RIPE 90.
2pm. Opening plenary.
Main hall.
MIRJAM KUHNE: Welcome everyone, it's two o'clock, we are still waiting for a couple of minutes, people to come in and find a seat
SPEAKER: There's still some seats hopefully you will find a chair, there's some empty chairs over there. Come in R I can hardly see you, the lights are really bright. Thanks Daniel. Respectable person here. I am just trying to fill bit of time to let everybody come in and find a seat.
I think there's still some people out there but we'll get started soon.
Is it not loud enough? Okay. I am so tall.
Be shorter, yeah, I will try! It will come with time, I am tell you.
Is this better? Great.
Right. I think there's some people coming in. Right. Well welcome you, welcome to RIPE90. So it's great to see so many of you, well see is a bit, I can hardly see you but I think you are, it's a pretty full room. And we actually see there's also in the registration numbers here we have over 600 registrations at this point in time, we have over four hundred on site, people checked in. Ah, there's the bell!
Probably some more people coming in.
And we have attendees from 47 countries here on site, which is great and also 81 newcomers, we had a newcomer session earlier today which was well attended so it's great to see, yeah, to see so many of you and also to see so many from different countries and different backgrounds and if you notice maybe outside in the hallway, the wonderful art work the RIPE NCC has put together, the theme is interconnections, you might not have noticed but you might see it on the lifts, there's a thought behind it, obviously that's what RIPE is all about, interconnections, not just connecting networks but connecting people and that's, yeah, it's great so many of you are here and working together and socialising together also and continuing this wonderful community so I am really looking forward to this week.
We also have online participants again, remote participants, we have two local hubs again, thanks for those organising them, there's one in Poland organised by the faculty of technical engineering and one in the Netherlands organised by SURF who is then, they might not be online the whole week but some days you might see them joining us.
This is actually the third time we are in Lisbon and the first meeting, RIPE 19 was my very first RIPE meeting and so I had just started working at the RIPE NCC and if you look at the minutes of RIPE 19, it's interesting because the managing director at the time, Daniel Karrenberg, had announced that they were partially working on their staff shortage by hiring a person who just finished her computer science degree in Berlin, it's actually mentioned in the minutes, that's how small it was at the time and I just started and I was sent to this RIPE meeting and this was of course a fantastic experience. Also the London internet exchange was announced. It hadn't quite launched yet but starting a few months later, it was announced at this meeting and the maintainer object for RIPE databases were introduced in 1994 as well and then we came back in 2009 to Lisbon again for RIPE 59 and then there, if you look to the minutes, some of the highlights was that the last /8 policy was discussed during the meeting and then later further on the mailing list and also agreed, and RIPE Labs was launched at the time, kind of coming back to the NCC and the platform was launched and you see there some staff handing out these wonderful t‑shirts with that fantastic logo we had came up with at the time, this big light bulb and RIPE Labs is still flourishing and running and a great community platform, still maintained by the RIPE NCC.
That's just a blast from the past and I will be back for the third time, so we really love it here apparently, it's great, and I don't know if you noticed on the staircase, there's all the RIPE meetings that we have had so far, it's really quite impressive, what this community has achieved and how often we came together.
We also have a RIPE Code of Conduct as you know, we treat each other with respect and also if you want to report something, there's a team, a RIPE Code of Conduct team, there's also some posters around and I believe most of the team members are here in person at the meeting, you can contact them individually, or as a group. There's a link on the slide how to find them.
More volunteers. This community is mostly run by volunteers, there's a lot of volunteers running working groups. This is the list of working group chairs currently, it might change by the end of the week because some working groups are looking for new working group chairs.
And another important set of volunteers is the RIPE programme committee, these are the people who have put together the programme for you, the plenary programme for this meeting so if you have any comments or if you want to have any feedback for the programme committee, please let them know and there's also a link and how to reach them.
And there too, I think Doris and Clara's term end this time and they are looking for new volunteers, candidates, and I think I have it here on the next slide, the Programme Committee election is, the candidates deadline is tomorrow and elections will start through the week.
There are a number of other governance items or selection topics going on, or ways for you to participate in the governance of the community. The NomCom is looking for feedback, and the NomCom chair will have a presentation later and they have office hours, so please don't be shy and provide feedback to them for the next chair term.
And the Programme Committee as I mentioned, they are looking for new candidates and also some of the working group chairs, working group policy, IoT and DNS, they are in the middle of selecting a new co‑chair. And then also on the governance; this topic that will probably see more returning through the week is the numbers council, they have been working on a draft, on a new RIR governance document, this replaces a current, the idea is to to revise and update the comment document, there's a BoF later today but they also have not office hours but they make themselves available in the hall if you want to talk to them during lunch break.
So this is the meeting plan. Compared to the last time, the schedule is pretty much the same, so mostly plenary today, tomorrow and then tomorrow afternoon and Wednesday, Thursday, working group sessions and then we are closing off the week again with plenary sessions. And then a number of BoFs, today there's the BCOP, the Best Current Operational Practice Task Force are having a meeting with these three topics, on the agenda, and they are also looking for engagement from the community and people who work on these topics. And parallel to that is this BoF I just mentioned about the RIR governance just as a little recap to teaser for the BoF, there's this document that is known as ICP2, a policy document in the ICANN website, it talks about the criteria for establishing new RIRs, it was felt it needed to be updated and revised and so there's been an ongoing process together community feedback, there was a survey that the council shared with you and then based on the feedback that came in through the survey, they worked on this draft document and the deadline for feedback is 27th May, there will be the BoF and also in the address space working group on Wednesday, more formal presentation about the stages of this activity.
And then we are wrapping it up on Thursday during the community plenary are some results, like a summary of the discussions during the week.
Then there will be two other BoFs on Thursday in parallel, one is an idean and initiative to possibly write a BCP about authoritative name servers, it's a follow‑up from the task force in the BCP that they published about recommendations for DNS resolver operators and looking into data quality in the Registry data.
And you can find all more descriptions of the BoFs and also a link to the RIR document I just mentioned in the BoF descriptions on the link. There's a link there.
Then tomorrow I also want to you to participate in the diversity in Tech session, it's always a bit different, this time we have two topics; there's a proposal to set up an advisory group from the community to advise the RIPE NCC events team, and me also, on accessibility issues and for the meetings and to make sure we are properly inclusive, and another topic on mentorship, what's the success of mentorship, and we really specifically want newcomers to participate in the sessions to tell us what works and what doesn't work and what you are expecting, as a mentee, what would be helpful for you.
Then RIPE meeting would be nothing without a lot of space to socialise and talk about interconnections, you know, connecting people, also and lots of I remember the previous chair said an integral part of the RIPE meetings are long coffee breaks and lunch breaks to so we get to talk to each other and learn how to know each other and work together. But there's some formal social events also today, there's a welcome reception at the end of the BoFs, here in the hotel, I think it's just out there. And then tomorrow a networking event in, it's in walking distance, 15 minutes walk throughout the park here, there's no transportation organised by us but you can either walk or a take public transport and please bring your badge. It's after dinner time, we don't provide dinner there so please try to find some food on the way or before and on Thursday we have the dinner again, unfortunately the tickets are already sold out so but there's a waiting list and you can still register at the registration desk and let them know if you are interested, there might still be tickets becoming available.
