Joe, --On Monday, June 1, 2020 10:43 -0700 Joseph Touch <touch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I don't like registration fees - that's "pay per vote" > or at least devolves to that. I don't like registration fees. I also don't like paying for airfares, hotels, and Internet connections good enough to support remote participation in meetings. I would also like free cookies and perhaps free lunches. If I didn't know, and dislike, the costs of keeping ponies, I'd like a pony too. The reality is that operating the IETF has costs, those costs are significant, and _any_ way to cover them has consequences. To take your earlier suggestion as an example, not only would a $1/yr fee on every TLD not cover the estimated costs of a single online meeting (as estimated/reported at https://www.ietf.org/blog/ietf108-registration-fees/ ), there are well under 2000 of the puppies so it would provide an order of magnitude less income than that estimate proposes to recover from registration fees, much less the costs of more than one meeting a year, some possibly in person. Now, if you were talking about registrations at the second level and below, that would be a different matter financially, more or less taxing ICANN from the tax it collects on TLD registries. More important, at least from my point of view, is the old adage about paying the pipe. The domain name sales interests already have far more influence over the Internet than makes me happy, partially because they and others and done a good (if sometimes self-interested) job of convincing much of the population that domain names, especially TLDs, are far more important than they probably actually are. > I prefer a "tax" on the Internet itself - and it > shouldn't be just .org - to pay for these things. > > I.e., "if you make money from it, you pay for it". Not "if > you want to speak on the standards", you pay. First, much as I have issues with the domain name sales business, the real "making money from the Internet" business seem to be those who sell advertising, user data, content, and more tangible products. Why pick on name sales or TLDs. How would you prevent "if I pay for the standards (because you make money on the Internet), I expect to have input into, and oversight of, what the IETF does? > Other orgs get some of this by licensing the standards; we > understandably don't want to do that. Most of them, fwiw, charge annual membership fees and insist on organizational membership rather than individual participation (even those that allow for some of the latter as, e.g., "invited experts"). You probably don't want to go there or do that either but it turns into another version of "pay to Play" or at least "pay to vote". john
