multihoming is a necessary property of a scalable IP economy. actually, provider independence is necessary, multihoming is just a means to that end. if you don't think there are more than 1.3M entities worldwide who would pay a little extra for provider independence, then you don't understand what's happened to *.COM over the last 10 years. in that case i'll simply ask you to take my word for it -- you make 1.3M slots available, they'll fill up.

I'm an "entity" that would be willing to pay extra for provider independence for my home /32 address. Globally, there are probably more than 1.3M individuals (ie, "entities" like me) that want to do that. All the "old" companies who've been on the Internet for years have all the IP address space they need. For example the parent company of the subsidiary I work for has at least 3 class B addresses, which we use internally. And yet the several thousand IP addresses in my subsidiary all NAT thru firewall with a very small number of externally visible IP addresses when accessing the internet at large. What a waste of IP space. These old companies, ISPs, NSPs, etc. have all the IP numbers they need. They got theirs and they don't give a f*ck that it's really hard for new companies to get anywhere near the equivalent. In the meantime it's DAMN difficult for new companies, especially smaller ones, to multihome. I still don't see any good solutions to that problem. What I would do if I were desperate and starting a company is to pay someone for their old pre-CIDR /24 address. As you say, everyone will route those. What's the going rate for a routeable class C?