[arin-ppml] [arin-announce]PolicyProposal: Transfer listingservice

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

Kevin Kargel wrote:
>> --Michael Dillon
>>
>> P.S. craigslist and Ebay have cornered the market in listing
>> items for resale. Why does anyone think that there is any
>> point in duplicating their work, but limiting the commodity
>> to only spare ARIN IPv4 address blocks?
>>
>>
>>
> I agree that CL and Ebay have a very efficient and somewhat sorted out
> system and that reinventing the wheel is not necessary and would probably be
> futile.
> 
> If/when and active market develops I would not be surprised to see eBay
> develop a specialized brokerage such as they have for vehicles.  All it will
> take is enough traffic for it to be profitable for them.
> 

That won't ever happen.  Ebay is large enough now that they are 
beginning to get worried about anti-trust actions against them, so
they have quietly been scraping off a large percentage of their
low-dollar sellers in the last few years

One of the first to go were the crafters, these are the 60-year-old
grandmaws and such knitting sweaters and doilies - today if you want
to get any of that, you have to go to etsy  (www.etsy.com)  Ebay
changed T&C to the point that those sellers can't deal with Ebay
any longer.  (and trust me those sellers are pretty POed about it)

If you google up unhappy ebay sellers you will end up with a list of
the major alternative online auction sites - every one of them is
specializing in some type of product, and vacuuming away the Ebay
sellers from Ebay that deal with those products.

There's no question if Ebay wanted they could put those places out
of business - but they are doing the same thing Microsoft is doing
with Linux - allowing the low-dollar markets to fall away and keeping
the cherry ones.

Vehicles and vehicle sales are way too profitable to let go - which is
why they have a special marketplace.  IPv4 sales, even though there may
be some spectacularly expensive ones for a while - can't hold a candle
to vehicle and vehicle parts sales.

If nobody sets up a specialized listing service for IPv4 then those
will take place on ebay and CL - but it's a market ripe for a small 
specialized listing service.

Ted