* Andrew Latham
If I can walk around a smallish town and point at 5 businesses like this its a possible solution. I am not claiming a few /24s will do, I am claiming that there are many (for larger values of many) companies like this.
There are certainly several thousands or even millions of unused IPv4 addresses in existence. But reclaiming and redistributing it, which would be a colossal undertaking, would only push back IPv4 depletion by a few months. It's simply not worth the effort.
I have already read the news of blackmarket sales of network allocations in Europe.
Interesting. Do you have a link or some other kind of reference?
I did a quick search and they are easy to find. Many news articles about Microsoft buying network allocations at auction to set a price of ~$11USD per IP. One tangent article that I liked was
Sure, there's a market all right. However, the well publicised Microsoft/Nortel transfer wasn't a "black market" transfer, it was done in accordance with the ARIN community's policies. Straight from the horse's mouth: https://www.arin.net/about_us/media/releases/20110415.html Such transfers are also permitted by the community's policies in the RIPE region, and the NCC maintains a public list of all such legit/"white" transfers that have taken place: https://www.ripe.net/lir-services/resource-management/ipv4-transfers/table-o...
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/07/16/ipv4-addresses-now-dr... This article mentions a "black market", but it falls short of providing any tangible evidence that it really exists, or to what extent - it appears to me to be more speculation and conjecture than anything else. That said - such speculation may well turn out to be correct, of course, and being involved in the RIPE community I'm genuinely interested in the topic. Therefore I was hoping you'd point me in the direction of "the news of blackmarket sales of network allocations in Europe" you mentioned you have read. Tore