> Il 04/05/2020 03:11 Paul Wouters <paul@xxxxxxxxx> ha scritto: > > 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. 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 vittorio.bertola@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Office @ Via Treviso 12, 10144 Torino, Italy