And yeah, last but not least, the meeting would not be possible out our generous sponsors an hosts, this meeting is hosted by .pt, the cctld for Portugal and diamond sponsor the RIPE NCC, organise this and contribute a lot to the meeting and as a platinum sponsor, we have AWS again, a number of silver sponsors, IPv4 global and Hilco and Verisign and Internet Society contribute as a bronze sponsor and we have a sponsor for the barista and that's important and that's Interlink this time.
So that's all I have to say to welcome you. I hope you have a constructive meeting, we have a packed agenda, here in the opening plenary, I am going to keep it short, I would like to introduce the next speaker, a representative from the local host, Luisa Ribeiro Lopes, please come on stage.
(APPLAUSE.)
LUISA RIBEIRO LOPES: I am not so tall.... it's okay. Wow. So many people. So I am not a tech person. Good afternoon. Everyone and welcome to Lisbon. Especially to Mirjam, it's okay, RIPE chair and all speakers in this welcome session, thank you so much for being here and for having me here.
It is with great satisfaction and pride that .pt, together with RIPE NCC, welcomes you to the 90th edition of the RIPE meeting. Hosting and event of this magnitude in Portugal with so many people from all over the world is an honour in recognition of our country's growing importance in the global internet landscape.
As Mirjam said before, the RIPE meeting took place in Lisbon already twice. RIPE 19 in September 1994, I am not here in .pt in that time and RIPE 59 in October 2009. Lisbon is a city with a rich history of exploration and connection, a place where cultures have met and ideas have succeeded for centuries. It is, I believe, the perfect setting for this gathering one more time.
We are living in a complex times and experiencing incredible technological acceleration. The social impact of the digital world continues to grow and we are all not just political but also technical community responsible for shaping the future for everyone.
Since 1989, the RIPE meeting has been a crucial meeting point for the technical community, a space for sharing debate and collaboration that drives innovation in the progress of the internet.
And it is just this spirit that moves and motivates as to support and participate in these meeting. Throughout this week, we'll have the opportunity to dive into particulars of extreme relevance for the future of the internet. The programme is vast and comprehensive from optimizing IPv6 and routing security to DNS resilience and the implications of IoT to the routers, networks, measurements, each session, each workshop, each informal conversation represents an opportunity to learn, share knowledge and build innovative solutions to the challenge we face.
I would especially like to highlight the session dedicated to diversity in tech, a topic that I very dear to us and for me in .pt. We truly believe that diversity is a fundamental driver inclusive, sorry, for innovation and creating a better and inclusive internet, it is essential that the technical community reflects the diversity of the society it serves and that everyone has the opportunity to contribute with their version and experiences.
This session is an important step in that direction and we hope it will inspire further initiatives in debates on this topic.
We are certain that these days will be filled with intense work, learning and networking. Make the most of these opportunities to exchange ideas, make contacts and build partnerships that drive the future of the internet while also ensuring that it remains global, open and free for all.
Thank you for choosing these event once again, we are grateful to the RIPE and .pt staff, all the team.
Without your hard work, none of these would be possible. I wish you all an excellent RIPE meeting. May our city inspire you to have great debates, innovative solutions and new friendships. Thank you so much.
(APPLAUSE.)
MIRJAM KUHNE: Thank you for these lovely words. I just want to note there are still chairs here on this side if you want to sit and probably also there, I can't really see, there's definitely still seats if you want to sit. The next speaker I ould like to introduce is is Petter Holen the managing director of the RIPE NCC.
(APPLAUSE.)
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Thank you, Mirjam. And welcome everybody to RIPE90. That's quite a time, the first RIPE meeting was in 1989 and there was a group of like minded people that met to solve all the issues of internet in Europe and beyond, we still have a bit to do there.
Just to give you a quick recap of the RIPE community which Mirjam is chairing. It's open to all, it's for changing information, its technical co‑ordination and policy development, while the RIPE NCC, the secretariat, was formed a couple of years later to be a secretariat for the community, to be a membership organisation, it's run by staff, we have between 180 and 190 staff members, we have a RIPE NCC executive board overlooking me and the board is elected by members and if you haven't done so already and you are a member, please register for the general meeting on Wednesday where you can vote for board members.
And we provide services and we implement policies.
Some of the logistics for the meeting: We have Meetecho, you may think that's only for remote users but it's actually a useful tool if you are here as well. You need to register for the meeting, you have already done if you are here, you can book your unique login link and use it for all sessions and you can add questions in the Q&A window and use audio video or the live transcription if you have trouble reading what's on the screen for the transcription, you can have that on your computer screen to follow with closely in the room.
There is a live stream on the RIPE90 website, that's just if you want to consume it, there is no chat there but you still have the Q&A available. We also record all the sessions and they are archived publicly afterwards, if you miss one of the sessions here, you can go back and watch it next weekends.
So in the Meetecho interface you have the audio and video queues, if you want to speak, ask questions, please press for that one. And then state your name and affiliation out loud, you know, we would like to know, even if you have been here for 30 years, we don't know who you are working for now or who you are affiliated with, be polite to everybody and state I am Hans Petter Holen and I am with the RIPE NCC, like that.
Q&As, if you don't want to go to the microphone, you can type in your questions there, there is a chat if you have issues technical issues or something you want to just share with people that are watching and stenography, if somebody don't understand what I'm saying, for some reason they do and they type it up there. Sometimes we they also make jokes on my behalf, but we will see...
Your badge is important. Wear it at the site, wear it to to all the social events as you need it to enter, and you can even use it to connect to wi‑fi and you can scan codes for the on site information, the meeting plan and parallel events, it's quite useful short‑cut to have there.
Photography, if you prefer not to be photographed, then wear a yellow lanyard. Then the photographers will be do their to avoid taking your picture and we will definitely sort it out and not publish it afterwards, please respect your fellow attendees choice of lanyards, if you see somebody with a yellow one, please don't take pictures of them, they are asking you not to. Keep an eye out for the official RIPE90 photographer and social media manager and you can see their picture, he is crawling around here so... he is very discreet, thanks for that.
The RIPE NCC, we are here with 60, 70 staff members I think, we have a meeting organisation time that's making all this happening, it's quite an effort. We have a tech team that does all the technical stuff. If you are speaking, please make sure you submit your presentation upfront and that they have tested it so that it actually runs. If you need IT support, we have IT support both out there, outside this room. There is a support desk where members services and registry staff can help you with issues with the RIPE NCC. And we do perform assisted registry checks if you want to to have an opportunity to review the accuracy of your registry data and please talk to my colleagues who works in an area of your interest.
Looking at the presentations here. I started some meetings back to say okay, can I have a small circle about which sessions we are talking in, and I see that's almost all of them. If you want to avoid listening to somebody from the RIPE NCC speaking, there are very few sessions to choose from any more!
But we have talks on measurements, on security, on diversity, on address space, on DNS, on services, there we will present what we did last year and what our outlook, that's part of the DM, the Services Working Group and the Services Working Group is open to everybody but the GM is only for members but you can see hear the presentations about what the RIPE NCC has been doing or you can read the annual report, which is what we base this on.
Then IPv6, Database Working Group, Routing Working Group, if you are interested in security on the internet and RPKI, please go there, Co‑Operation Working Group and the RIPE Community Plenary, we are also going to talk about some interesting things happening on our website.
And then even on Friday, we have presentations in the plenary and the closing plenary, it's the most interesting of all the presentations during the meeting, and that's of course the technical report from the meeting.
