Hi, On Sat, May 02, 2020 at 06:51:02AM +0100, Stewart Bryant wrote: > 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 -- Andrew Sullivan President & CEO, Internet Society sullivan@xxxxxxxx +1 416 731 1261
