Re: Why not a ".IETF" TLD? (was: Re: Financial state of the IETF...)

.IETF already exists - try not to duplicate namespace.

Joe Baptista - only at www.baptista.god

   PoserTutor - How to use Poser http://posertutor.nomad/
       registration facilities in the inclusive namespace

On Sun, 16 Mar 2003, Peter Deutsch wrote:

> g'day Randy,
>
> Randy Bush wrote:
> > > At one point some of us tried to use the .org redelegation to help fund
> > > the IETF. [1] We didn't win but the ISOC's bid did win. Did the ISOC make
> > > the same commitment, could they divert some funding from .org domain
> > > registrations to support the IETF?
> > how would they justify this?  i.e. s/org/net/ or s/org/uk/ and how
> > does it work out?
> I'm not sure I understand the question, but maybe you're just waxing
> rhetorical?
>
> If the question is should PIR help support the IETF, it would seem to
> fall within their mission, if they chose to do so. After all, their home
> page states:
>
>      "PIR looks forward to serving the .ORG community by
>       providing superior technology; new services designed
>       for noncommercial registrants; and responsive,
>       responsible stewardship."
>
> Note the line about "providing superior technology", which could be
> interpreted as supporting improvements to DNS technologies, at the
> least. Wouldn't be much of a stretch to say it could also cover
> supporting developments at the transport layer. Given the relationship
> between ISOC and the IETF you could make a similar argument about this
> being within *their* mandate, as well.
>
> Still, AFAIK PIR haven't actually made any specific commitments to
> helping out the IETF, so it wouldn't be appropriate to try to strong-arm
> them into offering to do so now, but I see no reason why we shouldn't
> push for revenues from a specific TLD to support the overall mission of
> the IETF in the future. Folks who support the IETF's goals and mission
> could use their patronage of the "IETF TLD" to show their support and
> provide specific finiancial aid. It would act as sort of an "affinity
> TLD service", just like those affinity credit cards, where a portion of
> the money spent goes as a subsidy to your favorite worthy cause.
>
> In fact, I'm surprised that this isn't being done already, since it
> seems such an obvious step. It would certainly be appropriate to set up
> an "IETF domain" to pay for the secretariat, mailing list hosting, a
> full-blown set of archives, etc. Meeting fees could then be used to fund
> only the incremental cost of a participant's physical presence (such as,
> of course, the cookies...)
>
>
>
> Let's look at the numbers for a minute. The IETF's non-meeting costs are
> somewhere on the order of $1.3 million, and the meetings are something
> on the order of $1.2 million (from slide 3 of Harald's presentation).
> This means that the meeting's direct costs are only about $250 per
> attendee per year (assuming three meetings per year and about 1.6k
> attendees per meeting).
>
> So, if the new TLD fees could raise something like $1.3 million clear
> (after the expenses of actually providing the TLD servers, which of
> course are ripe for donations, subsidies, etc) then you would only need
> to charge something like $250 per person per year for the actual
> meetings, which is obviously less than is charged now.
>
> So let's set the target at $2 million to cover the cost of a small TLD
> service, plus a little extra to build up the rainy day fund.
>
> How realistic is it to consider raising $2 million per year in domain
> registrations?
>
> Here's where I need to wave my hands a little and you need to use your
> imagination, but if you charge, say, $50 per reg, this is 40,000
> entries. Make it something like $200/year each and you need only 10,000
> to hit your target. Are there 20,000 people out there who'd pay $100 per
> year to have a cool "hacker(_at_)foobar(_dot_)ietf" email address? I suspect 
> so.
>
> And of course, you can reduce this number further if you still allow
> some cross-subsidy from the meeting fees, you can still push for
> corporate donations (say for servers or hosting services to reduce the
> service costs), etc. Here's where a full time DNS business manager could
> probably pay for him or herself in no time at all by drumming up
> equipment donations and hosting subsidies.
>
> In any event, there are today something like 2,000 people who already
> pay something like $500 per visit to the IETF over the course of a year
> for their meeting fees. Assuming you've reduced the meeting fees, or
> simply rolled the TLD sub into the existing fee, you'd find this part of
> the equation could remain revenue neutral with few complaints. Thus, the
> question boils down to whether you could raise any *additional* revenues
> from subs coming in from folks not physically present, companies,
> Intellectual Property lawyers and so on. At first glance this certainly