Please participate in our feedback sessions. We are not only developing software and interfaces the way they they they should look, we want to hear you what you need and how you use them. Fallon Antonella and Pedro are here and will do user testing, you can book a session with them and go through and test some of the new things that we are working on and give your feedback on that inter actively, it's very useful and we really want your feedback on this.
General meeting:
If you have haven't registered for it, please do so. There are some interesting resolutions to change the articles to vote on this time, it's on improving the ... panel, there is a board election going up, two of the board members terms are out and we have three candidates for two terms so, for two seats so we really needs your votes and your help in selecting those.
And the vote then goes on from the meeting on Wednesday until Friday morning so you can you don't have to be present at the meeting, if you are remote you can register and vote there as well.
Something that you heard Mirjam mention already is the so‑called ICP2 and what on earth is that. Well it's a document written 25 years ago on how to set up new regional internet registries, at the time we had RIPE NCC, APNIC and ARIN, with he wrote a document to describe the criteria for establishment of a new regional internet registry, 25 years ago without the revision, it's a long time, it's been a stable document, it hasn't been needed that much, there is now a process going on for review, we have opened it and drafted core principles or the volunteers on the NRO numbers council, taken interest from the community and reported on that, there's no daft document out for public comment and there is a BoF later today where you can actually Mm discuss in person improvements to this draft and going through the process for the rest of the year, we hope to have this approved at the end of the year. Through all the RIRs. So it's important that we get updated one of the most important governance documents that governs how do we set up new RIR, what's the criteria for continued operations and if we don't perform, what happens then.
We have just launched a new trust portal, and you all trust us right, so we don't need a portal for that. But it's a thing in security and compliance, with all the new regulations coming up and with more and more companies doing certifications in order to prove to their customers that they can be trusted, a lot of companies have and now also the RIPE NCC made a portal where you can find all the information about how we deal with information security, how we deal with legal and compliance and we have also have a section for law enforcement and compliment authorities, this is the first publication, we would really love feedback on this and we will enrich this as time goes on.
Several people from my security team are here, so you know reach out to us and talk to them and give feedback on this, we really would like that.
And that's all I have. So unless there are any questions, I think I'm four seconds over time so I have to wrap up.
No? Then thank you.
(APPLAUSE.)
MIRJAM KUHNE: Thank you very much, a little short on time but I would like to introduce you to Jan Zorz, the chair of this year's RIPE NomCom.
(APPLAUSE.)
JAN ZORZ: Hello everybody, I am Jan Zorz, the chair of the RIPE NomCom, I would like to ask the members of the NomCom to come here so people can see you.
So, the RIPE NomCom will select the new person or team for the next term for the RIPE chair and the Vice Chair and these are the candidates, so it's Fergus McKay and Mirjam Kuhne are the nominees nor the RIPE chair, then we have for the Vice Chair, we have three nom December, owe Len in a, Anna and Rob. If you are in the room, please stand up, if you are in the room? There. Mirjam is there, these are the nominees for the Chair or the Vice Chair? Quickly, whatever you talk to us, we will treat all your feedback in confidence. If you want to make a public statement, do it on the RIPE mailing list or somewhere else, whatever, you tell us, it will be treated with confidence and will not leave the room.
All the NomCom members are in Lisbon, so please talk to these people behind me, and me, we are looking for all the possible feedback that you can give us.
We are holding the office hours each day during the lunch break, actually the second half of the lunch break from 1.15 to 2, Lisbon time, it's in the room on the first floor of the meeting venue, this was the open office room from today when we had the first gathering, it's just next to the childcare, so look for balloons and the next one is the NomCom room.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I am sure they are separate!
JAN ZORZ: Yes, yes. So please come, join us at the open office hours, talk to the NomCom members during the open office hours, during the meeting give and give us as much feedback as possible because then we will be, we will have enough information to select the next RIPE Chair and the Vice Chair. Thank you very much.
(APPLAUSE.)
MIRJAM KUHNE: Thank you, with that I would like to hand over to the RIPE PC, the Programme Committee who will run the next part of the opening plenary.
MAX STUCCI: Hello everyone. I am Max, I am the Chair of the Programme Committee and I would like to introduce the first speaker for today, we are a bit late and people have reminded me that I live in Switzerland so we should be strict. So first up, we have Maria Farrell who has a presentation that will probably make you think today. So, are you ready Maria?
(APPLAUSE.)
MARIA FARRELL: Good morning everyone. So I am Irish and I am so glad we have Irish stenographers, that means I can speak really quickly and they will write it down and understand everything. No, I am sorry, that is a joke! I promise I will be civilised and correct.
So, my background is that I am used to work for ICANN, so I have worked in tech policy for quite a long time, 20, 25 years. Some of it is in the addressing space and some of it doing consulting, some working for the world bank and an awful loft of the last ten years writing, basically I am a writer, that's what I do.
So about a year ago, I wrote an article which with my co‑author Robin Berton, which went viral and it's basically called 'we need to rewild the internet'.
And so I am going to talk to you about what rewilding the internet means. We are going to start with story time though, then we are going to geopolitics and after that we are going to segue into what does rewilding mean for this community and for us as individuals and finally, kind of wrapping it all up to say where do we go from here.
So, story time!
Well, in the late ‑‑ in the kind of early 17th century, in the area we now know has modern day Germany, the country was largely covered by deep mixed forestry and in those forests, and of course we think of the German forest of middle Europe, of that middle European history, as the place where fairytales come from, this is sort of a fairytale because it's a tale about human folly and suffering.
But it's actually a completely true story.
So back in the day, the forests were owned by all, the peasants and the lords and the peasants had rights of foraging, they had the right to go hunt and grow things and the lords also owned the forest but had the right to hunt in them and had the right to extract from them. Around this time, Europe was suffering from a timber crisis, there just weren't enough trees to build all of the ships, all of the cities, all of the ships that we wanted to send around the world to dominate, to extract, to colonise.
And so there was a continentwide worry about how do we grow more trees. The lords decided we know how to do this, we will enclose the forests and keep the peasants out and stop them from coming and growing and doing all of the things they do and we will harvest all of the old growth and that's what they did and after they harvested the old growth forests, they planned new ones and I should say we are not just talking about Germany here, we are talking about Prussia, and these are people who loved marching and uniforms and loved straight lines. And so when they replanned the forest, they plant them in glorious straight lines, in glorious monoculture, Sitka spruce for the most part. And with nothing on the under story. They kept that clear. You don't want anything growing there to compete with the trees.
70 or 80 years past and they harvested the trees, let me tell but it was a bonanza, a history, an epoch defining amount of wealth that suddenly came out of the forests and into the pockets of those lords and they spent it richly, they spent it on ball gowns and townhouses, they spent it on military commissions for their sons, they spent it paying off their son's gambling debts and several surprisingly expensive wars. And then they replanned the trees and you know this is sort of like a fairytale because things happen in threes.
This time, 20 or 30 years in, same straight lines, same monoculture. They noticed that the trees were spindally and weak, they would fall over in storms, they were ravaged by disease.
In fact so many trees died that a new German compound word was creed to describe it and that word was waldsterben, forest death.
So many of the trees died because they, well first of all it was a mystery, but then I think we came to understand why.
This is more or less what it would have looked like because we still do some of the same forest tree practices today.
Now, what was I going to tell you, I was going to tell you more things about trees, mono‑culture. So the trees basically had all been weak and had died for a number of reasons but the main one was this. The previous diversity had been a source of abundance and wealth. The resilience of the forest depended on the many different species that lived in it and when those were taken away, the forest became weak and fragile and so it was susceptible to all sorts of disease and weather events and basically it was a complete disaster.
Well, the reason being that the wealth had been laid down for thousands of years was extracted in a one time bonanza and I think moving away from the trees now, moving to today and to today's internet and I know many of you are very familiar with the ongoing debates about concentration and consolidation, you can see that the story of the German, the Prussian forestry is also the story of the internet in that it started off as diverse, it started off with multiple owners and controllers at different layers of the tech stack, with many, many different kinds of relationships, not just ownership and control and very large companies managing huge swathes of planet tree networking, it started off with small different kinds of ways of interaction, different kinds of relationships.
And today the internet looks more like a plantation, it looks more like a mono‑culture with single owners, with an extractive regime, it looks like a plantation in the sense that it is made to do just one thing, to extract data and turn that into wealth. And that is all it does.
And you can see well plantations are good for growing things like tea, they are good for growing rubber, but plantations are not habitats. They are not ecosystems. And I know a lot of tech CEOs call what they do ecosystems because there may be two or three products but that's not an ecosystem, an ecosystem Sahib at that time, it's a place to live, a place to flourish and an ecosystem we have real competition. We have that leads to innovation, if you don't compete and innovate, you die.
And that's the other key thing about an ecosystem, there's death in an ecosystem. Everybody dies, nobody gets to be king forever.
And the other vital, two other vitally important things about the ecosystem are they are diverse and from diversity comes resilience and secondly, ecosystems are places where there are multiple different kinds of relationship, very similar to networking and to how the internet evolved, the number and different kinds of relationships you have are where the value lives. So the forest it was all of the different species and the under story and brush and grass and wild flowers and the mad things the peasants did running their pigs through making sure that land got churned up and new things would grow, the variety, unexpectedly and delight in different people doing different things, that's an ecosystem, it has not just predation and parasitism, but it has mutualism, it's commensalism and lots of different ways to relate.
So today I think we have an internet that more resembles the dark tower, almost the dark tower of so you sauron, and we know there's duopoly, one search engine, and two email providers and two browsers, we know this, but that duopoly and monopoly is being extended down the stack through the physical infrastructure and through the protocol layers to ensure that today's winners, today's evolutionary kings remain in place forever.
And that's something we have to stop.
Quite simply because of the kind of people they are but also because and we have learned this to our, in peril, the combination of big tech, government and fascism, which we are seeing unfold in a completely brazen and unapologetic manner is an existential threat to democracy, our planet and civilisation. So Tony Ben, a left wing politician of the 70s used to ask these questions of anybody in power and those questions are: What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you use it?
To whom are you accountable? And finally, how do we get rid of you?
And Tony Ben used to say if you cannot answer the last one in a very clear and simple way, you are no longer living in a democracy.
So, if we cannot get rid of the current rulers of this kingly internet, we no longer live in a democracy and we no longer live in an ecosystem where things can continue to evolve. That message so many of us have known for so long has suddenly become wildly just brazenly clear over the last few months. And this photo which I have seen on top of so many articles about tech policy in the last three months of US tech CEOs lined up in the front row to applause President Trump's inauguration, it has changed more hearts and minds than you can emergency in the policy circles of this continent.
So, it has led to leaders in Brussels and Paris, in Berlin and all around the continent saying we need to do something different, we need to, we understand now what people were saying to us about fragility, about choke points, about dependency and we need to have strategic autonomy, we need the euro rock stack, whatever it is, it means a lot of things to a lot of people. For many of us it means we need competition and choice at lever layer of the stack but fundamentally we need to not just replace the current paradigm with a different set of companies just at their European, thank you their see I don't say have burgundy coloured passports, we need to have something that's actually continuing to evolve and compete at every layer of the stack.
To do that, we need to rewild it, we need the internet to once again be a true ecosystem. Of competition and co‑operation, of evolution and of death.
How do we do that. How do we get something that looked like the lines of ranks of Sitka spruce and make them into something that is more diverse, that is rich and resilient, that has choices, not just for now but for the people who will come after us how do we ensure in or work building the internet every day that we are maintaining that openness, the ecological niches for people who will come, for people trying to build different things and who will be doing it in a much harder world than we have grown up, how do we make sure we keep that openness available for them.
Well there is one thing the Prussians didn't know about, none of us knew about until the late 90s, it wasn't just the forest died because they took away all of the richness out of the earth, that we took away all the nitrogen, whatever it was feeding the trees, it was that when you killed the forest, the visible forest that you could see, you also killed the underground networks which gave it life, which made it flourish. And those as many of us know are the fungal networks that travel along the roots of the plants and that pass sugar, that pass proteins and enzymes and information and warnings, that gather and push resources to trees that are dying. Those micelial networks when they died, no forest or trees could flourish in the ground that came, that were planted thereafter. And that is a crucial thing to know because I think most people and most people outside of this room know what the visible internet is, right, they know had the app level, they know the big companies and they also like increasingly know about under sea cables, they know about satellites, they know there's machines there, there are companies there and they are doing things.
But what they don't know about, what the secret sauce of the internet is that it was for the German forestry that underground network.
And the underground networks of what makes it work, the secret sauce of the internet, well it's you. It's everybody in this room. It's the human networks that hold the knowledge, that build the trust, that ensure the values of an internet that is open, that is growing, that is evolving and that is trustworthy, and so when we think about how to rewild the internet, we are not just thinking about a bunch of technical measures and policy steps that we can take, they are important but about this group of people and the group of people that it is connected to and how we work to ensure the values of the internet, openness, competition, interoperability, how we ensure that they survive and flourish and thrive for the future.
So, luckily ecology gives us a tool kit. And I suppose one of the big things in my life actually in the last few years has been honestly being a middle aged woman who the really got into gardening, that stuff creeps up on you and it happens!
Because I couldn't, because I am a geek at heart, I couldn't just stick to the gardening, I had to like start reading ecology textbooks, you know and I had to really go deep into this stuff and the more I got into it, the more I realised network thinking is the same as ecology and complexity theory, the more I realised for all the broken depraved internet stuff that's out there and the feeling that we are on like the bottom of a huge mountain that we have to climb and we have got no gear and we don't know how to do it and we are all on our own, there's a budget of team who have been doing this for longer, ecologists know how to cure, how to regenerate broken habitats. Ecologists know how to pull themselves together motionly and collectively to do the hard work and ecologists have done the science that tells us what works and what we can use.
So, this is a fern, anyone who did biology for the Irish leaving cert in the the 80s or 90s will know a lot about this plant, it's an old, old plant, from an evolutionary perspective, it's older than almost anything else on earth.
And it will grow everywhere and I tell you this, as the owner of ten or 11 acres of a small holding in Kerry in the southwest of Ireland, this stuff will grow through concrete, it will grow where you put plants, it will grow where you plant a nice hedge, it will grow anywhere. And okay. I respect that because you just have to make some space and this is what ecologists know, you just have to make the space and nature will grow back, things will grow, people will find good ideas to build in the space you have made. And it is such a fundamental understanding that ecologists have that we can take and share and use as we motivate ourselves.
