Maybe its time to have a serious talk about IPv4 commodity trading schemes. Anyone interested in this enough to have a BOF at ARIN/NANOG?
I, for one, would be very interesting in such a system. Distribution of
commodities is almost universally done best by capital markets.
There is a slight problem here. Commodities are things which are bought and sold. In other words, one party has legal title to the commodity and transfers that legal title to another party. Since nobody has legal title to any IPv4 addresses, nobody can sell them in the first place. Of course you can get around this by selling the networks that use the IPv4 addresses, but then you are getting away from the realm of commodities. A commodity is a fairly generic product and networks are far from generic. --Michael Dillon