[arin-ppml] Fwd: Advisory Council Meeting Results - December 2019

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

In message <alpine.LRH.2.21.2001031657540.742 at bigone.uneedus.com>, 
hostmaster at uneedus.com wrote:

>There are those that wanted to become landlords of IPv4.  I think this 
>kinda shoots down those hopes.

It would appear so.

To be frank however, I'm not fully persuaded that the term "landlord"
should be so cavalierly tossed around as an epithet with distinctly
negative connotations.  After all, landlords are job creators!  Just
ask our Job Creator in Chief!

Consideration should also be given to the possibility that Internet
landlords could be a good thing.  Imagine if you will that in some
cases, counties and municipalities might snatch up blocks of IP
addresses and then use them to provide the Internet equivalent of
Section 8 housing for poor folks who would otherwise be obliged to
go without.

But seriously folks, the truth is that I myself have never resolved my
own internal debate between top-down socialism and unfettered laissez
faire capitalism.  Thus, one day I'll be out in the streets defending
the absolute right of Walmart to chase homeless people off their private
property, and the next day I'll be out in the streets protesting the
stranglehold that the 1% has on the media.

In theory, the entire RIR system could simply cease to exist, except for
their record keeping role, and all of the remaining IPs could be sold off
to the highest bidders.  This would result in the laissez faire capitalism
end game for IP addresses, and yes, there would inevitably be robber
baron landlords and perhaps even an eventual very destructive attempt on
someone's part to "corner the market".  Or we can just keep things as they
are now, which is a kind of benevolent socialism where we make at least
some effort, pretentious or otherwise, to give "to each according to his
needs."

I don't know the right answer, and to be frank, I worry a lot about
anybody who thinks that they do.  The present system has worked for
quite a long time, but not without what I see as many notable failures,
the most grotesque of which having only been recently uncovered by myself
in a different region.

One short anecdote may help to illustrate the fundamentally insoluable
economics conundrum.

Recently, while talking via skype to my new friend Jan in South Africa,
he noted to me that the government there is now being forced... by dire
financial circumstances... to seriously consider privatizing some or all
of Eskom, the country's government-owned and massively money-losing
electric utility.  (Note also that Eskom's huge financial troubles have
been linked to allegations of corruption.)

I laughed when Jan told me this, and informed him that here in my home
state of California, our governor has publicly speculated about going
in the exact opposite direction... perhaps having the state take over
the troubled and embattled Pacific Gas & Electric Company... PG&E... 
in the wake of its apparent failures to perform routine maintenance...
generally considered to be the root cause of numerous massive wildfires...
thereby hopefully insuring that in future, paying regular dividends to
shareholders will no longer take precedence over badly needed maintenance
expenditures.

So which is better?  Socialist state control or laissez faire capitalism?
I think it's funamentally an insoluable debate, an economic Catch-22 in
which you are damned if you do and damned if you don't, and that at base
anyone vigorously arguing in favor of one or the other is really arguing
only in favor of rearranging the pieces on the board, without materially
changing the game, and is really just arguing in favor of exchanging one
set of crooks for a different one... no offense to any present company
intended.


Regards,
rfg