Let's see the problem from another angle...
IETF survives because, company and individuals give man/time to the IETF and because companies/individual becomes member of ISOC that pays the secretariat of the IETF (RFC editor, IAB,...). I don't know the full picture here but I think I'm close...
What these companies get in return? Well they want that their products become standard and because they drive the standard then people will prefer to buy products from the standard maker than from someone else... (simplistic view). There may be some other reasons why companies sponsor IETF...
But what is visible, nothing. If you sponsor the IETF work in money, then you get listed as ISOC organisation member. What the IETF/ISOC could offer on top is the rigth for a year to use an IETF logo/trademark "Support IETF" or "Designed for Internet" or something else... This logo shows the committment of the company to work with the IETF in promoting open Internet standard. As well RFC xxxx should be a registered trademark, so that each time someone write RFC 1234 compatible on their product they will add in the small print RFC 1234 is a trademark of ISOC/IETF. The ISOC/IETF get bigger visibility. It pushes company selling Internet product to refer back to ISOC/IETF and therefore understand that they should support ISOC/IETF...
This does not go into the easy buy-in of kyle, but I wanted to provide a sideline view on how ISOC/IETF could be sponsored, but more on how the ISOC/IETF could acknowledge widely their sponsors...
Cheers
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