Re: Registration details for IETF 108

[Joseph Touch <[e-mail]>]

> On Jun 1, 2020, at 11:47 AM, John C Klensin <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> Joe,
> 
> --On Monday, June 1, 2020 10:43 -0700 Joseph Touch
> <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
>> I don't like registration fees - that's "pay per vote"
>> or at least devolves to that.

I should have said “membership”; registration for events is different, understandably.

> ...
> 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. 

Agreed. There are other sources - annual per-IP costs, etc. The trick - as always - is correlating the benefit to the cost. NATs undermine that for IP addresses, e.g.

>> 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. 

I was giving an example. Glad to hear other alternatives.

> 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?

They already do - as a side-effect of needing to have 80% support for many IETF leadership roles.

> 
>> 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”.

That’s the example I started with that I do want to avoid.

But ultimately, making those who create value pay to do so is backwards.

Joe