Someone outlined the plot of an action film to me recently. Picture this, a worldwide communications system, built on a fundamentally flawed numbering system, is being held to ransom by unscrupulous operators. These operators won’t abide by the rules and use every means at their disposal to prevent the rules from being imposed on them, including bribery, corruption, hacking, DOS attacks, death threats, vexatious litigation and international subterfuge, crippling the administration of the communications governance system in a major continent. Sound like a fun film? An outlandish story? I fear it will be playing soon at a local conference centre near you, as these are all allegations that have been made against some people contesting the APNIC Executive Council elections. Sadly, however, with the price of IPv4 addresses getting higher and higher, we are likely to see increased shenanigans, so it is all the more important that we ensure the governance of our regional internet registries are sound. The term ‘Wild West’ has often been used to describe internet actors, but in reality the policy processes of our Internet governance systems including ICANN, APNIC and the IETF are usually much more boring and very disciplined. Let’s keep it that way. If you have a vote in the APNIC EC election, make sure you vote and use your vote wisely.
Speaking of things to combat the ‘Wild West’, we’ve announced our new online and in person conference series, kicking off with a session on Malicious Domains, given by Graeme Bunton and Rowena Schoo of the DNS Abuse Institute. This fun session will overview the latest research into DNS abuse, covering mitigations and best practice to keep things relating to our domain name system as boring and behind the scenes (i.e. WORKING!) as possible. I hope to see you online.
This month I will be heading off to Apricot in the Philippines, where I will catch up with our colleagues from other IXPs across the region and hear about new content and other services likely to appear on our networks soon. A check of our traffic statistics tells us we are serving over a petabyte in content each day! Rest assured I will be hunting more of it down wherever I can. If there is a game or other service your users are driving up the transit bills with, let me know and we will do what we can to get them into our content farm.
In other news, I hope you enjoy our latest article on traffic engineering, celebrate SA-IX’s birthday, check your Amazon IPv6 peering for a little typo recently discovered, and invite your colleagues to apply for this year’s IAA Systers program!
