On Mon, 14 Apr 2003, Dave Israel wrote:
There's a lot more available real estate than available v4 address space. That's the biggest one.
Is there? How much address space would be available if it were utilized efficiently by everyone? Once you put a price tag on it, organizations become the models of efficiency in utilization. If you can use NAT, you will, if you can't, you'll only assign unique addresses to users/applications that absolutly require it. If you don't like those options, maybe you'll move to v6. I just don't see a problem here.
Second, groups that make the Internet go aren't necessarily the ones who can afford the address space.
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. 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.
Third, there's no root owner of the address space, so who is going to sell it?
I'll give you that, the initial sale is difficult. Perhaps the registries/IANA could use the proceeds to setup an annuity to fund address title registries/other IETF functions for the future.
But really, you just need the first one: small space. The relatively small pool means that a large company with lots of money could buy the whole ARIN chunk of the Internet.
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. -- Brandon Ross AIM: BrandonNR VP Operations ICQ: 2269442 Sockeye Networks