You forgot that the ISOC funds the IETF, and currently the ISOC has financial difficulties and that its priority is to fund the IETF, which I fully support.
Most of the membership money from ISOC is directed towards the IETF by the organisation members.I do not know what is the amount here, but I suspect that all platinum and gold members pay to fund IETF at USD100,000 or USD50,000 a year. I think there is already a USD1-2M fund towards the IETF... A light trademark conformance program as Kyle is proposing would allow ISOC to focus on other issues than funding the IETF, and therefore trully work on their "Internet is for Everyone" vision. May I remind that ISOC has only 8000 inviduals members. Kyle, I think the solution to the problem is to bring the problem to the next ISOC meeting (inet2002) and especially to the IAB. This discussion involves more people than the IETF only. You have to leave the IETF do what it does best: work on standards. But the IETF needs to agree that such trademark system could be implemented by the parent organisation: ISOC. IAB meetings and ISOC board meetings are very interesting. Kyle, attend one of them in June www.isoc.org/inet2002/ May be all people interested by the subject should meet there, discuss, and act. Check www.isoc.org Franck Martin Network and Database Development Officer SOPAC South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission Fiji E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Web site: http://www.sopac.org/ <http://www.sopac.org/> Support FMaps: http://fmaps.sourceforge.net/ <http://fmaps.sourceforge.net/> This e-mail is intended for its addresses only. Do not forward this e-mail without approval. The views expressed in this e-mail may not be necessarily the views of SOPAC. -----Original Message----- From: Peter Deutsch [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, 24 January 2002 8:20 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: grenville armitage; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: IP: Microsoft breaks Mime specification g'day, But the biggest problem here is that you've just created a $10M annual cashflow for the IETF to manage. This would be a massive infusion of cash for an entity that today runs on cookies and good will. Do you really think that you can put $10M (or gosh forbid, $10M *a year*) into a bank account without it starting to attract attention? History tells us it would immediately generate its own infrastructure to consume it (have you looked over at the DNS world recently?) - peterd
