[arin-ppml] AC candidates

Tue Aug 13 09:30:25 EDT 2024

Hi Fernando and Amy,

I would be interested in discussing how a broker’s pecuniary interest is of a different nature than a non-broker’s pecuniary interest.

If voting on a policy will be better for any company’s bottom line, what’s the difference?

In point of fact nearly everybody involved in ARIN stands to make or lose money in the ip addressing arena.

It may be at one or two removes, but a little consideration will reveal that truth.

So maybe that’s the rub. 

A broker makes money directly from the provision of IP addresses, and other businesses make money from those addresses through profits engendered by their utilization.

Is that a distinction without a difference?

But what about an address buyer or an address seller or just an address holder? Should they be considered for potential conflicts in the same manner as brokers?

After all, the largest address buyer is well represented as well as some of the largest IP address holders. They stand to make money from policy but I discern no conflicted votes.

As active market participants, they continue to receive any benefits accrued through policy, and Amy was an active broker in her early AC days without issue.

I don’t think the active/no-longer-receiving payments  distinction matters.

I concur with Amy’s bottom line that it is the responsibility of the officeholder to ethically recuse, and the voter to choose an ethical candidate.

On Fernando’s point that some may be paid to participate in the forums, personally I have never heard of that but once again, the issue of ad hominem needs to be discussed.

Even if those forum posts are paid-for, we are obligated to consider the content of the post and nothing about the poster.  

This seems to be a bone of contention in this forum but it is a very basic and timeworn principal that ad hominem arguments are fallacious.

Regards,
Mike

From: ARIN-PPML <arin-ppml-bounces at arin.net> On Behalf Of Fernando Frediani
Sent: Friday, August 09, 2024 4:23 PM
To: arin-ppml at arin.net
Subject: Re: [arin-ppml] AC candidates

Hello Amy

Thanks for sharing you thought on the subject. That was indeed a great and detailed text to read.

I understand most of what you mean and your way to see the scenario, but sincerely I believe your experience and ability to ethically recuse yourself on certain occasions is more an exception rather than what would happen if other people that have been in the same business as you would be on your shoes. Just think for a moment how many business people with a primary role to sell something or make sure the environment is favorable for their main business activity is able to recuse themselves if they see there is a minimal chance they can loose businesses and therefore commission, money on their pocket. While I recognize that may be always possible, I rarely see people with that ability.

Important to mention that some of these individuals may have as role not only bring business to their companies, but are paid to spend part of business hours doing some type of work in the different policy forums and as such they as expected to bring some positive result to their company. That result I don't believe will, most of the time, be primarily in the interest of the community affected. When it is in the interest of both better, but when there is a conflict I don't think the community will always prevail on those situations. And as you put well, how clear will that be for other AC members and community ?

Best regards
Fernando

On 26/10/2023 16:11, Amy Potter wrote:

Hi all,

Having spent a substantial amount of time over the past decade thinking about how to manage this exact conflict, I figured I weigh in. I am currently serving out the remainder of my final year on the AC, so I really don't have a stake here in terms of trying to get re-elected, but I think the insights I have to offer are relevant. I was an IP address broker from 2012-2019, and was first elected to the AC in 2015. I was neither a member nor a resource holder for the first several years I served on the AC. I believe there is absolutely a conflict that exists for those currently working as an IP address broker (or any other form of financial intermediary), and that this conflict is of a slightly different nature than the conflicts other members of the AC may have based on working for companies that are impacted by ARIN policies. Previous affiliation with a broker is only a conflict in my opinion if they continue to receive some sort of payments based on IP address sales. Nonetheless I think this conflict can be managed by 1) the structural safeguards already in place, and 2) the AC member understanding the conflict and having a plan in place to deal with it. I'll get into the details of how this plays out below, but the TLDR of it is that I think the safeguards in place and the current culture of the AC provides quite a bit of protection; that a broker behaving ethically can provide substantial relevant insight and value to the AC under the right set of circumstances; and that successfully managing the conflict comes down to full transparency and recusing oneself at the appropriate times. 

There are a number of safeguards already built into the system during the election process and through the AC's own processes. Candidates running for the AC provide bios which include a section where they are asked about conflicts. They also provide details about prior work history. So long as these sections are answered honestly I think this provides the community itself with notice of potential conflicts so that members may vote in an informed manner, or seek additional feedback from the candidate if they have any questions. There are also options available to ARIN and the nomcom to deal with potentially false responses. 

As for the way the AC itself operates, at the annual face to face meeting each January members of the AC disclose their current employer, role, and potential conflicts to one another. At the end of each monthly meeting, there is an opportunity for AC members to disclose any changes in employment or affiliation so that other AC members are able to evaluate the things each AC member says and does in light of their affiliations and sources of compensation. Throughout my time on the AC, the culture of the group has taken this obligation very seriously, and members have taken affiliations and conflicts into account when evaluating the contributions of others and decisions on how to vote.  AC members also must update their bios that are published on ARIN's website to accurately reflect their employment and affiliation, in order to provide continued transparency to the community.

