>>> 3) What's wrong with treating assignments 
like property and setting up a market to buy and sell them? There's plenty of 
precedent for this:  
>>> Mineral 
rights, mining claims, Oil and gas leases, radio spectrum.  
>>>  If a given commodity is truly scarce, 
nothing works as good as the free market in encouraging consumers to conserve 
and make the best use of it.  
>>>
>> I think you're 
dead-on there, but you forget who you're really trying to convince.  It'll 
happen eventually but in the meantime the greybeards who were  
>> largely responsible 
for the Internet as we know it (and who by and large still 
wield significant influence if not still stewardship) will be dragged there 
kicking  
>> and screaming from their 
academic/pseudo-Marxist ideals, some of whom seem to still resent the 
commercialization of the Internet.  It's also hard to see  
>> the faults in the system when you 
are insulated by your position as member of the 
politburo.  
>>
>> The flip side of 
the coin of course is that if you let the free market reign on IP's, you may 
price developing countries right off the Internet which I don't think  
>> anyone sees as a 
desirable outcome.  There's sure to be a happy middle ground that people 
smarter than I will figure out, and maybe it takes a silly lawsuit  
>> such as this to kick things 
off. 
>>
>> Andrew Cruse  
>
> Another somewhat 
important point is that we also need to conserve routing 
entries.  If you make a market for addresses without regard to routability, 
you risk  
> creating a situation where you flood 
the world with /32's.  No thanks. 
>
> Tony  
 
I would think that would 
tend to police itself.  Even now with things as they are you're going to 
have serious reachability problems if you try to announce anything smaller than 
a /24.  And if routing tables suddenly explode, I'd expect that threshold 
to quickly move in 
reaction.
 
Andrew 
Cruse