOLEN: We did a legal review of the Charging Scheme and there should be no blockage on that. Exactly how we would have to calculate the surplus, we would have to go back and look at the exact formula for doing that.
SPEAKER: One from Serbulov Dmitry from ANT, the issue of the payment scheme will not solve any of the problems facing the RIPE NCC, except for the collection of budget funds. We must look at this issue in a different way, with step‑by‑step developmentive solutions. The current approach with categories is beneficial to very large resource holders and beginning LIRs; everyone else will pay for their dinner. I think the majority will vote for option D, I will personally do it and sorry, but I recommend it to others.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: For some members it will be more beneficial with the categories and for some members it will not be.
SPEAKER: Same person, I would like to see in the voting an option where the payment would be not in categories as an A option but in two parts, mandatory and for resources, I have already written this
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Thank you for that feedback but we cannot change the voting now.
SPEAKER: Lucas, why is it okay to directly monetise PR resources from using income from LIR accounts to get IPv4 addresses in contrast to PI resources?
HANS PETTER HOLEN: I am sorry, I didn't understand the question.
SPEAKER: Why is it okay to directly monetise PA resources by generating income from having an LIR account as opposed to PI resources?
HANS PETTER HOLEN: I hear the words but I still don't understand the question so I am unable to give an answer.
SPEAKER: I think this has kind of been answered. Samuel Cosgrove from TwistIK, would an ASN fee go against the hobby nets and cause many personal networks to close?
HANS PETTER HOLEN: I think that's been the point so yes.
SPEAKER: Lucas, why is LIR sponsoring allowed to exist since we are, you mentioned lowering the membership fee to enable more entrants?
HANS PETTER HOLEN: So when we proposed the scheme one of my proposals was that we would calculate any address space as address space and got rid of the distinction. There was strong opposition on that when it was discussed so we left that proposal.
SPEAKER: Philip baker: I am confused. If the NCC does not how much staff time it spends on average for an AS number registration or apparently any activities how can it reach a conclusion on what is an appropriate charge to recover its cost for a specific activity or determine if the time it's spending on average is actually sensible to begin with or even identify time consuming processes in need of improvement in order to manage staff costs?
HANS PETTER HOLEN: In my previous job I was responsible for running a service desk and I had time registration for all staff so they had to register their time on their activities. I did, however, not introduce time tracking on individual tickets because then my staff would simply go on strike. So if I introduced time registration on individual tickets to see how many minutes Marco uses to handle one AS request versus IPv4 request, productivity can go down. We can make estimates and look at how many requests we have and how much that is of the workload, we can do jump so we have a pretty good idea. I don't have the numbers here in front of me because I don't think that is a question that the GM should concern themselves with, I am not even sure it's a question that I should concern myself with. It's question for the registry manager to optimise that work. So we do have a pretty good idea of what the ‑‑ what the different services costs, you can look at page 43 in the Annual Report, I share that in the chat, and that gives a breakdown per service, like stat and Atlas and so on.
SPEAKER: Robert Schrek. Right now there is a very detailed report for the budget EG in RIPE 795, so but there is no detailed similar report for the FTEs, EG in RIPE 796. I requested a similar detailed report by the RIPE NCC earlier but I didn't see one so far. Let me know if I overlooked it. And if I didn't could you provide a same detailed report for FTEs like for the budget in the future as well please.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: That is noted, we have that report internally and I can't recall exactly why we left it out of the Annual Report but we will certainly put that on the table when we discuss next year's activity plans.
SPEAKER: Several of Dmitry, you say that in the future we may revise the Scheme A if it is adopted. I would like to understand when, why not immediately?
HANS PETTER HOLEN: So right now it's too late to make more options, so if the ‑‑ if the members vote in favour of Charging Scheme A we have to implement that and based on the implementation and we need to the rest of the year to make that implementation before we send out invoices in February, it's not a swithc to flick. There will be programming code to write to get this done. And then based on that experience we can look at the experiences on that next year and see if we want to refine that. Making the perfect model in one go as a revolution is difficult, so I am in favour of small steps and learning from experience.
