IABOPEN @ IETF 120

When: Thursday, July 25, 2024 13:00-14:30
Chairs: Tommy Pauly, Suresh Krishnan

Welcome & Status Update - Chairs (10 mins)

Slides: IAB Open Meeting

IAB Documents

• draft-iab-privacy-partitioning

  • In AUTH48, publication imminent

• draft-iab-bias-workshop-report

  • In the RFC Editor queue

Technical Programs

• Environmental Impacts of Internet Technology (EIMPACT)
  e-impact@ietf.org

  • Met Wednesday morning
  • Metrics identified at the past interim as one potential area for
    near-term engineering work
    • to be discussed further at the green BoF

• Evolvability, Deployability, & Maintainability (EDM) edm@iab.org

  • Meeting Friday morning
  • Discussing draft-edm-protocol-greasing-03

Liaisons

• Liaison coordinators are Suresh Krishnan, Qin Wu, & Mirja Kühlewind
• Office hours were earlier today!
• No IAB liaison statements since IETF 119

New work help desk

• Come talk to IAB members Monday and Thursday afternoon by
  registration to discuss developing new work in the IETF!

Independent Stream Open Meeting (ISOPEN)

• Meeting on Independent Submissions stream Friday morning; please
  come to provide feedback and comments on the stream. This will help
  provide input to the IAB for future ISE selections

Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG) Liaison Update - Barry Leiba (10 mins)

Slides: M3AAWG Liaison Summary

IAB Workshop on AI-CONTROL Introduction - Mark Nottingham (15 mins)

Slides: AI Control Workshop

Jean-François Quéralt: For the workshop participation, are you going to
have support to participate? For those who live abroad the U.S. and they
want to participate but it's only in-person?

Tommy Pauly: If that is the case, we would encourage people to reach
out.

Mirja Kühlewind: Even if you can't travel, please do submit papers.

---

Nick Doty: Thanks for organizing the event. I think it's an important
topic. Mark, you spoke about rights holders on one side and AI on the
other. I think you meant copyright holder, right?

Mark Nottingham: So the EU legislation expresses in terms of copyright.
In the discussion in the program committee there, are related areas here
in terms of other use, how granular do you want to be about your
permissions, about different use cases for AI. This is training for the
model. There might be other use cases that emerge in future. We
recognize it's still quite early days. So, it's not a copyright
workshop, but I think it's going to be the lens that naturally a lot of
participants look at it through.

Nock Doty: I hope we will do a slightly broader lens for people who
don't necessarily own large copyrights that might care about their own
data.

Mark Nottingham: Oh, absolutely. I think, you know, at least for me, the
focus is as an individual who uses the Internet and doesn't have a huge
platform, how do I have a say in this.

Nick Doty: Great, thanks.

Alissa Cooper: Thing is well reflected in the workshop call for papers
now. We tried to expand to make it clear that there's other use cases
that relate to individual's own data where they might not hold a
copyright, it's definitely in scope. I want to see papers on that topic.

---

Jonathan Hoyland: Jonathan, CloudFlare. One thing I noticed getting
blocked recently is if you use Google translate to try to translate a
website, it's like, oh, no, we don't want AI scraping our website. Like,
is this a copyright issue? I just want to be able to read your website
and I don't speak your language. Yeah there, are other lenses is the
point.

Mark Nottingham: Right. And that, you talk to folks over the W3C side
and they see that as a core facility on the web, as a user, you get to
decide how content is presented to you and how you can use it.

Tommy Pauly: All right, any other questions? Thank you, Mark.

Mark Nottingham: Thanks.

Tommy Pauly: We look forward to your submissions and engagement.

IAB Workshop on the Next Era of Network Management Operations (NEMOPS) Introduction - Wes Hardaker (15 mins)

Slides: IAB Workshop: Next Era of Network Management Operations
(NEMOPS)

Invited Talk: Community-led Solutions in Connecting Indigenous Communities - Bill Murdoch, Clear Sky Connections (30 mins)

Slides: Community-led Solutions in Connecting Indigenous
Communities

Suresh Krishnan: I had a question for you. When you're building this
network, your physical conditions are different. Are there any things
you encountered that you want to bring to us as problems, that we can
help with troubleshooting? The IETF has a playbook that you could use to
see any gaps in the solution, like for the Internet protocols that could
make things better for you going forward or a community somewhere else
to go forward.

Bill Murdoch: My last technical certification was in 2012, but I'll try
to answer your question. Our entire network design, the longest fiber
run we have is about 200-kilometers. I believe it's Ontario that has a
500-kilometer run. It's not their primary connection. Maybe technical
specs to allow being able to push the signal farther distances, or
there's no option for power along the whole length.

Bill Murdoch: From a policy side, if you can open up the ground for
anything, water, sewer, putting in new roads, replacing bridges, put in
conduit. Conduit is like 5 bucks a meter. If you're spending that on a
gravel road, adding conduit will save us -- to install conduit is
roughly $60,000 a kilometer in these remote areas. So if you already
have the equipment to install it, put conduit in. Then we just have to
blow the fiber through the existing conduit.

