On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 7:26 AM Christian Hopps <chopps@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On May 2, 2020, at 5:56 AM, Leif Johansson <leifj@xxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 2020-05-02 00:41, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
>> 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/.
>
> 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 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.