It's also important to remember the role of the AC in facilitating the policy development process, and the actual opportunities to advance ones own position (which do exist, but there are limits to that). When a new policy proposal comes in the Chair of the AC assigns shepherds to work with the author. If a proposal is authored by a member of the AC, that person cannot be a shepherd of the proposal. The chair also considers who to assign each proposal to, taking into account potential conflicts.Shepherds work with the author to ensure ensure the proposal 1) has a clear problem statement, 2) proposes changes to the text of NRPM, and 3) falls within the scope of ARIN policy. Once the shepherds are satisfied the proposal meets these requirements they bring it to the AC to vote on whether those three criteria are satisfied, and if it passes, the proposal comes onto the docket as a draft policy. At that point, yes, the "power of the pen" (ability to edit) shifts from the author to the shepherds. The shepherds make edits based on community feedback (mainly from  ppml and public policy consultations), however there is quite a bit of discretion in language choice--often times there's quite a bit of wordsmithing that goes on to try to ensure that the proposed change to the language of NRPM actually achieves the thing it's trying to achieve. Members of the AC often collaborate with one another on this wordsmithing, and this is where industry expertise is extremely helpful. As a broker I provided quite a bit of feedback to my peers about language choices based on my experience of how they would likely be applied, what potential opportunities for loopholes this left, etc. If a broker can fulfill this function ethically it can be very very useful. One of the most difficult parts of being on the AC is trying to make sure the language you're working on actually achieves what you want it to, and there is often a huge difference between what I actually see happen in the IP address market and what those not involved in the market think happens. 

The next stages of voting are where I believe the need to recuse oneself comes in. When the AC is voting to advance a draft to a recommended draft, move a recommended draft to last call, or recommend for board adoption the AC votes on whether it is 1) technically sound, 2) fair and impartial, and 3) supported by the community. I believe there is an opportunity for bias to creep in in evaluating the amount of community support that exists, so I frequently recused myself from voting on policies in these stages while I was a broker, even after having contributed to wordsmithing. While members of the AC make decisions for themselves about whether or not to recuse themselves, the culture of the AC plays a strong role here in setting expectations of behavior. If a member of the AC was voting in situations other members felt they should have recused themselves in, it's likely any attempts to influence the direction of future policies would be received with far more scrutiny in the future by other AC members. Since there are 15 members of the AC, it would be extremely difficult for one member to effectively influence the course of policy development after having lost the trust of the other members. If a perceived conflict became too strong, there are potential avenues for removal of an AC member as well. 

Ultimately I think the question for the community comes down to whether you feel you can trust a candidate to manage any conflict ethically. Personally I wouldn't fret too hard about that given the faith I have in the constraints and culture that exists at this time, however it may be worth reconsidering in the future if the makeup of the AC starts to shift. Also it's worth pointing out again that previous affiliations or prior roles that would have created a conflict in the past do not mean that conflict still exists today. Based on the bios I'm guessing that might be where some of this concern is coming from, but unless there is some form of continued compensation still occurring I don't see it as an issue personally, and the fact it was disclosed in the bios is itself a level of transparency. 

Hope that helps,

Amy

On Thu, Oct 26, 2023 at 1:18 PM Owen DeLong via ARIN-PPML <arin-ppml at arin.net <mailto:arin-ppml at arin.net> > wrote:

> On Oct 26, 2023, at 09:44, William Herrin <bill at herrin.us <mailto:bill at herrin.us> > wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Oct 26, 2023 at 9:42 AM John Curran <jcurran at arin.net <mailto:jcurran at arin.net> > wrote:
>>> On Oct 26, 2023, at 12:20 PM, William Herrin <bill at herrin.us <mailto:bill at herrin.us> > wrote:
>>> It plummeted after the Board changed the AC's role from shepherding
>>> policy proposals to developing policy proposals.
>> 
>> There is no material change in the role of the ARIN AC in this regard –
>> although I do agree that the role of the ARIN AC in shepherding policies
>> has been made clearer with subsequent updates to the ARIN Policy
>> Development Process (PDP).
> 
> Hi John,
> 
> That's just not accurate. I forget the name of the process that
> preceded the PDP, but the introduction of the PDP fundamentally and
> IMO destructively changed the AC's role.

I think you’re referring to the Internet Resources Policy Evaluation Process (IRPEP).

However, I think you are misremembering things rather substantially… Under the IRPEP,
the AC had a relatively free hand to reject proposals in their infancy and there was
considerably less protection available to the proposal author or the community.

This carried over into the first version of the PDP, and the AC’s escalating use of
that ability was significantly reigned in in the next version of the PDP as a result.

Under the current PDP (and at least 2 previous versions), the AC can only reject
a proposal prior to making it a draft policy if it is out of scope of the PDP or lacks
a clear problem statement. Even in those cases, the AC is required to make a good
faith effort to wrork with the author(s) to resolve those defects.

Once a policy is a draft policy, it’s published and open for community discussion.
The AC cannot abandon it without a substantial majority vote (IIRC it takes at
least 8 members of the AC voting in favor of abandonment, regardless of the
number of AC members present in the meeting). The AC must further provide
a reason for such abandonment to the community.

As John stated, if the community has any level of disagreement with the AC’s
actions in such a case, the petition process is quite easy to exercise.

To the best of my knowledge, only a handful of abandoned proposals or
draft policies have ever been successfully petitioned and of those, I don’t
recall a single example which went on to become policy.

I know taking pot shots at the PDP and the AC is one of your favorite
hobbies, but I think you’re a bit off base on this one.

Owen

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