There's already a black market in IPv4. I've seen plenty of offers to "buy" address space through various underhanded schemes. Most take the form of creating a shell company that the space is registered to and
then
the buyer "acquiring" that company.
In my opinion, the occasional underhanded deal involving shell companies does not constitute a "market". Also, I believe that ARIN is aware of this practice and that they have, in the past, taken back such addresses so the transactions were not ultimately successful. Anything involving the creation and sale of shell companies is far from the world of "commodities".
Instead of continuing with this socialistic concept that IP space is somehow owned by everyone, we should, instead, give title for IP space and allow those titles to be bought and sold freely.
Instructions for joining the ARIN PPML mailing list are found here: http://www.arin.net/mailing_lists/index.html It's the third from the top. However, I think that the notion that IP space is owned by everyone is also wrong. It isn't "space" in the sense of acreage and therefore isn't owned by anyone. We are talking about numbers here. To learn how another organization assigns numbers to people, check this page: http://www.nanpa.net/number_resource_info/co_codes.html
By my own best estimates, 50% of the allocated space today is wasted in one way or another,
This is by design. IPv4 is designed to waste numbers by allocating addresses in power-of-2 blocks. IPv6 improves things by wasting a much larger amount of numbers to ensure that every organization has their fair share of waste.
Almost all of the exhaustion problems that are on the horizon are being directly caused by inefficient use of this scarce resource, certainly all of the above is solved by a capital market.
All of the exhaustion problems are also solved by applying some magic pixie dust called IPv6 which is already available in a capital market. Just ask your company's finance people for capital to buy Cisco or Juniper boxes, then ask them for capital to buy IPv4 addresses. Which capital expenditure are they willing to release funds for? In fact, they will probably ask you to justify those new boxes and when you dig into it you will likely find that you have already paid for IPv6 boxes. --Michael Dillon