In a message written on Wed, Jun 15, 2016 at 08:25:04AM +0300, Hank Nussbacher wrote:
I am not at NANOG67 and am following this issue remotely. Excuse me if I am getting this all wrong. Dave shows a slide that LINX made $2.3M profit and AMS-IX made $4.1M last year and Randy states "that the IXPs run us over to make an extra penny"?
When I vew the presentation from a raw money basis, it seems like just a "we hate our suppliers" whine. For instance it's quite normal for a "not for profit" to both pay salaries and marketing, and to even "make a profit" from a raw accounting perspective. There's also nothing in the non-profit rules that disallow marketing departments or spending money on socials. If those things further their non-profit mission, it's all good. However there is another perspective where I think a good point is raised, and perhaps a bit lost. Some of these IXP's are "community run". Or well, they say they are "community run". But when the curtian is pulled back, perhaps they look a lot less community run and a lot more like a business with a savvy marketing department leading people to believe they are community run. I do wonder how many people became a _member_ of these "community run" IXP's thinking that entited them to some say over how it was run, only to discover due to the bylaws and corporate structure they have in fact little to no say over anything? That is a form of bait-and-switch, and _may_ be a problem with some IXP's. Maybe the community wants a no-marketing cost-recovery co-op service, and this is a way of rallying and organizing for that. It's on that point that the presentation is classic NANOG, a bunch of operators getting together to discuss their common issues and figure out if there if there is a path forward to make things better. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/