Secondly, so what do we do. Well one of the things I think we need to do is we need to change our aesthetics what a network looks and feels like, on the left this is the same piece of Scottish highlands 15 years apart, on the left a bare and barren landscape basically it's just Bracken, that plant I showed you, the fern, and grass and hardly even any heather, it's grazed and over grazed to extinction by sheep.
All they did, one thing they took Ray way the sheep and 15 years later you see this abundant almost rain forest. So what does that tell us. It tells us two things. One, it comes back. Diversity will grow if you just give it some space.
But two, we need to change what we think of as beautiful. Because I see that photo on the left all the timeto advertise tourism in Britain and many of us increasingly are kind of almost trained ourselves to see like that is a barren, that is dead. That is naturecide, right there, and on the right we have something that's beauty. And abundant and diverse and when you think of like, thinking like, think of routing security, you think of resilience, you think of not having choke points, you think of not having just one path or just one small number of people, I think when you think of security, it makes you think of what is security, security isn't brittleness and centralized control, that's an aesthetic, that's Prussian marching guy, that soldiers with loads of brass on who can't fight in a war.
Security is different, beauty is different and what we are looking for is different and I think we have to open our minds and our hearts to thinking okay, the future is not going to be what we thought it was but it's going to be something much different, much stranger, much more bizarre and surprising and so we have to change our aesthetic of control to an aesthetic of openness, to what can come.
The other great insight from ecologists is mosaics, so you make a bit of habitat over here, rewild over here, guess what, it's not big enough to grow like an mountain lion or a wolf or whatever your apex predator you are really geeking out on but the only thing you need to do to make a small habitat work is connect it to another habitat, we have to think differently about scale.
In the tech industry, and even in networking, I think we have been brain washed, we brain washed ourselves to think scale is the only thing that works. How many times have you heard somebody say that's a great idea but it will never scale?
Right. We shoot stuff down all the time because we think scale is a value of itself. But it's not, diversity is a value, resilience is a value and how do you make habitats resilient? You connect them to other habitats, that's all you need to do. This is a photo, actually, I wish it was of Ireland, it's of England, but I will take it, it's Somerset. These and you see the greenfields but between them you see the hedgerows and they will be whitethorn and blackthorn and aulder and Sallies and all sorts of, there will be brambles and things we think of as weeds, plants in the wrong place.
They are nature's highways, they are what the insects live in, what the birds live in, what small creatures and voles travel from one place to another, they make their lives possible.
And so I think we as people in networking need to think about okay, we are making nature's highways here, making nature corridors, here's a big AS corridor from one habitat to another, over a road that otherwise would be impassable for large mammals, what do we do in our work, how do we make those corridors, how do we connect ways of, bids models, new business models to another, different networks, how do build networks that don't have to be ginormous, how do we do business with not necessarily big cloud or legacy big tech, what are the different ways that we can build those, make those habitats, but also join those habitats to each other.
And I think the final thing that I kind of will leave you with really is that what we do matters. Every choice that we make in our jobs, and as organisations matters. This is a bee habitat, it is a bee hotel in County Clare in Ireland, and that is made and that holds hundreds, a habitat for hundreds and hundreds of solitary bees and it means for tens of acres all the awarned it, poll nation has just gone off the scale, people's orchards are thriving, people's crops are thriving, just because of this structure that somebody put up over a weekend, that solitary bees can live in and do their work.
So what we do matters.
And so I guess what I want to hear from you and now into the future is what are you growing. Because sometimes I think you find diversity in the most unexpected places. That is my garden during lock down when everybody had a lot of time.
Cities are the most biodiverse places on this planet, outside of the Amazon, if you want diversity of different plants and insect life and sub train Jan, you know, invertebrates, go to London. Like go and look at somebody's garden in London, especially May. So that's my contributes to nature in my little garden but it's significant, it makes a difference for hundreds perhaps thousands of invertebrates and insects.
So what are you guys doing, what does rewilding look like to you. That is what I want to hear about because I would just close with this and I want to hear from you and into the future, we are living in the worst of times and we are living in the best of times. There has never been more need for an open, interoperable, decentralised, resilient and diverse internet, the one we all originally made.
There is also looking into a future of war, of states actions against individuals, where we will have to build resilient internet all the way up and down the stack simply to protect ourselves and to come through the times that are coming, racing towards us.
But it is the best of times because never in my career have I seen the urgency, have I seen the ability to find other people who are already doing the things that we are just worrying about.
Never have I seen so many people who are united and the young people building an entire infrastructure for public social internet, people are so hungry to hear what you are doing. So my ask to you is I know about a lot of the app layers and so do most people, we know that to protect future generations, it is the deep infrastructure of the internet that sets the path for the future.
So what are you doing? How can we help you and how can we put what we are doing together to rewild the interne so that we flourish not just today and not just in this room but in the years to come and in the decades to come and for people who don't yet know how much they need the secret sauce that you are cooking up in this room? Thank you.
(APPLAUSE.)
JAN ZORZ: Thank you very much. Thank you, Maria. Very, very nice presentation. And we have questions, please?
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: My name is Kurt Kaiser, no affiliation. Thank you for your talk. You certainly made me rethink about the positive term 'killer app'.
MARIA FARRELL: Thank you!
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Thanks Maria, Dmytro Kohmanyuk, speaking for myself, I was with you the whole time, you brought your stack or your cloud, I want to ask you this, is Russia Mel drew part of the euro stack because last time I checked Russia was in Europe. It's very famous for data controlling, it's worse than the United States when it comes to that, just be careful what you say.
MARIA FARRELL: I am bringing the ‑‑ I am bringing the euro stack, you know that's happening and there's so many responses to the geopolitical crisis we come from, I me people have been on this forever, we have to have resilience, we have to have alternatives and so now we finally see that there are von der Leyens and Macrons and they are finally seeing yes it does matter who owns the back‑end and it does back dooring does matter and it does matter if the company that, two or three companies that your government depends on to build public services is headquartered in another country where a president will put his finger on the scales and you don't know what's going to happen, I live in geopolitical reality, I am a digital and human rights act gist and I am under no illusions what we need to do not just Europe but all of us to strengthen and harden, while maintaining suppleness with the networks.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: You are saying that Russia... I am just confused about
MARIA FARRELL: You asked al question, I gave an answer, we move on.
JAN ZORZ: In terms of interests of time, I am closing the queue now, please you were first.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Thanks so much for this, this is wonderful. I am Gus, representing myself. So you mentioned that you used to work in ICANN and that got me thinking sort of about the, when you sort of ‑‑ the names and numbers of the internet that kind of come back to these two organisations that are somewhat US centric and I am wondering is this something that you thought about or if you know anyone else who is thinking about just in that sort of general line of thinking?
MARIA FARRELL: So I am not sure what the question is, is that just ICANN and those organizations are US centric?
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Yes.
MARIA FARRELL: For sure, that's a long conversation. How we govern them I think needs to be more global but the fact that we need a single authoritative address and numbering space is to me inarguable, it's really the governance question, yes.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Thank you for your talk, Maria.
You mentioned about, what I got from the talk, the beginning part was that you got these commercial organisations who are all working in silos and for me this industry has always been about collaboration and helping each other but over time, I found that while we do have the non‑profit sector and the non‑profits themselves have their communities and they all work very well together, it seems to me that they are working in their own silos, there doesn't seem to be much collaboration between the different non‑profit organisations. Sop my question is am I right in my thinking here. And if I am, what do we need to be as the various different non‑profit organisations be careful of going down a particular path.
