Karl,
What you're saying then is that any group of people can get together, and effectively exert monopoly, oligopoly, or otherwise create control structures in a cartel-like environment over the Internet.
Uh, no. Not in the US anyway.
Ah, then ARIN is a figment of my imagination then. As are the IETF, IEEE, W3C, the ATM Forum, Lockheed Martin (or whoever is running the NANP now), etc. Thanks for pointing this out. You, as an end user or ISP are free to use whatever addresses you care to for whatever purposes you'd like. Of course, other end users and/or ISPs may not care to acknowledge your use of that address space unless there is some mutually agreeable mechanism that defines who "owns" what. The registries provide that mechanism. You (or I) may not like all the policies those organizations use to administer the resources they are responsible for, however its a dirty job -- somebody's gotta do it. The registries were tagged "it" 'cause ISPs couldn't find anyone else to clean up after 'em.
I believe that it is fair to say that the majority of ISPs do not support these policies.
Then why don't they join ARIN and change the policies? Oh, wait. Forgot. ARIN doesn't exist. Regards, -drc