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@arin.net> wrote:
> On Oct 26, 2023, at 09:44, William Herrin <b...@herrin.us> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Oct 26, 2023 at 9:42 AM John Curran <jcur...@arin.net>
wrote:
>>> On Oct 26, 2023, at 12:20 PM, William Herrin <b...@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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