Dear Jas

Thanks for your well-considered and valuable contributions. I note that your mail has already sparked some really useful dialogue, but I wanted to briefly clarify a few of the issues that have come up.

As Tim Jones noted in a previous reply, it's important to note the distinction between voting items and consensus items in the APNIC forums.

* Voting vs. consensus building

Voting --------- The APNIC ByLaws define certain situations where formal voting can occur, the most important being the Executive Council elections. It has also been the convention to put major decisions affecting membership rights (such as significant changes to the fee structure or adoption of a new membership agreement) to a formal vote, although this has generally followed a process of consensus building before the election. When there is a formal vote, then the number of ballots for each member is determined by their membership tier.

The ByLaws are here:

http://www.apnic.net/docs/corpdocs/Bylaws.htm

Consensus ---------- APNIC policy is generally considered a community issue rather than a membership issue, so the policy development process is based on consensus, which must be observed on both the mailing lists and in meetings. Every interested person is welcome to take part, whether they are a member or not. In this process, the voice of an individual is equal to that of an Extra Large member.

The process for reaching consensus is summarised here:

http://www.apnic.net/docs/policy/dev/process.html http://www.apnic.net/docs/policy/dev

* Other issues

Rejection of policy proposal ----------------------------- In your first mail you noted:

Earlier in the week, one of the APNIC people did a thing on improving dns service by what I calculate as 600%!! 2hrs to 2 mins.. I also notice that that policy was rejected.

I just wanted to clarify that the proposal you mentioned is not specifically about improving DNS service as such, but rather about removing one method of updating the whois database for operational and security reasons. The improvement in reverse DNS update times was given as just one example of the potential benefits. Also, the proposal was not actually rejected, but rather the decision was deferred until after a working group has gathered more input and provided more information about the issues. This proposal is still alive and all further inputs to the sig-policy mailing list or working group (when it is established) will be very welcome.

APNIC's hosting arrangement with ARIN -------------------------------------- As an example of the need to evaluate the cost of *IR services, you asked "Why does APNIC have one in the USA?".

Again, just for the sake of clarity, APNIC does have a small amount of space in one of ARIN's rack under a co-operative agreement with the RIRs. This does help efficiently distribute APNIC's services (bearing in mind that APNIC's whois database is heavily queried from around the world, including the US) and does not impose a significant cost.

Once again thanks for your comments to the list - active discussions like this are always welcome.

Finally, thank you for your compliments about the quality of the web cast. We having working hard to improve access to the APNIC meetings and so it is really good to see those services prompting more discussion.

Kind regards Save

_______________________________________________________________________ Savenaca Vocea email: save@apnic.net Policy Development Manager, APNIC sip: save@voip.apnic.net http://www.apnic.net phone: +61 7 3858 3100

On 15/09/2006, at 3:46 PM, Jas Webb wrote:

Hi Tim,

...

Great discussion you have started, possibly one that is long overdue.

Thanks.. My guess is about 5 years overdue. ;-)

...

In regards to voting though, I am pretty certain (can't find the info on APNIC website to confirm) that the extra votes for Large, Extra Large members etc. only come into play for things like elections of EC members.

When it comes to voting on policy changes, every member gets one vote, so you can definitely make a change.

well.. fees and EC members.. Isn't that the most important? and should be the most fair? Setting aside cultural differences of the term "fair".

So when the votes are distributed as they are now - the final result is not going to be one of the community/membership, but a result of the largest network operators.

Perhaps in APNIC's early days, this was desired.. Like start-up companies stacking their board and knowing the results of shareholder meetings before the meeting takes place. But is it required now?

-Jas

-- Jas Webb