Subject: News about the Internet Society and PIR.

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 1 May 2020 18:41:52 -0400

Dear colleagues,

I write in my role as the President and CEO of the Internet Society.

Some of you will be aware that the Internet Society announced last
November a proposed transaction involving Public Interest Registry
(PIR) and Ethos Capital.  This is relevant to the IETF because the
transaction would have yielded an endowment of over a billion dollars,
which would have supported ISOC (and hence the IETF) essentially
forever.  Many of you will have heard by now that the Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has witheld its
consent to this transaction.  I have written about it at
https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2020/05/our-work-to-make-the-internet-for-everyone-marches-on/.

The reason I'm posting here is to reiterate the commitment I made when
the transaction was announced: the Internet Society is committed to
funding the IETF, and that will not waver.  This news is obviously not
what I had hoped, but the IETF is not threatened by it.

The IETF list is probably not the best place to discuss the
transaction or one's views about the Internet Society, and I won't
engage in such discussions here.  Members of the Internet Society are
welcome to discuss such issues on Internet Society lists.  Membership
in the Internet Society is free of charge.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
President & CEO, Internet Society
[email-masked]
+1 416 731 1261

---

From: Mal <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 2 May 2020 11:57:51 +0930

On 02/05/2020 8:11 am, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> Many of you will have heard by now that the Internet
> consent to this transaction.

Well done ICANN.  The non-profits and charities thank you for keeping it
real.

https://www.eff.org/press/releases/org-domain-registry-sale-ethos-capital-rejected-stunning-victory-public-interest

---

From: Stewart Bryant <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 2 May 2020 06:51:02 +0100

I asked this once before, and was told that the key to IETF future funding was this sale. 

Given that some of the meeting fees apparently underwrote the cost of some of the IETF running costs, and that it is unclear when the IETF will meet again F2F, what is the IETF funding model?

Is the IETF now fully funded by ISOC for the foreseeable future?

Will all service levels be maintained for the foreseeable future?

Best regards 

Stewart

---

From: Leif Johansson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 2 May 2020 11:56:31 +0200

> https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2020/05/our-work-to-make-the-internet-for-everyone-marches-on/.

I am not sure why having IETF around "forever" is a good thing.

Personally I'd rather the IETF that goes away when it has outlived
its usefulness than stick around forever funded by the "endowment"
while keeping a priviledge class of "standards professionals"
around to produce paperwork.

I'm not saying were there today but lets not bemoan the lack of
funding that might greese those particular skids. You know what
they say about the mother of all invention...

	Cheers Leif

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 2 May 2020 06:03:00 -0400

> they say about the mother of all invention...

+1

---

From: Christian Hopps <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 2 May 2020 07:25:40 -0400

> On May 2, 2020, at 5:56 AM, Leif Johansson <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> 
> 

I think there will always be a need for standardizing technology used in the internet. Do you think a new organization would spring forth organically that would do a better job than the IETF does? Personally I think the we'd get something less open, with a higher barrier to entry, most likely with a subset of those same privileged "standards professionals" having even more control of the process/content. The IETF was born in a different time and I at least really appreciate some of it's basic principles.

I do think there are problems with the IETF that need working on, but I would hope we could work on those rather than just give up.

"Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater" and

"The grass is always greener on the other side".

Come to mind.

Thanks,
Chris.

---

From: Nick Hilliard <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 2 May 2020 12:53:36 +0100

> I am not sure why having IETF around "forever" is a good thing.

the implication in what Andrew wrote was that the endowment would have 
provided long term funding stability for ISOC (and therefore IETF), not 
that the IETF would be obliged to continue to exist after some future 
sell-by date.

Nick

---

From: Leif Johansson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 2 May 2020 14:41:07 +0200

> I think there will always be a need for standardizing technology used in the internet. Do you think a new organization would spring forth organically that would do a better job than the IETF does?…

Thats right and I'm don't think those values would survive beeing funded by an endowment.

I don't think we can be an organization that attracts the people an organization with a bn USD on the bank attracts.

