And the same way that government forced telephone number portability, I foresee one day government requiring IP number portability among ISPs in order to increase competition. So all those SWIPS and PA assignments in ARIN/RIPE/APNIc may one day be used to allow Acme Nail with their /29 assignment to leave ISP A and move to ISP B. Legislators have been known to make more idiotic laws and regulations so don't think it couldn't happen.
Customers already have portability. It's called DNS.
IP addresses aren't published in the big web rolodexes. They don't need their IP address to stay with them.
pt
yeah... like BGP peers are looked up thorugh DNS, SNMP is all DNS-lookup based, SYSLOG doesnt care about MAC or IP addresses, ISP's -never- re-write their DNS entries to actually map the clients prefered/canonical DNS entries application vendors always map software licenses to DNS names and never IP addresses. and... how do you find those DNS servers in the first place? man I'd love to live in your universe... or are you suggesting that things have evolved in the last decade to the point that the ostensible goal of the IETF PIER wg can finally be met, to completely renumber the entire Internet every 20 minutes... :) --bill