On 4/14/2003 at 18:13:35 -0500, Stephen Sprunk said:

Thus spake "Dave Israel" <davei@algx.net>

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That's a pretty brash thing to say on Merit's mail server. Much of the research and coordination of the Internet is done by research groups and universities. It isn't inefficiency that keeps their available cash for address space down; it is the nature of their business.

While I'm sure we all value Merit's contributions to the Internet, both past and present, you cannot seriously believe they are even remotely efficient in their use of 35/8 -- nor can one expect them to be without financial incentive. What boggles my mind is they managed to get allocated another 668,424 addresses in CIDR land -- do a whois and see for yourself.

I didn't say their usage was efficient; what I was expressing was the fear that they would have to go away entirely, in the face of companies with tons of cash buying into what was suddenly an unregulated pool of precious limited commodity that requires no maintenance or upkeep.

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It's this kind of thing that keeps areas of the radio spectrum licensed by the government.

And the govt licenses that spectrum to the highest bidder, plus allows owners to sell spectrum to each other as assets. Pretending the RIRs are even remotely similar is disingenuous.

(*sigh*) I guess I should have been more specific. When I said "areas of the radio spectrum," I was referring to the areas that were set apart before anybody learned how to get arbitrary amounts of bandwidth in a very small range. Specifically, the frequencies on your FM dial are meted out by the FCC, and while they, like ARIN, find a way to make gobs of dough off of it, they also make sure the usage is reasonably fair among the users and that the public airwaves are not excessively abused. While we can surely find flaws in both the FCC and in ARIN, that does not mean the work they do does not benefit the users of their domain immensely.