Thats all.

	Cheers Leif

---

From: Leif Johansson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 2 May 2020 14:42:29 +0200

On 2020-05-02 13:53, Nick Hilliard wrote:
> the implication in what Andrew wrote was that the endowment would have provided long term funding stability for ISOC (and therefore IETF), not that the IETF would be obliged to continue to exist after
> some future sell-by date.
> 
> Nick

Thats even worse. Then all there is is the Internet bank account.

---

From: "John Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 2 May 2020 12:37:09 -0400

>I asked this once before, and was told that the key to IETF future funding was this sale. 

If anyone told you that, they were wrong.

Most of ISOC's current funding, including for the IETF, comes from the
surplus from PIR.  Since we are not selling PIR, that will continue.

If we had sold PIR, the income from the endowment funded by the sale
would replace what we get from PIR.  In the short run, there wouldn't
be any financial difference, in the long run it depends what you think
about the long run prospects of the domain business.

The IETF's budget and funding sources are not exactly secret.  Start here:

https://ietf.org/blog/ietf-administration-llc-2020-budget/

-- 
Regards,
John Levine, [email-masked], Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

---

From: Miles Fidelman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 2 May 2020 12:48:23 -0400

Umm... the Internet has no owners, no government overseers - it is 
global infrastructure, that we've come to depend on, that's 
self-organized around standards that are written by those who show up, 
tested experimentally, and voluntarily adopted.  For now, the IETF 
standards process is as close as we have to governance - and it largely 
operates as a 24x7x365 town meeting, of those who show up.

For now, it seems like a rather good model to emulate, and expand to 
other areas of endeavor (say, the next generation of town meeting 
government in our communities - which has been my focus since 1992).

Unless & until something better comes along - we need to worry about the 
care & feeding of IETF - and doing so in ways that don't compromise the 
core model & values.

Miles Fidelman

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

---

From: Christian Huitema <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 2 May 2020 09:52:33 -0700

> surplus from PIR.  Since we are not selling PIR, that will continue.

Having a (somewhat) stable source of funding has pros and cons. I
remember the time when the Internet Society depended solely on surplus
from meetings and contributions from members, individuals and most
organizations. These were lean times, especially when the occasional
meeting failed to produce the expected surplus. At some point, the cash
at hand was barely providing for a few weeks of operating costs. So, I
understand the relief that a stable source of revenue provides. But at
the same time, the stable source of revenues removes the dependency on
contributions from members, and thus mightily diminishes the influence
of these members on the operation and direction of the Internet Society.
There is peril there too.

-- Christian Huitema

---

From: "John R Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 2 May 2020 13:04:25 -0400

On Sat, 2 May 2020, Christian Huitema wrote:
> ... But at the same time, the stable source of revenues removes the 
> dependency on contributions from members, and thus mightily diminishes 
> the influence of these members on the operation and direction of the 
> Internet Society. There is peril there too.

The ISOC contribution to the IETF is $5M/year, which seems rather a 
stretch to get from individual contributions.

As I'm sure you're aware, ISOC members elect 2/3 of the board, 1/3 from 
the chapters, 1/3 from the organizations.  The IAB selects the other 1/3, 
currently including me.

Regards,
John Levine, [email-masked], Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

---

From: Christian Huitema <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 2 May 2020 11:07:19 -0700

On 5/2/2020 10:04 AM, John R Levine wrote:

>> dependency on contributions from members, and thus mightily
>> diminishes the influence of these members on the operation and
>> direction of the Internet Society. There is peril there too.
>

That's true. Most likely these would be contribution from organizations
that rely on the standard process. But there could also be contributions
in kind --  for example, relying more on volunteers and less on staff
for functions like document preparation or tool development. That's the
kind of trade-off the IETF would have to make if the budget diminished.

>
> As I'm sure you're aware, ISOC members elect 2/3 of the board, 1/3
> from the chapters, 1/3 from the organizations.  The IAB selects the
> other 1/3, currently including me. 

Yes, and so far this selection process has provided a good set of checks
against mission drift. But I am a bit concerned whether these checks
would still be enough if the Internet Society was managing a large
endowment. I see how academia evolved from being managed for teaching to
being managed by large administrative staffs. The same kind of forces
would be at play.

-- Christian Huitema

---

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 2 May 2020 14:24:26 -0400

Hi,

> I asked this once before, and was told that the key to IETF future funding was this sale. 

I'm writing with my ISOC staff hat on.

I apologise if anything I said ever led you to such a conclusion,
because it was definitely not anything I intended to communicate.
What I _did_ want to communicate was that a very large percentage of
ISOC's revenue (which is revenue on which the IETF depends for roughly
half of its funding) comes from a single company in a single industry.
The domain name industry does not seem likely to dry up tomorrow, but
it basically depends on selling annual leases on identifiers made out
of letters, digits, and hyphens.  The risk of the revenue drying up
appears to be low and so the income stream appears to be stable.  But
prudent management of an income stream suggests that heavy dependence
on _any_ single source of income like this is unhealthy, because if an
income-collapse risk (however low the chance) comes to pass, the
result is catastrophic.  To put it another way, if the Internet
Society already had a well-diversified income stream, divesting itself
of the one from PIR would be a foolish move indeed; but that's not the
world we live in and so greater diversification was desirable.

In that sense, the "key to IETF's future funding" does depend on
ISOC's future finances.  PIR's long-term health would likely be better
with certain kinds of attention that the Internet Society's Board of
Trustees will basically never be able to provide (because of the way
it is selected), and so ISOC's future funding situation remains more
difficult to forecast.

But I am confident that, as long as the Internet Society exists and
the IETF continues to be useful to its participants, the IETF will be
able to depend on strong financial support from ISOC (should that be
desired).  The LLC agreement committed ISOC to an interim contribution
of $5M/year with the expectation that the amount would be recalculated
after things had started up and an understanding that the IETF might
well be looking for more support.  The COVID-19 situation has made
things even more uncertain, but ISOC in any case committed for budget
purposes to extending the minimal $5M for another year, pending
understanding of what the budget comes to look like.  The IETF
continues to appoint 1/3 of ISOC Trustees; there is currently an
effort by chapters to change the governance model, and I hope that
those in the IETF who are interested in this topic pay attention to
those developments.

As to the planned services and budget and so on, I think those are
questions that are properly the province of the IETF LLC or (more
likely) Jay.

Best regards,

A

---

From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 May 2020 02:25:13 +0200

Thanks, Adrew

Followup question:

> The IETF continues to appoint 1/3 of ISOC Trustees; there is currently an

So ISOC has a 1 billion dollar asset, but 
Q: What _RIGHT_ does the IETF have for revenue from that asset,
   now and in 10 years ?

Some thoughs:

If there is no fundamental ongoing _RIGHT_ by the IETF to some share of
that asset, but when it's just a matter of ongoing decision making in ISOC,
then indeed, IETF as an institution is living on borrowed time with
its current financial model and self-assumed mode of operations.

It seems clear that ISOC as an organization should continue to promote
the Internet as a whole much more and win more (especially individual) members,
but to me that will have to diminish the importance of IETF in ISOC.

IETF is what - maybe 2000 people ?  And ISOC has how many - 30x or more
if i am not mistaken ?  It would IMHO be highly irrational to expect
that a likely shrinking 1x group (IETF) can continue to outweigh a hopefully
growing 30x group (ISOC), just because of history and current, but changeable
policies. It also doesn't make a lot of logical sense to me to keep the
current model, given how IETF has to care for so many more networks technologies
than just the Internet, and how ISOC may want to worry a lot more for
layer 8/9 and legacy problems instead of <= layer 7 innovation.

The forming of resistance in ISOC chapters against the .org sale,
however well meaning that sale was or however badly it might have been
executed shows IMHO a first wave of such organizing of an easily growing
larger part of the ISOC community that is not primarily interested in
IETF activities, but a lot more in whatever they see in .org beyond
a glorified set of alphanumeric phone numbers.