MARIA FARRELL: So I have worked in non‑profit civil societies for a very long time and both as a volunteer and sometimes as an employee. I will say this, I don't think in any more about things we need to worry about or be cautious about, I feel that we in civil society have spent too many years saying don't do that thing, you will kill people, don't do that thing, you will kill people. We are always reacting to the business models and the extraction model of big tech effectively. And for me I think what we need to be doing is building the thing, building the future we want to see and I know it sounds so naff and cheesy but it's just like next month I am going to Norway to help with a workshop on how to fund open social media protocols, that give us actual interoperability and portability and social media that doesn't radicalise your uncle and your teenage boy and all of that.
I feel that we just wasted our time and our breath pleading with people to be less shitty and I think our job is to actually build the stuff that we want, build it and they will come is a, it's an expression for a reason. I think we can't any more were waste our time trying to argue with people or trying to figure out if they are in good faith or not, we have some strong values here and we need to support the organisations that themselves embody those values, the organisations of internet openness, of human rights and rule of law and I think we have to be robust about how we defend those organisation it is and those institutions because once they get, once we lose them, we won't build them back, they are like public libraries or health care, nobody would invent it right now so we have to circle the wagons and build what we want and protect what we have.
JAN ZORZ: Okay, we need to wrap this up, please be brief.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Okay, hi everybody, the Alice Looking Glass, you might know and I found myself for example confronted now with things like regulatory things like cyber resilience acts and so on, isn't it like quite an obstacle for things like building wild and, yeah, underground things. So how is this your wish that we go more wild, how does this go with the contrast of having more and more regulation.
MARIA FARRELL: Yeah, so we can see regulation is something that puts obligations on us and it does and many of those are good, I mean I grew up as a teenager in the 80s where literally every three or four months there was some horrible disaster where two hundred people were killed on a ferry or a hundred people were burnt to death in a disco and it was because we did not have public health and safety laws and so I do believe in having some regulation, it means that people, you know that, I am sorry, I don't need to convince of of that but I also think a big part of the what we need from policy makers is them to use their powers to enforce competition, to enforce antitrust, to criminalise and prosecute fraud that's being conducted on scale on a lot of the big social networks, like I think we have to use our muscle so I don't really see it so much as I wish they wouldn't put more obligations on us because it makes life hard, I actually wish they would do and excuse my French their fucking jobs and protect competition and stand strong for innovation and require openness, the laws are there already, we have got it all there and we need policy makers to actually grow a spine or locate their spines and do their jobs, that's where I see it, I know it's not an answer to your questions. Can I close by saying one just last thing. I as a teenager and probably many of us in in room probably many are Europeans and we would have looked at the history and at the Europe in the 30s and we always wondered in the back of our minds how did that happen? What what were people thinking. What were they doing. And probably we also had in their minds, what would I have done, would I have stood up and did something or would I have been somebody who said I have got a mortgage, I am that whole like internet thing is just going to have to look after itself, I have got to put my kids through private school. Would we have been the person who actually now we get to find out. We get to know who we are when our democratic values, when our democracy itself is under existential threat, we know right now that we would have been doing during the 30s because it's what we are doing now. My last words to you all today are think about what you want to be able to say you were doing when this time came. What you were building, who you were talking to and who were you listening to and raising up, that's what, if you want to know the answer what we would have done then, it's what we are doing now so I just hope we are all going to do the best we can and realise the strictures we have about what is possible or what is likely or what is poll particular, those are artificial. We have to do this now. This is the last chance we will get.
JAN ZORZ: Thank you very much.
(APPLAUSE.)
Hello Timo! Please, explain us how to start an ISP from scratch with zero resources, the floor is yours, thank you.
TIMO HILBRINK: Thank you. Hi everybody. It's been a while since I have been on the stage at a RIPE meeting, I think the last time was somewhere in the 2016 or something. Back then I was talking a lot about IPv6 deployment which I was doing for my employer at the time XS4ALL, that's why I worked. I have worked at XS4ALL for 25 years and now I work for a different ISP. Because things happened. When I came up with title, the first question I got from people is why would you start a new ISP now, there's already so many, what's the point.
So we are going to have a look at that.
We have to go back into history for that. So I used to work for XS4ALL, XS4ALL was an ISP in the Netherlands, one of the first residential ISPs in the Netherlands, it was founded by a bunch of hackers that you see in the picture there. That was in 1993, as an off shoot of the Hack‑tic foundation and they started one of the first internet providers in the Netherlands, there was some scientific research providers but this was just for everyone.
There was a very successful organisation, successful ISP that stood for digital rights, for openness, freedom of speech and everything. But in order to be able to invest in new infrastructure, the company was sold to K PN telecom, the Dutch in 1998 but XS4ALL remained an independent subsidiary, we had our own staff, our own network and made our own decisions and it became one of the larger ISPs in the Netherlands, very successful.
And known for its openness and technical knowledge, modern standards, etc. One of the first ISPs in the Netherlands to start rolling out... for example but then in January 2019, K PN announced they would end the brand and no longer have the brand on the market, they wanted a single brand strategy which was K PN, that meant all will the infrastructure that XS4ALL would go and everything would be merged into the K PN brand, all the subscribers and everything.
This was, it is in Dutch, I have the English caption underneath, when it came to the news in January 2019, that this was going to happen, there was another brand, Telfort, which was similar but a budget brand of K PN they also ended that to make everything into a one brand strategy which was to maximise profit basically.
That's what big telcos want, they have shareholders, they want to maximise profit.
So our customers were really not happy with this. Our customers valued what we were doing. And they feared that a lot of the technical stuff that we do would not be done by K PN and a lot of the digital rights stuff that we were involved in would not be done by KPN so our subscribers started a petition that was called XS4ALL must remain, must stay. It was signed 55,000 times within four weeks by customers and this resulted in an action committee being set up which was called XS4ALL must stay.
There you can see them. And these are actually customers of XS4ALL, they are protesting outside the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam where X was holding a shareholder meeting and they decided to stand there and KPN was holding, there's a protest outside of the head office and there was graffiti and of course there were t‑shirts, you have to have t‑shirts and the XS4ALL works council started a court case with a business chambers of the court to argue that dissolving XS4ALL was a really bad idea, would drive customers away. And would actually not be good for KPN, there was also not really a need because XS4ALL was a profitable and reasonable business with a reasonable market position, we were doing good, good ratings and everything but however it failed.
The court case ruled in favour of KPN and the action committee actually tried to buy XS4ALL from KPN but that didn't work either, that was sad.
That was plan A, to save XS4ALL, that failed as I just explained.
So when when plan A fails, you have to have a plan B. So the plan B was to start a new ISP on the same core values with the safeguards to ensure that such an a sale of the company would never happen again.
So this is how you start an ISP with no resources, there was no staff, no equipment, no network, no money, so how do you go about it, so the action committee started a crowd funding based on a loan so people fro front money an get it paid back in three year instalments, when you do one of these crowd funding things, you need a minimum amount and a maximum amount for the campaign so the money mum was set on a 1.25 million and a maximum was at 2.5 million euros.
This maximum goal of 2.5 million was reached within four days by more than 3,000 investors, all investing in a new ISP.
