On Sat, May 02, 2020 at 02:24:26PM -0400, Andrew Sullivan wrote: > 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. 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 muks@xxxxxxxxxxx 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
