Please donate to keep Network Time Protocol up – Goal 1k

Why not just turn it off and say we need money to turn it in again?

Turn what off?

pool.ntp.org dns resolution and any servers that they control, presumably

Time itself maybe, I know I could use with a little bit of a pause.

Return to the basement now. No escape.

That might work, but the second order effect would probably be companies trying to do the work of time synchronisation themselves in case it happened again. That would lead to fragmentation and incompatibility.

The ntp pool is actually independently run and funded and has nothing to do with the NTPd implementation nor the NTP Foundation, other than them allowing the pool to use that DNS name.

The cloud providers already use their own NTP infrastructure. Much of it is public and you can use it for free, too.