Optionally provide one URL to any one blog, social media, or external website of your choice.

http://bill.herrin.us/network/arinac.html

Name: William (Bill) Herrin

E-mail Address: bill@herrin.us

Phone Number:

Provide a brief biography of recent experience, associations, and affiliations relevant to serving on the Advisory Council. Please be as specific as possible.

Former director of engineering and network operations for CrossLink Internet, mid-eastern US ISP.

Frequently participate in the ARIN policy development process and occasionally propose policy on the public policy mailing list (PPML). Initiated and helped drive the discussion which resulted in proposal 2010-2 lowering the multihomed minimum assignment to /24 while balancing routing slot consumption concerns.

Participate in the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG)

Participate in the Internet Research Task Force Routing Research Group (IRTF RRG) seeking ways to reduce the costly impact of multihoming on core Internet routers. Designed and wrote proof of concept software code for TRRP, an experimental protocol which could reduce routing table load on core routers via dynamic tunnelling.

Describe the relevance of your technical and professional experience to serve on the Advisory Council.

I have experienced the ARIN process as an ISP seeking allocations for its users.

I have experienced the ARIN process as an end-user, upgrading the Democratic National Committee's infrastructure to support resilient 24/7 operation.

I have experienced the ARIN process as a legacy registrant, with a multihomed /23 running out of my basement.

Addressing is routing is addressing, and I bring an unusually wide perspective to the task.

Describe any concerns or limitations on your ability to travel to attend Advisory Council Meetings and Public Policy Meetings in person or to serve the entirety of a 3-year term?

None.

What Internet-related services do you or your current employer or organization provide?

I operate and develop software for a ground system associated with Iridium satellites' Short Burst Data which, among other tasks, gateways small messages to and from the Internet.

Are there any conflicts real or perceived that might arise should you be elected as an ARIN Advisory Council Member?

Unusual among candidates for the AC, my current employer, ITT, has no stake whatsoever in ARIN policy or Internet routing and addressing operations in general. They use the Internet in many products but the Internet is not a focus of their business. I foresee no conflicts of any significance, but would recuse myself should any arise.

What differentiates you as a candidate, or makes you uniquely suited to serve on the ARIN Advisory Council?

As a former ISP engineering director, I'm well familiar with ISP's operations.

As the former Internet Infrastructure Manager for the Democratic National Committee I have a unique window into complex public policy processes and the public that they serve.

As a software developer and protocol designer, I can both engage with the constraints of deployed technology and see beyond them.

As a guy working with satellites that don't transmit TCP/IP, I'm free to explore routing and addressing possibilities without my employer unduly shaping my view.

In short, I have a breadth of experience that uniquely well qualifies me to serve you on the advisory council.

Why do you want to serve on the Advisory Council?

I enjoy the debate. I enjoy asking folks to consider angles and possibilities that hadn't occurred to them. But most of all, I think I can help preserve and improve the remarkable openness that makes ARIN a uniquely accessible public policy organization.

How do you foresee ARIN’s function, scale, or role in the community changing in the future? What forces might influence or cause these changes?

Will the analysis of "need" rule IPv6 addressing as it has IPv4? Proposals like 103 suggest it doesn't have to. With the pending exhaustion of the IPv4 IANA free pool, how long will the community have to run the IPv4 Internet, reclaiming and retasking addresses from lower-value systems to higher-value ones? Will an address transfer market facilitate that operation? Or will ARIN be forced into a more active address reclamation role? What alternatives haven't we thought of yet?

IPv4 exhaustion will significantly stress the address management process. In these next few years, ARIN must be flexible, able to adapt to the reality we find ourselves in and constructively help the community guide us to the best solutions that become possible.

How do you intend to work with and include the originators of policy proposals in the re-writing process, when the AC determines that modifications are needed?

First, I will avoid drafting my own proposals while I serve on the AC. Once the idea is out there, would I be better qualified than a casual participant to draft a proposal? Maybe. But how would that serve ARIN's accessibility to the public? On the AC, it's not my role to tell the community what they should want, it's my role to help them tell us what they want.

Second, to the extent I'm permitted, I will leave the author or authors of a policy proposal with as much control of the text as they want. I believe most people will choose to be reasonable and inclusive of others' ideas. For those few who aren't, we can afford to wait for someone else to write a similar proposal after the current one fails to gather consensus.

Third, I'll work exhaustively to help the author edit the proposal into the best possible proposal which stays true to his key ideas. No doubt there are some ideas I won't like, but until the proposal is fully debated and fleshed out, how will any of us truly know whether it had merit? Few documents really hit the target on the first draft and even the bad ideas can offer valuable perspective that leads to good ones.

Finally, I will push for critical review of the author's proposal by the widest practical portion of the public policy community. Meeting attendees often bring a different perspective than the folks who camp the PPML list.

***FIXME***

Describe your thoughts on how to judge community consensus.

Consensus is a tricky animal. The only certainty is that if you aren't sure whether you have consensus, you don't.

Aside from IPv4 depletion, what areas of policy do you feel need the most attention and why?

ARIN and the other RIRs collectively set key routing policies on the Internet. This is a side effect of the econimically-driven expectation that a registrant who receives addresses from ARIN will be able to distinctively route those addresses in the Internet while registrants who get their addresses from ISPs mostly won't. I'd like to look for ways to decouple this dependency so that ARIN can consider addressing policy without the risk of devastating the core BGP routing tables in the default-free zone. Perhaps even foster an Internet in which second-tier routing structures, perhaps using tunnelling protocols, enable a wider and more flexible use of multihoming without damaging the expensive core routing system.

Please provide a summary of your views (in <200 words) on whether or not to continue IPv4 policy development work.

When the public stops requiring IPv4 addresses, we can stop figuring out how to put those addresses into their hands.

Please provide a summary of your views (in <200 words) on how to manage the remaining IPv4 free pool.

There aren't enough crumbs left to seriously argue about. Let's get our contingency plans in place for the ways addresses can move from low-value deployments to higher-value deployments after free pool deplection so that when the post-depletion operating theories (like transfer markets) converge on an actual reality, we already have a solid idea how to get it to work.

Please provide a summary of your views (in <200 words) on IPv6 adoption and transition.

Once enabled on a LAN, IPv6 takes priority over IPv4. That makes its early deployment in criticical production systems fundamentally unsafe. There's no cure for that but time.

Until then, there are things we can do to make sure that folks willing to take the risk and be a part of reducing that risk for the later adopters have nothing in their way. Given the option, I would pre-emptively assign an IPv6 address block to each organization with an ARIN-region Autonomous System in the routing table. Then I would reach out to let those orgs know that they actually have IPv6 addresses they can use. At the current stage in the process, nothing ARIN does should discourage anyone from deploying IPv6, not the filing of a form, not the payment of a single cent.

Please provide a summary of your views (in <200 words) on weighing the impact addressing policy has on internet routing.

Routing is addressing is routing. Technology and addressing policy converge to set the scope of what routing practices are possible.