IMHO, IETF (LLC) would financially be a lot safer off for the future if
it would have only sources of revenue that where not depending on ISOC.
Aka: split up the asset between ISOC and IETF LLC before its too late.

And to Christians point of problems with endowments:

I think would be very helpfull to the individual contribution model
of the IETF and survival of our (free) RFC model to have non-corporate
endowment. IMHO IANA also should be moved under the LLC and outside
the politics of ISOC.

I think its not too difficult to avoid bureaucracy to manage the
endowment. Managing the question "what to do if IETF has too much
money / wasting it" is indeed a challenge. But one i would love
to first see a discussion about on this mailing list before
concluding that IETFs destiny is death by bureaucratic gluttony.

Cheers
   Toerless

---

From: Paul Wouters <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 3 May 2020 21:11:31 -0400 (EDT)

> Aka: split up the asset between ISOC and IETF LLC before its too late.

What is "the asset" here? And why does IETF get half of that? Do you
mean half a billion dollars for .org? They aren't getting it and even
if they find a better way to get that, it would be over 10+ years, so
that is hardly "splitting up"? Also, why would or should ISOC
give half of this asset to IETF? I didn't think the .org agreement
with ICANN, PIR and ISOC contained specific language about IETF funding,
but I could be wrong here.

Paul

---

From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 May 2020 03:13:47 +0200

Inline

> around to produce paperwork.

IETF technologies are fueing almost all aspects of the economy across
the planet, far beyond the Internet.  I think it is completely theoretical
idea that those technologies would not benefit from ongoing research,
architecture and standardization for the next 50 years or more.

The best way IMHO to use such guaranteed endowement would IMHO be to use
it to finance well understood dependencies that continue to exist
even under fluctuation of innovation, such as RFC-Editor,
IANA and IMHO Datatracker/Tooling. Of course i would love to
primarily see short term strong investments into better virtual
conference tooling.

> they say about the mother of all invention...

I would love for IETF to survive and be strong given how its AFAIK
the only networking SDO that has free individual membership purely
based on contribution. My interest "how to handle the case when
the IETF should go away" is solely in how to avoid that to become
necessary.

Cheers
    Toerless

-- 
---
[email-masked]

---

From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 May 2020 03:30:38 +0200

On Sun, May 03, 2020 at 09:11:31PM -0400, Paul Wouters wrote:
> What is "the asset" here?

.org

> And why does IETF get half of that?

I didn't say half, i was just suggesting to consider cutting financial
ties between ISOC and IETF given their evolving differences in mission,
i have no idea what a fair split would be.

> Do you mean half a billion dollars for .org?

Yes, to the best of my understanding, the proposed deal was 1.3 B,
including 300 million deficit by the buyer, aka: net value 1 B
by the cancelled deals evaluation.

> They aren't getting it and even if they find a better way to get that,
> it would be over 10+ years, so that is hardly "splitting up"?

Was the Ethos deal over 10 years ?

Yes, today, there is no "splitting up", given how the ISOC structure
works. IETF still depends on getting checks from ISOCs.

> Also, why would or should ISOC

AFAIK, ISOC was once created as a care taker for IETF and the Internet,
and i think that inheritig .org was meant to support that mission,
but i raised exactly your question to Andrew in my prior email.

Toerless

---

From: Leif Johansson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 May 2020 12:04:46 +0200

> architecture and standardization for the next 50 years or more.

Thats right!

I couldn't agree more!

Thats why I don't think it was a good idea to arrange a funding
stream that is divorced from the core values of the Internet.

	MVH leifj

---

From: Vittorio Bertola <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 May 2020 12:27:57 +0200 (CEST)

> Il 04/05/2020 03:11 Paul Wouters <[email-masked]> ha scritto:
> 

I don't think either, but anyone who (like me) was around at ICANN in 2002 remembers that the deal was being justified in corridor talks as "we need to give .org to ISOC to keep the IETF alive". In order to do that, the ICANN community had to digest the fact that .com and .net were left to Verisign in perpetuity, which was the prize for agreeing to give up .org. Even the process for awarding .org to ISOC was not uncontroversial, as ICANN received eleven valid bids and the consultants hired as independent evaluators only ranked ISOC second, while the non-commercial constituency evaluators representing .org users only ranked ISOC third, so the Board came up with an "overall evaluation" that somehow put ISOC first, and not everyone was pleased.