So that means there was a fresh start on the 11th November 2019 at 11.11, a new Dutch ISP was launched, Freedom Internet.
The idea was that the company would have security and privacy by design, remember there was nothing yet everything was by design from the ground up, digital freedom, free of surveillance, transparency, modern internet standards, a safe and open internet and of course excellent technical support
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: And excellent peering.
TIMO HILBRINK: Thank you, the model we chose was a steward ownership, this was in place to avoid such a sell out again so that no big business to could come in and sell the company because a steward ownership has a foundation that governs it. And it's a non‑profit foundation and it will, that will protect investors from taking like decisions solely for financial gain.
So they also safeguard our corporate charter, we have a corporate charter and the foundation governs that and makes sure that we go by it.
Now you will probably wonder why there's a picture of apple pie there. That's because the foundation is called Stichting Appeltaart, or the Apple Pie Foundation.
This goes back to the times where if you needed a favour done by someone, something that's out of the ordinary, you would pay them with an apple pie, you could apple pie for them and you get stuff done, that bit of culture came with us and the foundation is Stichting Appeltaart, so the they hold part of the shares of Freedom Internet as well as a preferential share. So they have the power to veto if anyone can book changes to the core of the company and to, if anybody wanted to do was not according to the charter, they could step in and veto it. This is to protect our values.
So when Freedom Internet generates profit, a part of this will flow into the foundation and they will act as a front for them to support initiatives with innovation, social solutions relating to the internet and they can find us so basically things for the good of the internet.
There's another safeguard, you see the logo there of bits of freedom, this is the digital rights organisation of the Netherlands and the name, the domain freedom.nl which is the primary domain that we use is owned by them.
So we have it on loan from them and if we do things that they do not agree with, they can take back the domain name that's in the statutory documents, they can take the domain name back which means that freedom would miss their primary domain name and would be basically useless so this is another safeguard.
They have a lot of power with that. And this was also deliberately set up this way.
So in March 2020, the first connections, the first internet connections were delivered, we are actually at the moment still hitchhiking on the back of a small ISP in the Netherlands called Cambrium, a lot of people won't know it, they allowed us to get this going without big contracts with wholesalers because that was not financially feasible at that time. Unfortunately that company has been sold, they got sold so T mobile in the Netherlands, so they don't exist any more but I think they deserved a mention, so we started batches, 128, 256, you know where this is going, 2024 lines, this was the end of the test batch, we had 2,048 connections online, this was all to test our ordering system.
Ordering system is very complicated, we'll see that in a minute.
But as we were hitchhiking on the back of another ISP, we needed to set up our own network, have hardware and switches and connections with IXPs and all that sort of stuff so more finance was needed and to go from a start up to growing ISP and this time the customers and supporters were offered to buy a share in Freedom Internet so these shares certificates were sold at 250 euro and we had two rounds, the first one was between two and four million, that was done in two weeks. And then there was a second one for one and a half million, that was gone in a couple of weeks more.
These people have shares so they have, they own shares in our company. And they can deal them actually, you can sell them to other people if you want. But with that, they also have have something to say of course, not everybody, that flies by the Apple Pie Foundation. The values are internet and privacy, security and transparency so like examples of that is we do not record personal data unless it's absolutely necessary. We don't know, we don't need to know your date of birth, we don't need to know your agenda, all we want to know is a name and address, we want to supply you with internet connection and a phone number and e‑mail address so we can contact you, that's all we need to know. We don't ask for anyone else. We don't share these data unnecessarily with partners so for example if we have a partner that supplies TP products to our customers, so when we order for a customer, we order a TP products, they don't know, they don't need to know the telephone number of the customer, that's not necessary for example if we need to send you a parcel through our logistic come, they don't need to know your first name and definitely don't need to the know your date of birth, some of these parties require, have these fields as required and if we think don't they are necessary, we fill them with random data for telephone numbers or for birthdays or whatever.
It's nonsense.
Then we only work with partners that go with the same privacy protection. For example it is very difficult sometimes, this is what makes it difficult to find partners, as I mentioned earlier, we have ourself holders and we wanted to have a platform to, for certificate holders to trade their certificates with other holders or people who are interested. You try to find a trading system that is not based on Azzure or AWS or whatever, it's almost impossible, we had found one now I think they might be able to do it and make some special adaptations for us.
That is, that can be very complicated but it works. Otherwise of course we don't use any third party cookies or tracking pixels in our websites or e‑mails to customers, only fully anonymised functional and analytical cookies are used, we don't use public storage or cloud storage or applications so no cloud providers, no big tech.
Internal communication, we never share personal details so if I send a message to my support staff or another engineer, we never mention a customer's name or a customer's IP dress, we just put a link to our user database where my colleague can then click on and see all the details he needs, this way we make sure that if an email leaks out or a conversation in a chat gets out, that no customer details are in there, they are all just in the user database.
Of course we have the later sipher for SSL and TLS, we don't keep any longers than necessary and we ease OpenSource swear as much as possible, which is 99% of our software we use is OpenSource, here is a few in a bit of a random order, the software we use, we use Debian, power DNS for our DNS services, Zamad is our ticketing system, you can see there's a whole lot of OpenSource software packages that glue freedom together.
When freedom started off with in late 2019 RIPE had just arrived ran out of IPv4, we are only able to get a /24 from the recovered pool. Yeah. Of course we did IPv6 from the start. Everything is completely dual stack because we did a survey on our owe pension customers and asked them would they want, happy with IPv6 only or some translation mechanism and the basic outcome was that is what all the ISPs are doing already or will be doing shortly, we want full dual stack, we want public IPv4 and V V6, that's the way we went, it means we have to lease address space, that's expensive and we calculated these costs to the subscriptions for our users but it is what our users want and it sets us apart from some of the other ISPs in the market, there's even a lot of people who lease a /29 for us, one public IPv4 dress is not enough for them, that's what we want, that's what we do supply.
Of course internal we use a lot of V6 and our public, our own /24 is used for our external services.
Then the technical challenges apart from getting IP dresses, the easy bit is set up a redundant network, data centre it is, transit providers, if you worked in the industry 20 years, it's not rocket science or brain surgery, this is pretty easy to do. The hard part is for a small ISP is the fiber to the home infrastructure, the logistics that come with it, unbundled access which is something the regulator in the Netherlands has put on the market as a necessity that incoming telcos need to share their infrastructure with new players on the market, so many people in the fiber world will know this.
What it means, this is a very crude drawing of how how you connect to an ISP in the middle is a pop, that's a little box somewhere in your local area where the fiber to your house ends up. That is what we call a layer one, the local loop, the physical fiber that's put in the ground by a company that owns it. That can be a telco, that can be a city council, some building companies are doing it in the Netherlands, there's a lot of them and over that you have an operator that actually puts light on the fiber and has equipment in the pop and makes sure that there is some equipment in the house to handle the delivery of the fiber.
And then on top of that comes the layer 3 which is the ISP in this case freedom. And the challenges that we have to deal with six of those operators and between those six operators, there are 20 local loop companies, providers and those six operators have their own order management system, post code availability checks, incident management, interconnection because we have to inter connect with all these operators and between them there are ten types of fiber termination units, the little boxes you get into the metre cabinet when the fiber is brought into your house, there's ten differences ones of those and in most cases, the operator and local loop provider combination because there is different combinations has its own set of equipment so we have four AO Nhthe active optical network, we need an NTU like a network termination unit in the metre cabinet, there's eight of those and for passive opt network, you need an ONT and there's ten types of those, coupled with the ten types of fiber termination units that makes a really difficult order system because we need to know what we sent to the customer's premises, we need to know how their modem will hook up to that and what prices to calculate because all these operators are different pricings, some of them have only one speed over one speed, others provide different subscriptions speeds, this is actually the biggest challenge and we have made it ourselves very difficult by connecting to all these operators but we wanted a big footprint so that's what we got.
