On 11/24/17 1:09 PM, John R. Levine wrote:
Please don't send private responses to public comments.
Well, OK.
Is it a membership organization? It purported to be, at the
beginning - but individual membership has come and gone, doesn't
carry a vote, or dues. It's a non-profit with a self-perpetuating
board of trustees. So it's not really clear what is.
As is trivial to find out by looking at ISOC's web site, there are
individual members, and the board is selected by a complex process,
not by the existing trustees.
Well, yes, the articles of incorporation state:
"The corporation shall have classes of members, and the qualifications
and rights of the members, including any right to vote, shall be as
provided in the by-laws."
And the current by-laws state that "Individual members shall not have
any voting rights with respect to the Society." (To my recollection,
they never have.) At the beginning, there were dues levied on
individual members, but no longer.
I also note that individual "membership" is equivalent to registering
for the ISOC web site.
Given that the only folks who actually have a vote on anything are
organizational members - which include carriers who might be subject to
government action – ISOC starts to look a lot like an industry
association, and does not really have a particularly legitimate standing
to talk about policy in the public interest. (I also note that the
by-laws, which specify how Trustees are selected, can be amended by a
vote of the Trustees.)
That bothers me, a lot (speaking as someone who carries a "pioneer"
membership card, dated 1992.
Scott's original comment, about the IETF seeming to get lost in the
mission statement bothers me more - as I remember, hearing directly from
Vint, that (as now stated on ISOC's web site) "The Internet Society was
formed by a number of people with long-term involvement in the Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF). As a result, one of its principal
rationales was to provide an institutional home for and financial
support for the Internet Standards process. This rationale still exists
today." And to my mind, it's the only place that ISOC is actually
making a substantive impact.
Miles Fidelman
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra