RIPE 63 is on this week in Vienna, Austria. Yesterday evening saw the General Meeting where members were asked to vote on a number of motions.

While some of the motions were more formalities than anything else, the votes on RPKI and the membership fee structure for 2012 provoked some emotive debate.

As a member organisation RIPE’s general meetings offer an opportunity to the membership to voice their opinions and discuss the organisation’s plans with its staff and board. Last night’s meeting was a prime example of this, with a two hour meeting lasting three hours! (Some people were beginning to ask if the hotel would deliver food to the meeting room!) Several members took the microphone to speak both in favour and against the motions on the table, while others sought clarification as to how voting would work. While that might seem like a strange request, in the context of last night’s meeting it was quite understandable. In what might be classed as a rather “odd” move members were offered two options to vote on with respect to RPKI. Option A if passed would have meant that RIPE would have stopped all RPKI work and would have revoked any existing certification, while option B would allow them to continue with RPKI but without the slightly more contentious inclusion of ROAs. If members felt that RIPE should continue doing what they were doing until now they had to vote against BOTH motions, which was rather confusing!

The other motion that provoked a level of debate was with respect to fees. RIPE is a member funded organisation with over 7000 members that include ISPs, hosting companies, governments, academic institutions, domain name registries and others. The proposed change in the fee structure might not have had much impact on “smaller” members, but would have led to a dramatic increase in fees for the larger ones.

When the voting results were announced this afternoon both motions on RPKI were defeated, which means that RIPE can continue to do RPKI with ROAs and the contentious fee change was not passed, which means that this year’s fee structure will be used for the next fiscal year.

The other, less contentious, motions all passed.