--On Sunday, March 17, 2002 02:04 PM -0800 Bonney Kooper <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> support that. I suggest let IETF institute a tiered > corporate membership program like all other standards > forums (organizations do pay huge fees for WAP forums > and MPLS forums etc.). Let us have $20 K per year for The difference is that the IETF is not an organization-membership-based entity but rather an individual-member-based organization. Your proposal would alter the basis of membership for the IETF and would encourage the very behaviour you claim is happening now and wish to prevent: the excessive influence of large corporations on Internet Standards. Once you turn IETF into a corporate-membership-based organization (whether explicitly by membership dues or implicitly by an official sliding scale paid by the corporation), the bias of attention and service shifts from the individual to the corporation. I decided to sit in on the Newcomers Orientation Sunday where one could learn: 1. that we don't use voting to determine standards to avoid the effect of anyone packing working group meetings with voters, 2. how all the different documents fit together as part of the process, how they are produced and reviewed primarily outside of meetings, and 3. the lengthy and tortuous path a proposal must take to become a standard, of which the working group meetings are only a small part. The system has been rigged to avoid excessive influence from any one organization. Maybe it's not always perfect, but you can be assured that trying to fix or avoid it by tinkering with registration fees will be futile no matter what structure you set. As others have pointed out, the registration fee is a rather small minority of total direct and indirect attendance costs, so protesting it on economic grounds doesn't seem to be a very strong issue. If your real issue is with perceived large corporate influence, that should be addressed by organizational and operational changes, not fee structures. -- Dennis Fazio HeatSeeker Technology Partners
