[ppml] Policy Proposal 2007-15: Authentication ofLegacyResources

[michael.dillon at bt.com]

>  MIT might discover that maybe they 
> don't really need 16,777,216 addresses for their 11,000 
> students and faculty and begin to sublet portions of that 
> space.  HP might decide they don't actually need the DEC /8 
> and start leasing it for additional revenues.  The 
> individuals who thought they might have more than 256 hosts 
> and thus needed a class B (you know who you are :-)) might 
> decide to sell (gasp!) their space to the highest bidder.  Etc.
> 
> Why do you think this won't happen?

Because MIT and HP don't have a very strong ownership claim on those
addresses. If they start selling them, they are likely to find
themselves on the wrong end of a lawsuit as the large ISPs start feeling
the pinch. In addition, if these are private sales then they could find
themselves the target of an antitrust investigation. Currently, there is
a public allocation process for addresses based on technically justified
needs. Anything less than a public sale (open auction like the NYSE)
does not seem to have legal justification and certainly, the DoC is
unlikely to support anything less than a public sale mechanism.

--Michael Dillon