[arin-ppml] simple question about money

[michael.dillon at bt.com]

> It seems to me that the two biggest policy issues facing RIRs 
> today are address transfers (in effect, the creation of a 
> much-needed private secondary market to move scarce v4 
> addresses from underutilized allocations/assignments to those 
> who need them more) and the costs or fees associated with 
> granting assignments or allocations. 

That's like saying that we should create a much-needed secondary market
for used cars so that cars which have been stolen can be more easily
sold to those who badly need a car for transport. It's too hard at
present because you have to file off vehicle registration numbers or
ship them to Africa or the former Soviet countries where nobody will
notice that the registration numbers belong to stolen vehicles.

Currently ARIN policy only allows for organizations to receive IP
address allocations or assignments if they can show a technical need for
the addresses. If the technical need has ceased to exist, then these
organizations are no longer LEGITIMATELY holding those resources. Of
course, we don't get anal about this, especially in the case of ISPs
since shrinkage in one part of their network may only be temporary
followed by growth in another part of the network. Look at ARIN's long
term IP allocation charts to see this when the telecom collapse caused a
drop in new allocations. Then once the networks began to grow again,
they used up their surpluses and began to apply for new addresses again.

It is strange to see an economist who does not recognize the fact than
when a fixed resource nears exhaustion, there just isn't anything
available for people to sell because everyone is in the same boat.

--Michael Dillon