David R. Conrad writes:
Your proposal is? If you say charging for address space, please explain what would stop deep pocket companies from buying up all the address space?
David, I know that you know what you're doing technically, but you have no clue about how a free market works (and, by implication, I do -- not very humble I guess. Oh well. Deal.) Assume with me, that a market for IP addresses has been created (just like the Internic did when they said that they would cooperate with the transfer of domain names from one party to another, and that any trademark was sufficient to hold a domain name). Doesn't matter who owns them first -- the market will decide on a price. Further assume that AT&T (hey, I'm a stockholder so I get to pick on them) wants all the IP addresses in the world. Problem is that they have to buy them from the current owners. The owners need somewhere between a few and all of them. But not zero. The cost of giving up all of their addresses is ALL OF THEIR BUSINESS. If they're tired of being an ISP, they might be willing to go out of business. But let's say that they're not. So they sell their address block to AT&T. The problem for AT&T is that some people WON'T want to go out of business at any price (e.g. Sprint or MCI). AT&T would have to purchase up all of their business, that is, merge with them. That would take a lot of money. No, that would take a LOT OF MONEY, because as soon as the stockholders realized that AT&T was trying to get a monopoly on IP addresses, they would want their fair share of the monopoly. So the price of Sprint and/or MCI stock would go up. Way up. All out of proportion to the income from Sprint's or MCI's ISP business. AT&T couldn't get away with monopoly profits without sharing them with the current IP address holders. And it gets worse -- network address translation software exists, so the ISP who sold his business to AT&T could start up another business, buying only one address, compete with AT&T, and (because AT&T is seeking monopoly profits) sell this business to AT&T again. One Texas oilman sold three successive refineries to Standard Oil. And it gets worse -- just WHAT is the meaning of "owning" an IP address. Hell, I could claim to own all the class A addresses (in fact, I actually do -- I've just never asserted my claim [ yet -- you'll be hearing from my lawyer]). An IP address is just an entry in a database, without the cooperation of all the backbone providers. So AT&T buys all the addresses; everyone laughs at them, and starts up another Internet in parallel with AT&T's, and puts a network address translator between the new Internet, and AT&T's old Internet. See? -russ <nelson@crynwr.com> http://www.crynwr.com/~nelson Crynwr Software | Crynwr Software sells packet driver support | PGP ok 11 Grant St. | +1 315 268 1925 voice | If you would seek peace, Potsdam, NY 13676 | +1 315 268 9201 FAX | first seek freedom