> seems feasible to me...
>
> And if you do better than cover the current revenue shortfall, you would
> actually be lowering the cost of IETF participation for those who
> physically show up to meetings. As Martha Stewart would say "And This is
> Good...(tm)"
>
>
> I for one maintain a few TLDs and wouldn't mind at all taking out at
> least one more to support the IETF, assuming it's a "reasonable" fee
> (anything under $100 per year would probably be lost in the noise). It
> would be a legitimate business expense for me, and I'd know the money is
> going to support something I approve of. You'd need to do some real
> market research to determine if this is all viable or if I'm really as
> special as my mom always thought, but my guess is you could find a whole
> passle of intellectual property types who'd sign up for their favorite
> strings on principle (after fighting you tooth and nail through the
> "twisty little passages of ICANN, all the same" until the TLD went
> live).
>
> My guess is that there's an inbuilt free rent in *any* TLD (why do you
> think they're so popular??) but even if there isn't, all you're really
> trying to do is generate supplemental revenues equal to the delta
> between current revenues and expenses, so this looks like a *very*
> promising line to take.
>
> The only other alternative for an organization who sees its membership
> falling is to cut costs or increase fees. The former reduces performance
> and the later could lead to a death spiral as rising costs chase more
> and more people away. Finding an alternative revenue stream seems the
> only *healthy* long term alternative.
>
>
> Oh wait - there is a hitch. Of course, if we try to do this, the IETF
> would then be finally forced to visit the ICANN Alternate Reality Plane
> that the rest of the world has struggled with for so long. Whether this
> is considered a "good thing" or a "bad thing" is left as an exercise for
> the reader but if any organization has a claim to a TLD, it would seem
> to be the group that defines and maintains the very technologies and
> procedures used to make the service work. This approach requires no
> revenue-sharing agreements with the other TLD operators, no changes in
> technologies or procedures and shouldn't "destabilize the root" since
> it's a single additional TLD with minimal impact on traffic patterns.
> Putting aside any moral claims, the IETF should be able to quickly reach
> consensus upon an RFC stating that this specific TLD wouldn't hurt the
> current DNS... ;-)
>
> Okay, that's more than my 2 cents on this subject. Do with it as you
> will...
>
>
> And finally, a couple of specific comments on the posted financials
> before I close.
>
> Any business plan predicated upon the assumption that attendance will
> maintain or return to the higher levels of previous years seems fatally
> flawed, to say the least. The hi tech train wreck has now lasted three
> years and shows no signs of being cleared from the tracks any time soon,
> so we shouldn't allow ourselves too much "irrational optimism" on this
> front. A more likely scenario is falling attendance for at least another
> year, if not more, and this should be in the budget.
>
> Also, to respond to Steve Casner's comment about comparisons with past
> costs, given the inertia in starting and perpetrating working groups I
> would guess that a 20 percent reduction in attendees doesn't
> automatically translate to a 20 percent reduction in demand for the
> number of meeting rooms, just more space available in each room, so
> there seems to have been a ratchet effect here on the cost base. And if
> the IETF's cost base is now permanently higher than it was a few years
> ago, you will either need to take steps to fix the revenue side, or
> you'll need to fix the demand side.
>
> Thus, it looks like one of the steps needed in these harder times is a
> cost-cutting exercise to reduce the number or working groups, and thus
> the number of rooms needed. The demands upon space likely wont drop back
> down again on their own, so some hard calls might be needed to balance
> the books here.
>
>
> In summary, I would suggest that if decisions are made based upon
> built-in assumptions such as "attendance is going back up" or "falling
> attendance automatically lowers costs", we'll all be revisiting this
> whole debate again a year from now, but with the numbers in worse shape
> than they are today...
>
>
>
>                  - peterd (who remembers this specific analysis on the
>                             cost of cookies cycling round before...)
>
> --
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>     Peter Deutsch                       pdeutsch(_at_)gydig(_dot_)com
>                       Gydig Software
>
>
>      As Oprah Winfrey likes to say, "There's only two ways
>         to lose weight - eat less, or exercise more..."
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------