[excessive cc trimmed] At 04:17 AM 3/14/96 GMT, nelson@crynwr.com wrote:

And it gets worse -- just WHAT is the meaning of "owning" an IP address. Hell, I could claim to own all the class A addresses (in fact, I actually do -- I've just never asserted my claim [ yet -- you'll be hearing from my lawyer]). An IP address is just an entry in a database, without the cooperation of all the backbone providers. So AT&T buys all the addresses; everyone laughs at them, and starts up another Internet in parallel with AT&T's, and puts a network address translator between the new Internet, and AT&T's old Internet.

See?

No, I don't 'see'. Most of the discussion that has been held on Paul Resnick's 'Suggestions for Market-Based Allocation of IP Address Blocks' seems to imply that once IP addresses are economic commodities, then they will indeed be 'owned' in the traditional sense, much the way one buys or sells a used car. I'm of the opinion that this approach is seriously flawed, in that it almost encourages those entities with deep pockets to hoard address space. Any amount of fairness is removed from the equation altogether. I'm sorry -- I can't agree with this model, but hey, that's just me. Perhaps others vehemently agree, perhaps not. In any event, I believe that some economic incentive is indeed appropriate; perhaps the route [prefix] charging model will be the prevailing method, but that is for the providers to determine, not for the IETF. - paul