In any case, "we will keep .org as a non-profit operation for its non-profit registrants" was one of the sweeteners added to the pill, especially for those for-profit registry companies that would much have liked to run it, and that at least wanted to be sure that PIR would not start to compete too hard with them. In the end, everyone swallowed the pill under the understanding that giving .org to ISOC forever was necessary to keep the Internet running under its traditional technical management model, and this had to trump any other concern "or we'll get the ITU". This might explain why some ICANN leaders of that era felt so betrayed by the attempted sale of .org to someone else that they took it very personally.

-- 
 
Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
[email-masked] 
Office @ Via Treviso 12, 10144 Torino, Italy

---

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 May 2020 11:27:48 -0400

Hi,

On Mon, May 04, 2020 at 02:25:13AM +0200, Toerless Eckert wrote:

> So ISOC has a 1 billion dollar asset

Well, maybe.  We did have an independent valuation done, of course,
but that valuation was undertaken before any ICANN decision.  I
therefore don't know whether we have this information now and I'd not
be willing to speculate about it without consulting with legal and
financial experts on the matter (which we have not yet done).

> Q: What _RIGHT_ does the IETF have for revenue from that asset,

I cannot guarantee anything about 10 years from now, given that 10
years from now the domain name industry may be very different.
Formally, of course, the point of the LLC was to give the IETF certain
degrees of freedom from the Internet Society, and in doing that it
gave up a strict right to any of the revenue except for whatever
rights it gets by agreement with ISOC.

> if i am not mistaken ?

The latest published numbers count nearly 68,000 members worldwide,
with 135 chapters and special interest groups.  But this is a bit of
apples:oranges, because of course IETF participants are all active at
least in their particular area of concern, whereas not all ISOC
members are really active.

> a glorified set of alphanumeric phone numbers.

This is a lot later than the first wave.  There are definitely people
who are active participants in the Internet Society who do not really
see why ISOC ought to be contributing to the IETF's operations.

> Aka: split up the asset between ISOC and IETF LLC before its too late.

That isn't really possible to do now.  Had there been an endowment, it
_might_ have been possible (there are legal questions, but still, it
was at least logically possible).  PIR is a supporting organization of
ISOC, however, so it can't have shareholders.  Therefore, the path to
revenue from PIR remains through the Internet Society.

> IMHO IANA also should be moved under the LLC and outside
> the politics of ISOC.

IANA nothing to do with ISOC as far as I know.  That's an ICANN job
through its subsidiary PTI.  If the IETF wants a different supplier of
the protocol parameters functions, that is a decision the IETF can
take I believe without consulting ISOC.
 
> endowment.

Well, you have an endowment now, but it is too small to generate the
income you need.  But questions about that are appropriately directed
at the LLC.

Best regards,

A

---

From: Mukund Sivaraman <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 May 2020 23:06:16 +0530

> it is selected), and so ISOC's future funding situation remains more

I am a registrant of several .org domains. The .org top-level zone has
served my family well, and I have a fondness for it. Around 1998 or
1999, I had read a couple of of Richard Stevens books and was playing
with socket programming on Linux, when I registered my first domain -
a .org domain. It felt great.. I had to ask ask friends to host it on a
Linux server for free, and I mainly wanted the [email-masked] address
from it - a permanent address to send/receive email, in other words, an
identity. I was student in a university in India and it was a very
different India from today. I got "into" the open source software
movement volunteering for linux.com and was on VA's IRC channels like
#sourceforge, and .org was a popular domain for open source projects.
Registering a domain then needed a credit card and I didn't
have one. Cards were not common and we didn't have many ATMs and debit
cards back then. Credit cards were for the rich. My tuition fees for an
entire semester of university was INR 750 and the .org domain
registration fee cost about the same for a year.  We were not rich and I
don't remember how I paid for the registration.. I may have asked a
relative to pay for it. Alas, the domain expired because I couldn't pay
for it again. After university, I took on some project work in 2000
before a full-time job, and promptly registered the domain this email is
from, this time after convincing my mom to get an American Express
credit card for herself (I could not get a card). I've used this email
address since then. The .org domain was almost out of reach, though we
were a middle class family and not poor.

