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

[Richard Hill]

>From my perspective, I don't have a problem with the principle of selling PIR, but I do think that there should have been a consultation with the ISOC constituencies regarding that principle.

If the principle had been accepted by the constituencies, then, in my view, ISOC should have opened public bidding, restricted to non-profit organizations, and with some sort of cap on the absolute price of registrations (perhaps as a multiple of cost).

Best,
Richard

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chapter-delegates [mailto:chapter-delegates-
> bounces at elists.isoc.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Sullivan via Chapter-
> delegates
> Sent: Friday, November 29, 2019 12:51
> To: chapter-delegates at elists.isoc.org
> Subject: Re: [Chapter-delegates] Join our call to stop the sale of .org
> 
> 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
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