[Chapter-delegates] Join our call to stop the sale of .org

[Andrew Sullivan]

Hi,

You have a good question (and an interesting assumption) in your
remarks:

On Thu, Nov 28, 2019 at 09:48:56AM +0100, Borka Jerman Blazic via Chapter-delegates wrote:

> Running PIR was a guarantee that income flow each year, do we have a
> guarantee that ISOC will have similar flow in the future  if donations are
> excepted?

Running PIR was in fact _not_ such a guarantee, because it is one
company in one industry.  If things changed dramatically in that
industry, the consequences would also be dramatic.  For instance,
suppose that the nightmares of some people around DNS over HTTPS (DoH)
come true, and a given browser-webservice combination conspires to
ditch the DNS in favour of non-DNS lookups inside the browser
subsidiary to the DNS once the initial resolution works.  (This is a
story that has been floated; I'm not pretending I think it is true,
but let's imagine.)  In that case, DNS registrations would become less
valuable and registration numbers could fall off a cliff.  It is hard
to model exactly what the revenue consequences are, and I think this
is a highly improbable scenario anyway, but good practice for
non-profits is to try ti minimize risk.  Today there is no hedge for
this.  The new fund doesn't expose us to such risks.

The size of this transaction is sufficient to provide a corpus of
money, which we will treat as an endowment.  That means that we
specify the annual income we need (currently, to replace what we get
from PIR, on the order of $45M per year), and can be sure we can draw
that much from the fund.  The fund needs to continue to invest in
itself in order to grow so that our draw can rise to match inflation,
so on average it will need to produce more than what we draw.  We
believe (on the basis of our financial advice) that we can achieve
that.

Best regards,

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
President & CEO, Internet Society
sullivan at isoc.org
+1 416 731 1261