A lot of us on this list are fortunate. We are in some technical
profession and that brings in a lot more income than most of the
developing and under-developed world's people do. We are reminded of
this even more during these times where we are able to work-from-home
without a dent in our income, whereas many of my compatriots go hungry
in a real sense of that word. The lists here often discuss and argue
about liberties and freedom because that matters a lot to us, whereas I
see people around me whose first concern is being able to afford food
and basic amenities in the best of times. They don't even think or know
that there are concepts like liberty and freedom worth pondering about.
There is a lot of inequality in the world. Although protecting liberty
and freedom is important and a lot of the technical people care about
these things, they are items further down the list for many. (It's not
criticism.)

Without prejudice, there is a lot of good work that is done by the IETF
and ISOC. To the general public around the world, the .ORG top-level
zone matters a lot. There are projects, organizations, companies, and
individuals that've use .org for tens of years, and many of these
registrants have not heard of the ISOC or even the PIR. They use a
".org" which gave them an identity.

DNS is about identity and service discovery.  If internet-for-all is to
become a basic human right, then there needs to be a practical and
low-cost or free way for every person to have an identity in it. .com
and later .org have been open-for-all zones, but they are still out of
reach of many due to cost and educational reasons. Almost everyone has
known how to get a free yahoo mail or gmail account and use it, but a
very tiny percentage own a node in the DNS graph - a usable, inalienable
DNS domain as an undeniable right, a domain that nobody can take away
from them.

I wish for .org to go the opposite route from where it was going with
the failed deal, and become a public-benefit zone, similar to the work
of other public-benefits like Wikimedia, Let's Encrypt, the Archive
project, etc. where the service it provides to humanity is not
influenced by money. It would be best if ISOC, and transitively, other
groups like the IETF didn't depend on .org money, if .org can provide
free or very low-cost and affordable registration for all.

A .org domain costs more to renew than a .com domain these days. The
.org zone _can_ be operated entirely from donations, grants, etc. if its
purpose was just to provide an identity for people, projects,
organizations, and not to generate money for other organizations. An
open TLD is how .org is known to the majority of the planet. This is why
some of us were concerned about what was going on with this proposed
sale, and how it would affect us. The general public does not care about
the ISOC's activities. They would care about whether .org was
accessible.

		Mukund

---

From: "John Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 4 May 2020 20:05:03 -0000

In article <[email-masked]>,
>stream that is divorced from the core values of the Internet.

I would be very sad if the core values of the Internet were merely
selling second level domain names.

Some of us still provide geographic names to our communities for free.

R's,
John

PS: If anyone needs a watkins-glen.ny.us name, you know where to ask.

---

From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 May 2020 20:15:12 -0400

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 7:26 AM Christian Hopps <[email-masked]> wrote:

> I think there will always be a need for standardizing technology used in
> the internet. Do you think a new organization would spring forth
> organically that would do a better job than the IETF does? Personally I
> think the we'd get something less open, with a higher barrier to entry,
> most likely with a subset of those same privileged "standards
> professionals" having even more control of the process/content. The IETF
> was born in a different time and I at least really appreciate some of it's
> basic principles.
>

Let us accept for the sake of argument that the IETF might not be a
suitable vehicle for standards work in perpetuity. One of the
responsibilities of ISOC might be to tell IETF that was the case.

ISOC does not have to be limited to just supporting IETF, in fact it isn't.
It has IRTF and a few other organizations as well. they might spin up
another standards body. They might have already acquired one. Tim B-L
regularly threatens to declare the work of W3C done and shut down.

Having a pot of money devoted to internet standards making would be very
useful. A lot more useful than giving a bunch of domain name owners a
discount on their TLD registration.

The reason I want to see ISOC divest from PIR is I would like to see IETF
entirely separated from ICANN politics which means ISOC must be so
separated. I make no secret of the fact that my long term goal is to make
the ICANN issued DNS names moot at some point. That is only possible if
IETF is neutral on the architecture issue.

The only people who are going to really benefit from the cancellation of
the contract are the lawyers and expert witnesses as the lawsuits fly.

---

From: Richard Shockey <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 04 May 2020 20:43:01 -0400

In line 

From: ietf <[email-masked]> on behalf of Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Monday, May 4, 2020 at 8:15 PM
To: Christian Hopps <[email-masked]>
Cc: IETF Best Practices <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: News about the Internet Society and PIR.

Let us accept for the sake of argument that the IETF might not be a suitable vehicle for standards work in perpetuity. One of the responsibilities of ISOC might be to tell IETF that was the case.

RS>  It may have already outlived its usefulness, but to your point I think most of us have seen the precipitous decline in institutions like ITU-T.  In Realtime communications all of the real activity is done in 3GPP. I’m not sure what ETSI even does anymore.

ISOC does not have to be limited to just supporting IETF, in fact it isn't. It has IRTF and a few other organizations as well. they might spin up another standards body. They might have already acquired one. Tim B-L regularly threatens to declare the work of W3C done and shut down.

RS> Exactly. He is right. 

Having a pot of money devoted to internet standards making would be very useful. A lot more useful than giving a bunch of domain name owners a discount on their TLD registration.

The reason I want to see ISOC divest from PIR is I would like to see IETF entirely separated from ICANN politics which means ISOC must be so separated. I make no secret of the fact that my long term goal is to make the ICANN issued DNS names moot at some point. That is only possible if IETF is neutral on the architecture issue.

RS> Good luck with that but where we are now IMHO was the whole point of the exercise and the creation of the IETF LLC.  I have nothing but utter contempt for EFF and the CA AG’s office and others that created this controversy.  

The only people who are going to really benefit from the cancellation of the contract are the lawyers and expert witnesses as the lawsuits fly.

---

From: "John Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 4 May 2020 20:54:44 -0400

In article <CAMm+LwhLEg3UyhNRzNj2WJjfRA3_9KPfgYndY=[email-masked]> you write:
>It has IRTF and a few other organizations as well. ...

The IRTF's very small budget is included in the IETF's, but the ISOC's
contribution to the IETF is only 10% of ISOC's overall budget.

We have a lovely web site that describes all of the other stuff we do.

R's,
John

---

From: Leif Johansson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 5 May 2020 10:46:56 +0200

> selling second level domain names.

Yep.

Almost as sad if the ISOC and the IETF LLC became all about capital
management.

	Cheers Leif

---

From: S Moonesamy <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 05 May 2020 07:50:07 -0700

Hi Toerless,
>architecture and standardization for the next 50 years or more.

Does the above include email?  If so, it is not a technology which 
was invented by the IETF.  The so-called IETF technologies do not 
create jobs at my location.  Is there any evidence that it fuels the 
local economy?

>the IETF should go away" is solely in how to avoid that to become

Did you mean financial or some other contribution in the above?

Regards,
S. Moonesamy

---

From: "Livingood, Jason" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 7 May 2020 14:22:56 +0000

On 5/2/20, 2:25 PM, "ietf on behalf of Andrew Sullivan" <[email-masked] on behalf of [email-masked]> wrote:
> The LLC agreement committed ISOC to an interim contribution
    of $5M/year with the expectation that the amount would be recalculated
    after things had started up and an understanding that the IETF might
    well be looking for more support.

