Thus spake "Dave Israel" <davei@algx.net>
Ah, but when you buy address space, are you going to be happy about giving it back when you change providers? Will the provider give you a fair price on selling it back? Do you think sales departments won't insist you buy their address space when you connect? And if you can keep it, it makes the routing table more and more interesting.
That's already standard practice today, except you're forced to lease PA addresses instead of buying them and selling them back. However, this discussion is really limited to PI space, which has completely different economics.
That's a pretty brash thing to say on Merit's mail server. Much of the research and coordination of the Internet is done by research groups and universities. It isn't inefficiency that keeps their available cash for address space down; it is the nature of their business.
While I'm sure we all value Merit's contributions to the Internet, both past and present, you cannot seriously believe they are even remotely efficient in their use of 35/8 -- nor can one expect them to be without financial incentive. What boggles my mind is they managed to get allocated another 668,424 addresses in CIDR land -- do a whois and see for yourself.
It's this kind of thing that keeps areas of the radio spectrum licensed by the government.
And the govt licenses that spectrum to the highest bidder, plus allows owners to sell spectrum to each other as assets. Pretending the RIRs are even remotely similar is disingenuous. S Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking