From: Frank Bulk - iName.com [mailto:frnkblk@iname.com]
It appears that ARIN wants to raise the IP addressing space issue to the CxO level -- if it was interested in honesty, ARIN would have required a notarized statement by the person submitting the request. If ARIN really wants to get the interest of CEOs, raise the price!
Raising the price won't help; there's already a huge amount of wasted address space by web hosts selling IP addresses to customers who need them solely for 'seo purposes' rather than allocating them in return for a reasonable technical justification. If ARIN raises the prices, it will hurt hosts who allocate their space in a responsible manner and those who don't will just charge more for the right to have one of these seo-friendly exclusive IP's that webmasters so righteously believe will make their sites #1 on google. We regularly lose business thanks to something that goes a little like this: "Can I get a block of 100 IP's for no particular reason?", no, "My old host let me, I just had to pay $100/month for it." One of Google's seo spam team members actually blogged on this topic after a nanog post I made about this a few years back, and I still send it to people asking for IP's for seo reasons and even then they don't believe me. If ARIN would enforce a technically justified use of IPv4 space that does not recognize "seo" as a valid reason, that would definitely help, otherwise web hosts will keep selling IP space to their customers at prices that let them keep buying more. And since the policy allows it currently, the CEO signing off on it will also be valid. David