owner-nanog@merit.edu wrote:
Once this subject took off on nanog, I have been oversaturated with people trying to "sell" me ip space. I have had offers for several /16's for 10,000.00 each that are no longer in use by the companies who "own" lol them.
It seems to me that this nicely illustrates a major problem with the current system. Here we have large blocks of IP space that, by their own rules, ARIN should take back. It all sounds nice on paper, but clearly there is a hole in the system whereby ARIN doesn't know and apparently has no way of figuring out that the space is no longer in use. It makes me wonder just how much space like that there is out there artifically increasing IP scarcity. I don't know what the solution is, but the way things currently work it seems like if you can justify a block today, it's yours forever even if you stop actively using it. Maybe allowing for some kind of IP market would cut down on that type of hoarding -- you would at the very least change the type of value those subnets have. Andrew Cruse