The partnerships, we have collaborated with partners to provide services, it's something you will noting doing if you start up yourself ISP, email is also pretty intense if you want to do it right. So for example for email, we work together with Sovrin, which is a Dutch secure email provider, a bit similar to what some people might know pro ton Mayo, based on the same values. And they they share the same privacy and security principles, they helped us set up our company.
For telephony, we worked together with Voys which is also a company that really is on the same wavelength as we are and they actually even participated in the crowd funding.
We have CANAL+ for our television, they actually, there's not much choice for television in the Netherlands, if you want to do a multicast, an over the top service, but we have come with them to a model where they can guarantee the privacy of our customers, they have made some adaptations especially for us so that we can deal with them without having their customer data stored in the cloud, etc.
Then there is TriNed a Dutch ISP, an operator that we share not so technical parts of our company with, that's like a help desk, HR, financial administration, those are things that are easy to do together to kind of make a little bit more financially attractive.
And AVM, a lot of people will know this company, they supply our CPEs, if the customer wants it, they are also free to chose their own hardware or to buy a modem from, from us or lease it through us, that's all possible.
And AVM is very helpful in supplying the right hardware for all these different combinations of hardware that we have, fiber hardware that we have.
So where are we now. Six years on we are still growing at a steady pace, we have been awarded the best all in one service provider now two years in a row, this is a badge you get from the Dutch consumer board, they do four times a year, they choose, they let customers in a panel choose what we think of their ISP based on that there is a rating and we have been coming out ten times the best and the last of eight of those was two years in a row.
The picture you see there is the badges on our wall in the office, the last one is missing because that's still in the post because we only really received that in April.
We are MANRS participant, of all Dutch ISPs we have the largest foot print which means the most, we can reach most addresses of all the ISPs because that is, it's segmented so a lot of ISPs only have a certain reach but we can reach the largest amount of addresses in the Netherlands.
We are a team of 16 people, we are working on improving our existing services, developing new ones, our consumers are asking for, we have a very active community, we have a very active community discourse forum where customers can ask for things, for improvements, we can discuss services with our consumers and this is very helpful. They are actually also a good partner for us. And to support initiatives that improve the internet and safety and transparency, that's what it's all about for us.
That was it from me.
(APPLAUSE.)
Over to questions.
MAX STUCCI: Thank you, Timo and Jan, can you read the first question we have from Meetecho?
JAN ZORZ: So Max is asking: Hello, how are you gaining the customers? Why regular people are switching to your network? Where and how do you advertise your services? Thank you.
TIMO HILBRINK: How do we find our customers! Oh yes, our marketing budget is extremely small and most of it is actually through word of mouth. We do some local advertising when fiber is rolled out in an area, we go there with posters and stuff. But most of it is word of mouth, we don't have the budget for big marketing campaigns.
MAX STUCCI: Okay, thank you. Let me close the lines because we are way behind in time so let's start from there for load balancing reasons.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: My name is Daniel Karrenberg, the first and current employee of the RIPE NCC and one of the 31,000 crowd funders and certificate holder and above all, I am a very, very satisfied customer and that's the point, the way they get their customers is that they do a good job and the thing I said earlier about peering junkies was not in jest, the best peering you can get as a customer in the Netherlands.
TIMO HILBRINK: Thanks.
DANIEL KARRENBERG: Now for my question; it's a two‑part question: One part of course your business hinges on the open access, do you see any threats to this currently in the Netherlands. And a second one is in this open access where the incumbents have to provide you the last mile, you mentioned that this is one of your biggest challenges because of the many combinations of things but is it also as you feel it a bit of obstructionism from some of them?
TIMO HILBRINK: In most cases it's not obstruction, it's just how it worked out because all these people invent the wheel and find a new peace of hardware to put in a meter cabinet, so I don't think it's on purpose. Going to the first part of your question, if I see unbundled access is in danger? Yes it is.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Why and how and what can we do?
TIMO HILBRINK: In the Netherlands especially we have to go on to the ACM and convince them that what is happening at the moment is detrimental to the freedom of choice.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Just to translate, this is the consumer market regulator.
TIMO HILBRINK: Yes. Competition regulator. Yes. And I have an idea, in my opinion, they are fooled easily by the big telcos who come with a lot of power and big pockets, deep pockets, and they are kind of easily fooled about their nice stories that they are going to make things better and going to be honest, but yeah. So it is a challenge for us and we are fighting that very hard. We are lobbying everywhere in Brussels and as well and also on a European level.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Audit thank you.
MAX STUCCI: Thank you.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: As a Swiss ISP, I have gotten the luck to go and be able to serve switch directly in the pops where everybody is; I was wondering if that would be something that you could do and you did consider, I mean becoming a bit more operator than what you are right now? I understand it's probably expensive but ‑‑
TIMO HILBRINK: It's very expensive and as a start you have, we have one big problem which is cashflow, connecting customers is very expensive, we need hardware and engineers and we will be two years down the line before we make any money from a subscription.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: We can discuss that later on, I have another question.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Blake Willis. Congratulations, great stuff. Are there any other major challenges that you are facing, non‑technical challenges that maybe you didn't have time to stick in your deck like regulatory or business? .
TIMO HILBRINK: Regulatory, yes, technical challenges, mostly to do with cashflow problems. So it is expensive to buy new hardware and it is expensive to get more staff, so we are really ‑‑
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: It's not like an AI startup, it's not like you have tons and tons of cash.
TIMO HILBRINK: That's also why we are not doing stuff that Will was asking for, for technical challenges, I don't think so, regulatory there's always challenges, absolutely. Some of that has to do with what Danny was mentioning about the unbundled access; if that disappears, we are gone.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Thank you.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I was wondering do you ‑‑ how do you deal with requests from law enforcement and specifically do you publish statistics on those requests?
TIMO HILBRINK: I was actually planning on publishing a transparency report but I haven't gotten to that yet. I am actually responsible for a lot of the deception part of what we do, we do that through the, how the law is in the Netherlands and that is all regulated and there is a special body for this and there's actually an organisation of Dutch internet providers that is called the NBIP and they own infrastructure to do this and when you are a member of their organisation, they supply you with the equipment to do whatever is necessary for law enforcement. But we just, we obey the law, yes.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Thank you.
MAX STUCCI: Thank you, Timo, thank you very much.
(APPLAUSE.)
I understand between you and and coffee but we are very late, two small announcements: Please rate the talks, let us know what you liked and what you haven't, what you didn't like; and the second one is we are still looking for some submissions for lightning talks because we have had a cancellation for a talk on Friday in the last very section, so if you have any idea, please get in touch with any one of us from the Programme Committee, let us know what you are thinking and we can help you do a submission.
Lightening talks are short, seven minutes, you don't need to prepare that many slides, you might find time during the week. Enjoy your break, we'll be back in less than 20 minutes.
(APPLAUSE.)
Coffee break.