I know Andrew knows this (as well as ISOC Board & CFO) but FYI for other here -- the initial LLC agreement with ISOC set financial support for fiscal years 2019 and 2020. The agreement says we are to negotiate a longer-term agreement this year. That requires some long-term financial forecasting from the LLC but obviously COVID19 has complicated that task. I am confident we'll sort out something satisfactory in due course. :-)

Jason
(IETF LLC hat on)

---

From: "Livingood, Jason" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 7 May 2020 14:35:19 +0000

>  The ISOC contribution to the IETF is $5M/year, which seems rather a stretch to get from individual contributions.

FWIW, the IETF LLC board has noted the need to develop a long-term fundraising/sponsorship strategy and continue to work on this in 2020.[1][2][3]

Thanks
Jason
IETF LLC

[1] Section 2 of https://www.ietf.org/blog/recap-january-2020-ietf-llc-board-retreat/
[2] Slide 7 of https://www.ietf.org/media/documents/slides-106-ietf-sessb-llc-board-briefing-01.pdf
[3] Goal 4 of https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf-announce/tlGE60p0HACGrP4osnQ1RAjc9Mw/

---

From: "Livingood, Jason" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 7 May 2020 14:37:46 +0000

Oops - incorrect URL for the 2nd FN - should have been https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/107/materials/slides-107-ietf-sessa-ietf-107-ietf-llc-report-01

Jason

    Thanks
    Jason
    IETF LLC

---

From: S Moonesamy <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 07 May 2020 08:40:18 -0700

Hi Jason,
At 07:22 AM 07-05-2020, Livingood, Jason wrote:
>I know Andrew knows this (as well as ISOC Board & CFO) but FYI for 
>other here -- the initial LLC agreement with ISOC set financial 
>support for fiscal years 2019 and 2020. The agreement says we are to 
>negotiate a longer-term agreement this year. That requires some 
>long-term financial forecasting from the LLC but obviously COVID19 
>has complicated that task. I am confident we'll sort out something 
>satisfactory in due course. :-)

Thank you for the above information.  I was a bit curious about how 
the Public Interest Registry issue might impact on IETF LLC 
revenue.  I understand that the potential fallout from the pandemic 
can complicate matters.  I am part of a committee which does finance 
monitoring.  I might be reassured once I see the numbers.  I could be 
wrong on this; the potential drop in revenue could be around $2.3 
million.  Is there a report about that?

Regards,
S. Moonesamy

---

From: Jay Daley <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 8 May 2020 07:20:49 +1200

> On 8/05/2020, at 3:40 AM, S Moonesamy <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> Hi Jason,
> Thank you for the above information.  I was a bit curious about how the Public Interest Registry issue might impact on IETF LLC revenue.

It should not have any impact at all.

>  I understand that the potential fallout from the pandemic can complicate matters.  I am part of a committee which does finance monitoring.  I might be reassured once I see the numbers.  I could be wrong on this; the potential drop in revenue could be around $2.3 million.  Is there a report about that?

We have full epidemic/pandemic insurance for 2020 which has been invoked for IETF 107 and may be needed for later meetings.  It is too early to know if our claim will be accepted and to what level, but the intent of the insurance is to ensure there is no financial loss from this crisis.

Jay

-- 
Jay Daley
IETF Executive Director
[email-masked]

---

From: S Moonesamy <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 07 May 2020 14:31:35 -0700

Dear Mr Daley,
At 12:20 PM 07-05-2020, Jay Daley wrote:
>We have full epidemic/pandemic insurance for 2020 which has been 
>invoked for IETF 107 and may be needed for later meetings.  It is 
>too early to know if our claim will be accepted and to what level, 
>but the intent of the insurance is to ensure there is no financial 
>loss from this crisis.

Ms Moriarty asked a question about risk management last year.  It may 
be too early to know whether the insurance company will pay the full 
amount.  In general, it is not a great idea to assume that the 
insurance will cover everything unless there is reliable information 
to back that.  That was one of the reasons why I asked whether there 
was a report.  My interest is about whether the risks are being managed.

On an unrelated note, would it be possible to publish the financial 
statements for February and March?  I could not find them on the web site.

Regards,
S. Moonesamy