So, since I paid money for my car registration & license plates, I should be able to sell my plates to someone else to put on their car?
I believe that people with spiffy vanity plates have sold them. Why not? But discussion about the Internet is always plagued with analogies. IP address allocation is not really like the allocation of land, or phone numbers, or pollution credits, or milk quotas, or typing paper, or license plates, or routing table slots, or cocaine. It's sort of like all of these things, but not completely like any of them. And the nature of an analogy is that it pretends two things are similar in all ways. The best way to think about this is not: "IP addresses should be allocated in X way because Y is allocated that way," "But IP addresses are not like Y," "Are so!", but instead: "What is the current policy on IP address allocation? What are the implications? What would be the implications of this other policy?" Analogies are a good tool when things really are the same, but nothing hurts you like using the wrong tool. Since IP addresses are not like other things, there is not much to compare them to. -- Shields, CrossLink.