During early phase of free pool exhaustion, when you can't deliver more IPv4 addresses to your customers you lose the customer to a hosting provider who still has addresses left. So sorry. Those will be some nasty years. Unless you're Cogent, Level3 or one of the others sitting pretty on a /8. They'll be in phat city. this is a very real and significant problem. a very small fraction of the arin membership holds the vast majority of the address space. it would be interesting to ask arin to give us the cdf of this.
It would be nice if it was that simple. Those /8's arise from legacy assignments that fall more or less directly under IANA without any form of agreement in place that could allow policy change. Barring government action, they're effectively the unrecoverable property of those organizations. They can even act as mini-registries and auction addresses off to the highest bidder if they're so inclined.\
and this prevents producing a cdf exactly how? randy