Peter,
When people got network numbers in the past they were getting addresses for the research Internet. It is important to understand that the research Internet was a great thing, but we are now working on the global public Internet and we desperately needed new routing and addressing systems. We should establish that we are in a transition from the research Internet to the global public Internet and we subsequently
I don't think this will fly. I was around when we had a "research internet". I even had two class A addresses assigned to me [yes, I know I should have kept them :-) ]. I think that was quite a while ago and does not apply to the majority of internet sites today. Certainly not for all of the sites labeled as commercial under the AUP.
address space to make this work. Reasoning by analogy with the phone system is a powerful argument. People change phone numbers all the time, they don't absolutely revolt because the phone system is so valuable.
The phone number analogy does not apply here. When you phone number changes (and in most cases today it is only the area code, not the local number) the telephone still works. This is not the case for computers and routers. They break. Some hosts may not even boot. When the phone number changes and someone dials the old number the user gets a recording with the new number to dial. We have not built the current internet to do anything like this. Bob