SPEAKER: And the last one, when you receive this to the GM mailbox, it has to be read out, this is question from Louise Ronda, he said: We have a total of 4.3 billion IP addresses available on v4. However, most of these addresses are allocated to very few RIPE members. This is causing a massive market price increase of the v4 addresses. I find this unfair and can only help ‑‑ and it can only help to deploy v6 faster. As members of RIPE, we need to promote that some members with too many addresses for their needs bring some back to RIPE members so those are very few addresses can request more at a reasonable price.
This speculation with v4 prices must stop, otherwise v6 will take over and RIPE members cannot have a fair access to v4. I would like to propose that no member can have more than 10,000 IPv4 addresses without a justification of real usage by a RIPE designated auditor. The rest should be brought back to RIPE for its internal usage and management. I am thinking here of many universities and long time RIPE members that happen to have reserved hundreds of thousands or millions when there was no limit. This corrective action should provide plenty of v4 addresses to RIPE to be used and help finish with this lack of chief IP addresses.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: The distribution of addresses is not a topic for the General Meeting of the RIPE NCC, it belongs in the Address Policy. And we have drawn a line so the queue is closed, so I am sorry we will not take more questions now. So please take that to the Address Policy Working Group if you want to change the policy. I know that Chairs won't like that, but that's your job, sorry about that. However, if this would result in us moving to IPv6 I think that would be a good idea.
(Applause)
CYNTHIA: I don't think I need to introduce myself again. I do want to make the comment that Erik made a comment about €50 not really being that much and while that is true, it is also the administrative work that's involved with like as I mentioned, potentially more requirements and such that makes it ‑‑ some LIRs might not be able to do the service as pro bono know service if you will, just because they want to give back to the community. It would be more difficult to justify, to like subsidise the actual cost as opposed to subsidise the paperwork time. Also there's the whole thing of like, well, getting into this when you are 20, that's young but it's certainly not like the youngest. I am 21, I have been involved for almost five years and I know many others who have been involved when they are 15 or 16, it's ‑‑ and like, yeah, maybe if you are 20, 50 euros isn't that much, that's possibly true, but if you get into 15 and 16 it could be a whole lot more. And like some people, these people shouldn't have any ‑‑ should do something else, but you can't deny that it's the most effective method we have for getting young people in. Like, I would not be standing here today if it wasn't for that, some people might think that would be better because they think I am being annoying at the moment and that's fine. However, we do need more people in the industry because otherwise all the networking ‑ are going to die out and there's no one to replace them. So please think about this when you vote. Yeah, thank you.
ONDREJ FILIP: Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Kevin Brennan: Good afternoon, My name is Kevin Brenna. I am legal counsel for the RIPE NCC. I am here today to present a shortchange to the RIPE NCC Standard Service Agreement. An outline of what this proposed amendment is behind me here, essentially it is to add an explicit mention of the LIR account agreement to the Standard Service Agreement and the stated aim of that is to alleviate doubt as to whether conflicts relating to the LIR account agreement fall within the scope of the conflict arbitration procedures.
As a brief background to what prompted this, we had seen some misunderstandings within the membership and within the community as to how certain agreements and procedures interacted and aligned with one another. And essentially the LIR account agreement states that any dispute as it pertains to that agreement should be settled through arbitration. The arbitration procedure on the other hand, states in its scope that it is between the member and the RIPE NCC as it pertains to the SSA.
In practice, however, if there had been an arbitration procedure initiated as it pertained to the LIR account agreement, this would have been possible as in principle. The arbitration procedure is about disputes as they relate to the registration of Internet Resources and of course the LIR account is the vehicle through which the member accesses RIPE NCC Services and the registration of resources.
As you see behind me the current text from Article 6.1 of the SSA has no explicit mention of the LIR account agreement therein. And the proposed amendment is essentially to add, yeah, a short mention of the RIPE NCC LIR agreement to this article. And as I stated before, this is for clarification and to alleviate doubt as to how procedures and documents align with one another.
