Note: I have no position in the ISOC nor am a current member (or maybe they do not have members these days). My employer is a corporate member. I was a member when the ISOC was first created by Vint Cerf, but let my membership lapse after a year or two.
There are a number of reasons why I came to hold this opinion that I will try to outline below.
The problems in the IETF that is causing us to pursue the administrative restructuring activity are real problems and need to be solved. We clearly need to have relationship with our support and infrastructure service providers where we are the customer. The current situation is broken and needs to be fixed.
While these problems are real, I do not think they are the most important or difficult problems the IETF faces today. I think the bigger problems are the problems with how we run the standards process (being working on in NEWTRK but a long way from being done) and the potential problems down the road with the UN based NextGen Internet governance activities. The overall functioning of the IETF has serious problems and less new work is being done in the IETF. Unless we fix this problem, in the long term we won't have to worry about how well our administrative functions are working.
Housing the IETF administrative activity in ISOC seems to me to be a much simpler solution to our administrative problems and will require much less work to get it set up. I am concerned that the independent approach will take considerably more cycles and work from the IETF leadership to get it set up and functioning. This will take away from working on what I consider to be more important problems. There is also considerable risk that it will not be as easy to setup as would be liked, taking additional scarce resources.
The ISOC is certainly not perfect and has had serious problems in the past. These problems have been solved and as far as I can tell the ISOC is working well. I would note that the ISOC was initially set up by competent people with the best of intentions, but things did not work out as originally planned. This is probably normal in any new organization. It seems to me that creating another new corporation for the IETF's administrative functions is likely to also need some degree of restructuring. This will at a minimum take resources from the leadership, or worse seriously disrupt the operation of the IETF.
If we go in the direction to create a new corporation for the IETF administrative functions (i.e., Scenario C), it will duplicate a lot of overhead functions. Since any funds not derived from meeting fees will come from the ISOC, these funds will have two taxes applies (e.g., the overhead of each organizations). I also worry that while the intention is to keep the new organization small, it will tend to grow and consume more resources on it's own over time. We will be creating a new bureaucracy. Bureaucracies tend to grow over time
Both approaches assume some amount of funding from ISOC for IETF activities. This makes perfect sense in the approach where the administrative activity is part of ISOC, but I don't think it is very realistic to assume that the ISOC would give money to an independent administrative activity without a certain amount of control. The ISOC is, of course, bound by the rules of their corporate structure that allows them to be a non-profit tax exempt corporation. If they are going to be legally required to have some degree of control over the money they raise that is earmarked for the IETF, I don't see what the benefit is of having an independent organization. If we could raise enough money ourselves (e.g., just from meeting fees or other means), this would be very different. As long as we are dependent on money from the ISOC it seems to me that it is better to make the administrative activity part of ISOC.
The IETF currently has a very important and close relationship with the ISOC today. We give them the copyrights to the standards we create, they are part of the nomcom process, they are part of the appeals process, they fund the RFC-Editor that we depend on, and we select people to be on the ISOC board of trustees. It seems to me that having them also provide our administrative service is perfectly natural. I think that if we can trust the ISOC with our standards, we ought to be able to trust them to provide our administrative services.
Bob
_______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf