This is only a NANOG matter in that the trade in address space can be seen as undermining those who legitimately request CIDR blocks and then spend the time to justify them and SWIP the addresses. Not to beat this into the ground ...
1) what IP space "crunch"?
Addresess are harder to get then they where in 1990. You could (and many people did) ask for a class B and get it with little or no hassle. I know people who did it and held on to unused class Bs based on speculation that they could sell them. $10K is a good return on some e-mail sent seven years ago.
2) what incentive do you propose to give to encourage people to return address space to the pool of "usable" addresses? Given that they have not done so already, it is safe to assume "for the good of the Internet" is not sufficient.
If I can not sell it, I don't need it and it costs me money, why keep it? Most of the IP address speculators will give them up if annual fees are assessed for allocated address space and they can not transfer them. I suspect a large number of organizations would then have the incentive to move to proxies and addresses per RFC 1918 http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1918.txt
Commerce can not function without law.
Nit: commerce functions quite well without law (as any drug dealer will tell you). It does however need a consensus of behaviors among buyers and sellers, although those behaviors need not to conform to those of the rest of "society"...
Regards, -drc
Point Taken. I was taking a rather Hamiltonian approach with my argument and it has some flaws. I should have replace law with consensus ... a more Jeffersonian view. Laws do not function with out the consensus of the governed; nor do rules of commerce without a consensus within the given market. What is the InterNIC policy on the sale of class Bs? -- From: Joseph T. Klein, Titania Corporation http://www.titania.net E-mail: jtk@titania.net Sent: 22:10:20 CST/CDT 03/09/97 "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759