If they can't afford the address space, there's a very good chance it's because they are inefficient and they should be done away with.
capital != efficiency.
Besides, I just don't see address space being prohibitively expensive on an open market, as a previous poster pointed out, only a minority of address space is currently announced in the Internet. I'd bet at least half of that isn't used at all, and I'd bet another half of that is unnecessary.
it's not the amount of address space in use, the amount of space being announced, or even the amount of space that is "necessary" which matters. it's the ratio of the number of prefixes currently being announced to the number of prefixes, which were they to be announced, would cause lots of "disconnectivity". kind've hard to charge against the ratio, since no one body is in charge of anyone-in-particular's BGP tables. you can have all the address space you want if nobody is listening to your prefix announcements.
There are a large number of organizations with more addres space than they need. The chances of any one company buying all the address space and then just sitting on it are nil. Why would their investors allow them to sit on a asset and not make any income on it? They would have to compete with the likes of GE, ATT, MIT, and Genuity for sales of the address space they already hold.
you don't have to buy all of it to cause problems. just enough to be able to keep the price arbitrarily high. and in whose interest is it best to price small competitors out of the market? exactly those companies and/or individuals who would be able to do this. s.