Bill Murdoch: The funding models need to be more flexible because
there's a lot of expenses that are not under eligible costs, and we have
to source those funds outside of the grant funds, through revenues or
some other means.

Bill Murdoch: Prioritize not-for-profit organizations. I heard a
presentation that said all the problems were solved 20 years ago. Well,
if so, it would have been done, but it's not done because it's expensive
to connect these communities. We're talking a community of 300 people to
5,000 people. It doesn't make sense for a major telco to build there
unless there's a financial incentive for them. But there isn't. So
that's why we operate as a not-for-profit.

Bill Murdoch: Internet Exchange Points, we connect there to the
community. The transit is a separate piece. Then you have the Internet
service provider. We work the local community.

Bill Murdoch: In Winnipeg, there's an Internet service provider that is
one office building. A friend of my rents space in there. There's an
ISP. And the ISP is literally one office building. So all the tenants in
there subscribe to the ISP. So it doesn't have to be huge. It can be
very small. It works.

---

Pete Resnick: Totally cool stuff. Absolutely fabulous.

Bill Murdoch: Thank you.

Pete Resnick: Three really quick questions: the fiber plant, after it's
built, does the not-for-profit still own it?

Bill Murdoch: Yes.

Pete Resnick: Were you getting funds from private or government? How
were you getting the money for this? This is expensive. I know.

Bill Murdoch: The majority of funds are government grants. I know in the
United States, they have the funding that they've been advertising. So
I've done a little bit of work with New York State and California.
That's why I'm familiar with that. But my focus is obviously in
Manitoba, Canada. We've had a number of grants. Way back when, we had
the CTI connect. It was last mile builds only. So there's no transit.
What are we going to connect to? So it didn't make sense. So they came
out with new grant funds. Universal Broadband Fund is the big one. UBF,
they're looking for the end-to-end solution where you go to the telcos.
We need you to build a wireless infrastructure to provide service to
this community. Well, you're essentially creating a monopoly for that
community. The community really only has one choice because you only
have one owner of the infrastructure.

Bill Murdoch: That's why our model is to separate it out. Clear Sky owns
the transit. Then we don't care who the ISP is. That's up to the
community to decide.

Pete Resnick: We fought the same battle locally where I am, and that's a
great model. Much better than what we came up with. The last question is
really simple. Don't you guys have permafrost up in northern Manitoba,
and how do you deal with that?

Bill Murdoch: Yeah. That's a great question.

(Laughter)

Bill Murdoch: So, actually, permafrost is actually really easy to run
fiber through. It's actually like cutting butter. A rule of thumb, we
use 60,000 per kilometer to build. Going through permafrost, you can do
it for 40,000 because you don't have the rocks, the tree roots, and the
other obstacles that you encounter with working more with the south. So
it's actually very easy-going. You can do 10-kilometers a day easy as
opposed to three to five in the environment that I showed pictures of.
And you don't have to blast rocks. I mean, blasting rocks is very
expensive. Very difficult.

---

Mirja Kühlewind: Thank you for doing this work. It's really important.
The one thing I'm wondering about is, you have this model where the
community runs their own ISP. Isn't this a big challenge because you
need to train the people with the technical expertise. Are you involved
in that as well?

Bill Murdoch: The question is a little bit more complicated, but the
simple answer is, yes, we're involved with that. The three business
models we offer to the communities. They become their own ISP. Sometimes
we're replacing with fiber. They can put it out to a third party. Or
they can use a hybrid model or white label model where it's branded as a
community ISP but in the background, somebody else runs it. So we help
with the negotiation process.

Bill Murdoch: If they choose the hybrid model, which a lot of
communities lean towards, it's built into the agreements that when the
community has the technical expertise to run it on their own, they can
then take over that ISP company. I know its focus is on Internet. We're
talking the transit. Internet is one service. Cell phone, voice,
television, computer, radiography, the list goes on and on. Transit has
more uses.

Mirja Kühlewind: To go one step further, is there a barrier to these
companies in using the Internet?

Bill Murdoch: Yeah. There's communities that have basically been reliant
on dial-up. Today, there's essentially dial-up Internet. And the map
going from north to south, there's a community called Gillam. The fiber
runs up to Gillam. Then a signal shoots south to reach the communities,
but that's a 1 gig wireless link. By the time it gets to the last
community, it's worst than dial-up because the bandwidth gets chewed up
by the communities it hits first. So there's definitely an education and
awareness piece that is built into what we do.

Bill Murdoch: So Clear Sky carries the mandate to do the fiber build,
but part of it is education and awareness. I work with the ICI. We're
just starting up to build the Indigenous Connectivity Workshops. We're
working on the awareness and training to communities as to what is
possible. We're basically a volunteer organization. The ICI, we look for
technical trainers that are looking to volunteer their time to provide
their expertise and knowledge to First Nation communities. The next one
is September.

Mirja Kühlewind: Thank you so much.

---

Sean Turner: Thanks for the work. It's good to see the chapters knocking
it out. I'm a former ISOC Board member. I really appreciated the scale
and the picture of the map. What is the total distance of fiber that you
think you're going to end up dropping?

Bill Murdoch: 3,000-kilometers, roughly. I knew that question would come
up. I meant to look it up.

Sean Turner: That's a whole lot.

Bill Murdoch: We started this project about 11 years ago. As time goes
by, it gets more expensive to do. Suresh, can you bring up the slide
with the map on it? Right there. In the top corner there, you will see
Fox Lake. And then there's the red line. It's roughly about 118 miles, I
think, of winter road to connect the community that's relatively small.
When we first did the submission 10 years ago, for the funding, that
build would have costs about $7 million. I refreshed the number about
two years ago. The same exact build would now cost $17 million. As time
goes on, it gets more expensive.

Sean Turner: Cool. Keep up the good work, man.

Bill Murdoch: Thank you.

---

Matt Mathis: Awesome work. I have a question about the other map there.
I think it was page seven. Page nine. That map. I noticed a lack of
purple. Is that a plotting artifact, or is that real? What I'm curious
about is do you know what the mechanism is by which the ISPs signal each
other because that level of collusion is usually not legal. It's
certainly not legal in the U.S. There's evidence that the maps in the
U.S. look like this too. How are they signaling?

Bill Murdoch: How do the ISPs talk to each other? Is that what you mean?
Oh, that's permits. They put in a funding application. There's four sets
of engineering drawing that needs to be complete. The first set is: How
do you get from point A to point B. You use that set of drawings to do
your initial estimates. Once you have somewhat of funding approval, the
next set of drawings, that's a little bit more detail. That's what gets
submitted to the city or the province for permits. And then the city or
province approves the permits for where you can build fiber to. Oh,
there's fiber there. You can't build fiber there. You have to go to the
other side of the street, whatever.

Bill Murdoch: So the last set of drawings, the more detailed work,
that's what the construction team uses to build by. And the last set of
drawings are the as-builts, which are the most important because
sometimes you have to deviate from the path.

Matt Mathis: So the second drawings includes implicit communications
through the approval agencies?

Bill Murdoch: Yes. And I use the City of Toronto as an example. This
information was pulled from a Request for Comment through the RFC
process. I know it's different from this RFC process. So I pulled this
from one of the submissions just to illustrate that. Because of the
funding models, these are two major telcos. I don't remember. The red is
one telco. The blue is another telco. So two major telcos doing builds
in the city. And the fibers don't connect to each other. They probably
talk to each other at the Internet Exchange Point, but I'm just guessing
at that point.

---

Ali Rezaki: Thank you. I really appreciate you being here. Thank you for
your presentation. My question is: Are you tracking the impact of this
connectivity or building on services like health, education, other
government and privacy services?

Bill Murdoch: I would love to have the funds to do that. That is an
initiative, actually, that the University of Brandon is doing work on.
Through the current submission of funding to do a fiber build, it's been
initially approved. I can't say where yet because the government has not
confirmed, but the beneficial impacts to the community; there's a line
item. So they know the benefits, but they're not willing to pay for it.
So we have to access other funds to do the benefit analysis that the
government says is a requirement.

Ali Rezaki: And in your protocols for the grants, what type of methods
do you propose as indicators to measure that or assess that impact or
have you done?

Bill Murdoch: I don't have any specifics. Everything is pretty much
anecdotal. This project started with more bandwidth for EMR. I was
working with health 10 years ago. Medical transportation; the First
Nations have health centers. They have fractional doctors. So they will
have a visiting doctor once a week, once a month. There's one community
that's large enough that has a hospital. If somebody needs to see a
doctor or they have a medical emergency, they have to be transported out
of the community to the nearest hospital. That's in med tran. When I was
working in health, it was $110,000 a year for med tran. One of the
chiefs said if they had connectivity, we could probably save 80% of our
Med Tran expenses.

Bill Murdoch: Let's say 10% is a realistic number. So $110 million a
year at that time versus $10 million a year. We could leverage that and
pay for the whole connectivity for Manitoba. We would be done. I
wouldn't be here talking about this is what we need to do. I could say
this is what we did. I'm sure it's more than 110 million a year. Aat
that time, it was $20,000 a flight to get somebody out.

Ali Rezaki: Sure. Thanks very much.

Bill Murdoch: Yeah. Other benefits? I will expand on that, I guess. The
schools in First Nations, in Manitoba, you need 31 credits to graduate.
So the core catalog is 31 in Manitoba. The school I went to had a
catalog of 10 credits. To be hired, you have to have physics. To get
into some university programs, you have to have physics and bio. As you
have people in the community, to go to higher education, well, they're
already behind their peers because now they have to go back to high
school to take these other courses to get into university.

---

Tommy Pauly: All right. I think that is the end of our queue. It's the
end of our main agenda here. So thank you again, Bill. I think this was
really insightful. It's fascinating to hear all the different things
that you're doing, and this is really great work. Really helpful
perspective for all of us who are working on all our various niches of
the Internet. This is critical work. We're actually making it useful to
people. So thank you for doing the work.

Bill Murdoch: Thank you.

(Applause)