That's the end of that short presentation. If there are any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.
(Applause)
ONDREJ FILIP: We are progressing in this General Meeting very quickly. The next is the RIPE NCC Executive Board elections and we have several candidates. And I think the plan is to have a presentation of those people from video, is this correct?
FERGAL CUNNINGHAM: There is video of all the candidates where they had two minutes each.
ONDREJ FILIP: That's what I thought.
(Video playing)
FAHAD ALSHIRAWI: Item one, question everything. I think we need to look at the way we have been doing things and just because we have done things a certain way for the longest time does not mean we should continue doing them the same way. The way we do things might have been right for when we started doing them but it does not mean it's right for us now. I think if we do question everything and reevaluate what we do we will probably yield a massive cost savings without impacting any of the benefits that members receive from their organisation.
Item 2 on my agenda, neutrality. It's very important for Board members to maintain extreme neutrality and I think anybody who knows my history knows no amount of pressure is going to sway me or change how I do things and I think so that's very important.
I think in the geopolitical world we live in where we have war between two of our member nations, we have another member nation that's persona non grata on the global arena and two other member nations with wars going on right now, I believe it's very important that we have Board members who will not be pressured by geopolitics and actually do what is right by maintaining neutrality throughout.
Why should you vote for me?
I have Board experience. I have experience running multiple companies. I have legal experience. I have financial management experience. And I am retired. I have all the time in the world for this job.
MUSTAFA OMER GOLGELI: Greetings from Istanbul, I wanted to be with you in person and instead you are watching a video‑recording which turns out to be pretty hard and two minutes is not sufficient for anything but I will try to be fast.
While a few of you might know about me, I understand the majority may not be familiar which is not surprising since I am not a prominent figure in any big name company, I am a small LIR, I am involved in logics, in nonprofit IXP operating in Europe, I am one of the founders of our small turbine irk internet exchange it, T IR X and that's pretty much T my reason for being a candidate is actually quite straightforward, when I was first nominated I didn't have any actual intention to return for the Chair; however, through persistence and further thinking I realised I haven't seen many people who are not a big part of a commercial organisation or people from a younger generation as much as we would like to. It feels like small LIRs are under‑represented in RIPE. So I want someone among us to have a voice in this community for this committee, thus I am here. Thank you for listening, have a nice day.
MARIA HALL: Wait a minute, Maria ‑‑ I do it. So first I would like to say how proud I am to be part of the RIPE NCC Executive Board, how proud I am of the company, the community and the whole membership. And look at the engagement that we have, in all our working groups, our discussions, our solutions that we find when you work together and look at the candidate list. What an engagement. I am pretty sure, never mind how the selection turns out, I think RIPE NCC is going to be in very good hands. But of course we have had challenges and still have, the latest times with the pandemic, inflation, regulation, the war in Ukraine and some problematic situations in some parts of our service regions and beyond and put a lot of pressure on the RIPE NCC and the Board. And above that also but Vesna was talking about on Monday the climate change, so now I think it's time, now maybe even more than before, that we come together, we use our skills and our resources to be able to together tackle the challenges that we have had. And of course the strategic direction for the RIPE NCC and the strategic actions has to be in line with what's happening right now, how do we prioritise what is needed to be done, how do we be wise and efficient with our services and budget and also the actions taken. So, yes, I think there still are a lot of things to be done. And I don't feel that I have done enough yet. So I still want to contribute to the Board, to the company and to the community. So thank you very much for listening. And once again, I'm looking forward to your support. Thank you very much.
RAYMOND JETTEN: Hello everyone, I have been a Board member now for one term, three years. And I really would like to continue doing this important work. I have been also been a treasurer since last year September and the first term of Board work has been two years of Covid followed by a terrible war in Europe. So we have challenges, we have multiple challenges. We have members that are not allowed to make payments to our bank account because the bank will otherwise close it, members from Syria and Iran. We also have challenges with this war in Ukraine. We are not sure how many of the members can make their payments. And of course now we have the budget, the Charging Scheme and the activity plan that have been discussed lately quite often on mailing list.
