[address-policy-wg] 2007-08 New Policy Proposal (Enabling Methods for Reallocation of IPv4 Resources)

> The address space in question is already allocated, hence 
> unavailable.  The question is how to incent folks to put 
> their "allocated but unused" address space back into play.  
> Stamping your foot and declaring "markets are bad"
> isn't likely to be too helpful.

And thinking that you can influence address-holders decision making
without pricing an IPv4 at several hundred thousand dollars, is also not
likely to be too helpful.

Any organization who contemplates selling a block of IPv4 addresses has
to conside the reality that it would be an extremely constrained market
where the supply is going down and they are not making any new IPv4
addresses. This means that if you do sell, and then discover that you
needed those addresses after all, the price to buy them back could be
substantially higher than your sale price. In the face of continually
rising prices, it is risky to sell any addresses at all, unless you are
absolutely certain, at the CEO/board level, that the addresses are not
needed, or if the price that you would receive is at least several
hundred thousand dollars.

This is a recipe for a gold-rush style market followed by liquidity
collapse which will have additional knock-on effects in the real
markets, i.e. share prices.

--Michael Dillon