On Mar 25, 2014, at 9:25 AM, Randy Bush <randy@psg.com> wrote:
john:
i appreciate the numbers. thanks! and, btw, it has always been a pleasure to work with arin staff.
Thanks (we do work for you, member or not, if you hold resources in the region.)
... the arin membership consists of 17% of the address holding organizations in the region (plus a few folk who buy membership), and they hold 42% of the address space.
Correct.
so the 17% (give or take) elect the board [0], and the board, through a complex inside-controlled process [1], sets policy for the other unrepresented 83%.
To be perfectly clear, it is even lower in practice... 17% _could_ elect the ARIN Board and the ARIN Advisory Council (ARIN AC), but that would be presuming 100% participation. Actual election participation is actually fairly high for an association; we had approx 15% participation (~ 600 organizations) in 2013 elections - <https://www.arin.net/announcements/2013/20131023.html>
...and the board and policy wonks set policy and contracts, among other things the lrsa and rsa, which place serious barriers to becoming a member, such as clauses with arin being able to unilaterally change ts&cs arbitrarily. [2] [3]
You might want to tease those two statements apart - The ARIN Board provides organization oversight, and this includes fees, services, contracts and related terms and conditions. The ARIN AC administers the policy process, and this includes incorporating edits to draft policies based on the community discussion.
and i know the "anyone can partiipate" theory. but in fact extremely few participate, and arin pays many of the policy wonks to fly around the world business class and spread the arin regulatory religion. no other rir does this.
I do not know if the other RIRs send their equivalent community "policy working group" folks to other RIR meetings; we do - the purpose is not evangelism but to bring back information on ongoing policy developments in other regions.
and this is a representative bottom up organization claiming legitimacy in the global arena? i would be interested in similar numbers for other rirs, and whether their service agreements are similarly onerous. (and i believe that ripe is actively tearing down barriers to participation).
It is true that we have an abundance of resource holders who received resources prior to ARIN, and that is going to skew the numbers for this region significantly. I know that you don't believe that we've been tearing down barriers to participation, but one of the reasons that the legacy service agreement was updated (again) recently was specifically to be more explicit about rights for the address holder. We specifically lay these out now, note that revocation will not occur based on utilization, and provide a fee schedule that is favorable compared to those issued resources after ARIN's formation. There does remain one very significant difference between some in the community and ARIN - that is on the applicability of community-developed policy to legacy holders, and this is a fairly fundamental issue that has definitely reduced interest in folks signing an LRSA and participating as members. FYI - I'm going to comment on your footnotes, since you use terminology below which is factually incorrect.
[0] as you know, there has been at least one occasion where the board election has been rigged. at your encouragement, i once submitted the whole nomination rig-a-marole to the nomcom. my name did not appear on the ballot, which i found out only when the ballot came out, and was never even viven a reason.
ARIN has a nomination committee (like many other Internet organizations such as IETF, ISOC, ICANN) and its deliberations are private. I do not sit on it, so there is not much I can add, but I would definitely welcome suggestions for improvements to the nomination and election process. A NomCom (composed of a selection of Board, AC, and at large members) which deliberates privately does not equate to "rigged" by any means, although I will agree it does raise reasonable questions of transparency. Note that anyone can make it onto the ballot via petition, and that is a mechanism that has been used successfully in the past.
[1] an outsider can not make a proposal that is not modifiably by an 'advisory' committee. and most are revised. [smell same problem as nomcom?]
While the ARIN AC does hold the editors pen (and from what I am told does a good job of reflecting discussions), there has always been (and remains today) a simple petition process available at each stage if you think that they have somehow failed and want your original text to go to the ARIN Public policy meeting and the ARIN Board.
[2] who would sign such an agreement except under threat of not having the resources necessary to run their business? see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extortion
Membership organizations set terms and conditions for their services, and ARIN is no different. The answer is, of course, to participate in the election process; as you have already noted, if even a fraction of a percent of the community (30 to 50 folks) felt strongly there was a major issue, they could put candidates in each election which were assured of being elected, and could in short order significantly alter practices to better match their expectations. That would be a case of improved community representation, and therefore the most appropriate outcome. I appreciate your note, Randy - far better to express these concerns and get folks thinking about them than to have them go unstated... Thanks! /John John Curran President and CEO ARIN p.s. Discussion of improvements to ARIN election process would probably be best send over to ARIN-discuss or PPML (for sake of those here who lack interest) but I'll leave that to this list to decide. I would also recommend (for folks who have suggestions they'd like to send privately) to send them to me, and I'll get them to the ARIN Board.