[arin-ppml] Change of Use and ARIN (was: Re: AFRINIC And The Stability Of The Internet Number Registry System)

[John Curran]

Fernando -

The ARIN AC _administers_ the ARIN policy process – this means that they engage the community, listen to them, edit proposals based on that input, and help move each proposal to its appropriate conclusion based on the views of the community – it is not unlike what Policy WG chairs do in other regions - only we have 15 of them on a body referred to as the ARIN Advisory Council.

For example, it is easy to find instances of ARIN AC discussions where one or more AC members has remarked along the lines of “The community showed strong support of this draft policy at the last public policy meeting, and so despite the fact that I am not personally a fan of it, I support it advancing to the next stage.”

In short, I’d recommend some very carefully study of the ARIN Policy Development Process before drawing conclusion about its structure or strengths compared to other appraoches.

Thanks,
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
American Registry for Internet Numbers

On 8 Sep 2021, at 8:46 PM, Fernando Frediani <fhfrediani at gmail.com<mailto:fhfrediani at gmail.com>> wrote:


I don't think this is something to celebrate as it puts over control on membership as both Board and AC are elected exclusively by them while the ultimate power about policies must always be with community, otherwise there is no bottom-up process.

The existence of AC as it is is already something exotic. Plus the fact the AC represents only membership and not community unbalances the process and in a odd scenario could exclude community totally from the process in practice.
I understand you appraisal to this due the results so far, and that may have been because there have been majority of good people in both Board and AC, or as you said people involved in the process have behaved according to the requirements. But that is not, by far, a good governance model as if the people on these bodies change in the future it allows a easy takeover of the process by bad actors. So in the sense ARIN have had some luck so far.
Of course those who currently retaining the power would have justification for this model as it fits well for them and will say that everything is fine, but looking from the theoretic point of view there is an unbalance as members should not have the ultimate authority of what a policy should be, but the community which is above them on this matter.

Fernando


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.arin.net/pipermail/arin-ppml/attachments/20210909/1a584e14/attachment.htm>