Having some issues with trouble or problems or challenges is not a reason for me to run away. I rather try to solve the problems and the most important thing we need to do as a Board member to get these things solved is listen to the members. If we do that, then we might have a chance to make the membership as convenient, as efficient as possible, so please do vote for me and make sure that it continues its important work. Thank you, bye.
(Applause.)
DMYTRO KOHMANYUK: Good morning from Rotterdam, the city of the RIPE 86 Meeting. This is the Executive Board candidate speaking. My name is Dmytro Kohmanyuk. And I have been part of this community for about 15 years and this is my third attempt to run. I am from Ukraine and work for the country code we had enormous challenge last year due to the full scale aggression of Russia, we per is he veered and haven't stopped operating, as many of you know running a small business is always a challenged, not used many address resources and haven't planned to request any more many companies in Ukraine travel to obtain the bare minimum, members talk about rising cost and restraining distribution of IPv4 addresses, the Board proposed four new Charging Scheme options and I have sent my comments on the members' discuss list as well as read all of yours, we need to find a way to be fair, some increased the rising budget, increasing staff count and too many projects which make us the most regional internet registration in operation, while I see the value like RIS and Atlas, I think a comprehensive review is in order. Let's make our money go all the way for our benefit.
I like to attend our meetings and as a Programme Committee member I hope you enjoy what we have prepared for you this week. Many people made new connections, expanded their knowledge and had a good time in the past. We need to rethink how our future events would be more accessible, inclusive and add value, not everyone can afford a flight and the hotel, some have visa issues and therefore easy on line participation remains essential. St last I would like to stress I remain adamant about enforcing the sanctions and keeping our members safe from unauthorised resource hijacks as well as data correctness, we need to be vigilant there.
With all that said I am again glad to be at the meeting, regardless of the election, see you all and please do not forget to register to vote.
(Applause)
OLENA KUSHNIR: Hi, My name is Olena Kushnir. Change and improving the world is mine, that's why I am here. In this difficult time I believe that my experience is owner of telecommunications company in Ukraine has given me unique experience that I can share with the RIPE community. Due to the constant rockets, my team and I together with all telecommunication industry of Ukraine work hard every day. Our goal was to prevent fragmentation of Ukrainian Internet from the rest of the world. The ongoing war in Ukraine has forced me to face and overcome many challenges and what I can ‑‑ did, I learn. The first is to make quick decisions in changing conditions; the second is the knowledge how to maintain Internet networks in extremely difficult conditions; the third is of course crisis management which also concerns budget maintains, management staffing and continued operations.
I am now enthusiastic than ever before to new project and where I can be useful by electing me to the Board the RIPE community can benefit from their crisis management experience. I can contribute the strengthening our resilience and providing constant support to our members during difficult times. Choosing me for this position would bring a fresh aspect to the Board, representative the infusion of new blog into our community. Thank you very much.
(Applause)
HARALD SUMMA: Hello RIPE, good afternoon. The world is becoming very volatile. The open and free Internet as we wanted and as we know it is under pressure. Self regulated organisations of the Internet like the RIPE are facing more and more challenges from inside of the organisation as well as from the outside world, from strong corporates and governments. Technical issues driven by the global trend of digitalisation will change the demand for products and services. The next years to come will decide how successful and sustainable a member organisation like RIPE can shape the future in the Internet. My name is Harald Summa and I have dedicated half of my life to the development of free and open Internet, among others by underlying the infrastructure with many internet exchanges. As CEO of a global organisation, I have been working with many international communities with complex technologies, with governments, with NOGs and many beautiful people, as part of the access Board of RIPE I see my role as a moderator and mediator between the RIPE community and the RIPE management.
I am willing to dedicate substantial time and power to this job, bringing in all my technical, financial and managerial experience and knowledge. So please vote for me. Thank you.
