This is something I have discussed with several people and every one seems to agree. The current registration fee of $575 is outrageously high. Even though IETF claims to be an open forum with no membership fee - you need $575*3=$1725 per year for registration fee alone for attending IETF sessions. This is effectively the membership fee for IETF. Sorry - not everyone can plan ten days in advance to get $125 reduction in fee. Just try to run a small consulting business or work for a 20 person start up - you would know what I mean. Instead of seeing the cost going down due to increasing attendance, and therefore seeing the gain due to economy of scale, we have seen IETF registration fees going up. This has resulted in that a handful of big companies with deep pockets send army of people who pretty much monopolise all IETF working group sessions - thanks to the sheer number they can afford to send and raise hands/do loud hums etc. This is as close to rigging the outcomes of most IETF sessions as you will get in any professional body. It is time IETF/IESG/IAB stopped a handful of big companies monopolising sessions, and restoring openness of IETF. What about setting the starting fee at about $200 and then increasing it by $100 for every new person from the same company. Or setting a fee at $1000 and then giving 80% discount for the first person and reducing the discount by 10% for every additional person from the same organisation (all you need a organisation HTML tag counter on the online registration for tracking the registration per organisation). Yes, a person can attend IETF as an individual at reduce discounts but then that person should not be allowed to list his companys name on his tag or any publications that he may contribute unless he shows proof of the recent change in employement from individual status to a company's employment. I hope IETF/IESG/IAB has courage to discuss this in their plenary meetings. ==Bonney ps: Also IETF should allow no more than three authors per RFC/internet drafts. Every one else should go to the back page in the acknowledgement section. Also, stop publishing author affiliations which is the root cause of seeing dozen plus authors on a five page draft. How ridiculous things can get! IEEE/and ACM journals wouldn't publish a paper with that many names when names show affiliations to dozen plus different organizations. We are not talking about genuine team efforts by a research group, but credit grabbing or creating powerful gang like relationships here by some people. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Sports - live college hoops coverage http://sports.yahoo.com/