RIPE 89 Daily Meeting Blog

Day 1: Choose Wisely

RIPE 89 is the fourth time that a RIPE Meeting is being held in beautiful Prague, resplendent in its autumnal colours. You can watch the sessions, you can view the slides, but if you really want to know what’s happening, read our Daily Meeting Blog!

The 89th RIPE Meeting kicked off today. As RIPE Chair, Mirjam Kühne mentioned in her opening, the previous RIPE Meetings held here discussed allocations from the last /8, CIDR, and …IPv7! What will we end up discussing by this Friday?

Crash Courses

You learn a lot at RIPE Meetings, and there were three crash courses in the Opening Plenary - Ondřej Filip, the local host, welcomed attendees to RIPE 89 and explained the hierarchy of Czech holidays. The end of communism is celebrated by capitalism (Level 1 holiday) and today’s Czech National Day doesn’t mean that the end is nigh (pubs are open). The Programme Committee gave a one-slide overview of whether AI will help your talk get accepted for a RIPE Meeting plenary session (Spoiler alert: It won’t).

Fredy Kuenzler gave us a crash course in Swiss governance as part of his talk on what can go wrong with FTTH. Make notes - the ComCom and ComCo are two different entities! Fredy gave a presentation about the ‘Glasfaserstreit' (fibre optic dispute), an antitrust case,which prevented the monopolisation of the Swiss fibre optic network.

Geoff Huston presented remotely, an unfortunate (errr crash course in) firsthand experience of Newton’s first law of motion while riding a bike having prevented him from travelling to Prague. Geoff asked why there’s been so much resistance to the adoption of security measures like DNSSEC and RPKI in Internet infrastructure, despite nearly three decades of efforts.

Richard Patterson from Sky UK Ltd kicked off the second Plenary of the day with his presentation on IPv6-only with IPv4aaS (MAP-T). Richard led the attendees through the ins and outs of “IPv4-as-a-Service” (IPv4aaS) which led to a fruitful Q&A discussion upon its conclusion.

Benoit Claise from the IETF was up next with his presentation on the Next Era of Network Management Operations. Benoit, joined on stage by his IETF colleague Mirja Kühlewind engaged in an outreach effort regarding a workshop - organised by the IETF and IAB (Internet Architecture Board) with regards to an operation which began 22 years ago called RFC 3535, "Overview of the 2002 IAB Network Management Workshop", which collected requirements & recommendations, and which lead to some IETF developments. Following this there were 3 lightning talks presented by Andrew McConachie of ICANN on rssac002.root-servers.org, Mikhail Klimarev of the Internet Protection Society on Throttling YouTube in Russia: Impact on Telecom Infrastructure and Access to Information and August Bournique of the Law Office of August Bournique on The Cyber Resilience Act and Open Source Projects.

Day 1 wrapped up with the BCOP Task Force session with two talks. Since 2023, efforts have been made to document the practices of network operators in Ukraine in war and to set up a network operators group - NOGUA. NOGUA has made efforts to support network operators maintain resilient networks on the frontlines and successfully held its first meeting. 

The other talk focused on the definition of “consensus” in RIPE. It’s clear when we agree to disagree, but it’s less clear when we agree to agree. Whether you agree with the need to document consensus or disagree with the definition of agreement - the BCOP TF wants to hear from you! 

The session ended with everyone agreeing to agree that the Welcome Reception was the perfect way to end a very busy first day of RIPE 89! We couldn’t agree more…