SALAM YAMOUT: Hello, I am Salam Yamout and I am an engineer from Lebanon. Presently I work at Netflix, based in Amsterdam. I am a partner engagement manager. Previous to that for ten years I had public policy roles involving telecom regulations and Internet governance. I served on the RIPE NCC Board between 2014 and 2020, by then we were faced with pretty nasty challenges, but because the Board was cohesive and rounded, we were able to find good solutions. I cannot tell you what the Board is going to face in the next three years, but I can share with you my guiding principles, the one that shaped my thoughts and actions.
Principle 1: Relevance. RIPE NCC must remain relevant to its members and the community, that means we might have to go back to basics and select our priorities.
2: Cost control. We are now faced with a reality of decreased income streams. I stand committed to transparency, efficiency and reviewing all costs.
3: Inclusion and diversity. I will support any committee‑led initiative to improve inclusion and diversity. I believe that our future depends on getting new blood in.
4: Neutrality. We are under increased pressure from governments to comply. We have to remain true to our principles. However, without being politicised.
In conclusion, I want to reiterate my long life commitment to a global and open Internet.
I still care and I am really proud of this community, the way it operates and makes its decisions bottom up.
Running for the Board and being part of the Board is my way to say thank you, and to contribute.
(Applause)
FERGAL CUNNINGHAM: Hello everyone, Fergal Cunningham. I am the head of membership engagement at the RIPE NCC and I am going to try and one you through the voting platform, the procedure and maybe talk a bit about how instant run‑off voting works.
I like this visualisation, we have an awful lot of people registered but it's still relatively small proportion of the entire electorate so it's about 14.62% which is much higher than usual. We had 2,910 from 86 countries, it's still well short of the record we had three years ago.
Registered votes per country, if you want to check this outlook at the presentation, it also gives the percentage of voting members per country as well.
Now, the voting platform, what's new:
This is the second time we have used assembly voting and they have used an a new UI, platform, you will see some changes. We have an opening and closing ceremony involving a key that's transferred to a RIPE NCC server, I will go into that a little bit more on the next slide. Members need to be ‑‑ need to have a TLS 1.2 in order to receive e‑mails from assembly voting. We found this to be a problem last time. And also please note that when you start the voting, complete it to the end if you want all ‑‑ any of your votes to register; you need to do all the resolutions and the election. And if you don't do that, your votes will not be registered. So, in the previous voting system we had, the previous voting company, you could cast one or two votes and then drop off and those two would be registered; that's not the case here, so please beware.
We have an opening ceremony again, the election's opened after the ceremony with encrypted keys, assembly voting themselves and the RIPE NCC now store these keys on servers and once these keys have been entered into the system the election can begin and one the key ceremony has taken place all the subsequent actions by all parties including voters can be seen on the bulletin Board and this process is duplicated for the closing ceremony where it is produced once all parties have entered their keys.
So, last time we had ‑‑ it was the first time we used assembly voting. One of the things we couldn't do the first time we used it was allow people with representing multiple members to cast all their votes in one system so for people who had quite a few votes it was a bit of an ordeal so I am happy to say we have solved this for this election. And voting. I can tell who is clapping, probably.
This is the first time they have used instant run‑off voting calculations, it's the first of its kind that they have seen, so they were quite fascinated with how we do our voting here. Once Andrei declares voting open we will start, it's available to all members who have registered, votes can be cast until 9 a.m. on Friday and again no paper ballots at this GM.
You received two e‑mails, one receives ‑‑ one has your passcode from the RIPE NCC and you need that, and then another mail comes from assembly voting with the link to vote.
So basically, the assembly code is pre‑filled and just add your RIPE NCC password.
Most of the resolutions are yes/no votes as usual, just choose yes, no or abstain this is how it works for people who have multiple votes. You choose how many votes you want to assign to each selection and then confirm.
