>>> 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