Now the Charging Scheme, it's preferential voting, you need to vote in order of preference, so 1 is your most preferred option and 4 is your least preferred. But you can choose any number of preferences. You don't need to choose four preferences, you just need one to make it valid. I have seen some members on Members Discuss saying that the ‑‑ it's stacked in favour of model A, that's not really how preferential voting works. If any of the models receive 50% on the first preferences, then that models will be accepted but if no model receives 50% then we move to second preferences, the least preferred model is eliminated and the second preferences for that vote get redistributed, so it will end up that the most preferred model is the one that's chosen.
It works the exact same way for the Executive Board election, choose in order of preference, you can choose up to eight candidates or you can abstain, of course.
I will say there's excellent video explaining instant run‑off voting on the GM pages in the how‑to vote section, Once you're finished, please confirm at the end and then you can track your vote. We have a GM voting platform guide that goes into everything in a bit more detail. These are the resolutions, five of them need slightly more than 50% and we use instant run‑off for resolution 3 and the elections. The abstentions are noted but don't counted in the reckoning. At 10:30 on Friday we will reconvene in this room and Ondrej will announce the results, we will stream it live in the same place. So that's it. If anyone has any questions about the voting, I am happy to take them.
Blake: Thank you for this explanation, it's probably one of the better explanations of instant run‑off we have seen over the years, it's quite good.
Just to clarify, an instant run‑off vote is still a vote, like ‑ I very much appreciate the abstention option there which was not mentioned in previous times, so an instant run‑off vote is still a vote. If there's something that you don't want to vote for, please don't vote for it. Thanks.
FERGAL CUNNINGHAM: Thank you.
Dmitry: A really quick question, I know the old system was working fine, it was different. Once, like you said, you have to go through all the resolutions and submit a final, would that e‑mail be instantly generated to confirm that these all eight options has indeed been processed?
FERGAL CUNNINGHAM: I am not sure I understand Dmitry:
DMITRY: How the information works from your voting back ends, so does the email go immediately after the votes are submitted by the member?
FERGAL CUNNINGHAM: Once you confirm, you will see a summary page of all your votes so it will show you the six resolutions and the election and with your options that you have chosen, and at that stage you can hit "confirm" and that will post your votes, and then you can track your ballot to make sure that it has been cast and applied it in the system.
DMITRY: But no e‑mails are sent to members to confirm vote has been received?
FERGAL CUNNINGHAM: No, sorry. That's it. Thank you, everyone.
(Applause).
ONDREJ FILIP: So I think that's it. Before I will conclude this part of the meeting, let me add one more thank yous, I know there are three Board members who serve for three years which is Raymond, Maria and Christian, so I would like to thank them for those three exceptional years, thank you very much.
(Applause)
Again, because one of them is not a candidate anymore and he was a Chair for such a long time and he was an exceptional Chair, I would like to again thank Christian, thank you for all your service and good luck in your ICANN endeavour.
(Applause)
And last formal point I have to read the resolutions:
Resolution 1: "The General Meeting adopts the RIPE Financial Report 2022:
Resolution 2: The General Meeting discharges the Executive Board with regard to its actions as they appear from the Annual Report 2022 and Financial Report 2022.
Resolution 3: Option A the General Meeting adopts the RIPE NCC Charging Scheme 2024 model A, B and C and D". If you don't mind I will not read all of it.
Resolution 4: In addition to the RIPE NCC Charging Scheme adopted in Resolution 3, the General Meeting adopts an extra charge of €50 per SAN as integral part of the Charging Scheme 2024.
Resolution 5: In addition to the Charging Scheme adopted in resolution 3, the General Meeting adopts an extra charge of €500 per accepted transfer request as an integral part of the Charging Scheme 2024.
Resolution 6: The General Meeting adopts the amendment to RIPE NCC Standard Service Agreement."
I think that's it.
So unless there's some final question or comment? I will give ten more seconds. I don't hear anything so I declare the voting open and the GM will reconvene on Friday at 10:30 local time. Thank you very much.
(Applause)
LIVE CAPTIONING BY AOIFE DOWNES, RPR
DUBLIN, IRELAND