On 8 Oct 2008, at 17:14, <michael.dillon@bt.com> wrote:
Anyone who looks at this aspect of the issue will see that huge amounts of the IPv4 address space are tied up in this way and are very unlikely to ever be transferred to another company if it appears that IP addresses have some monetary value.
I'm not sure it's as simple as that. If/when IP addresses have a more visible monetary value than they do today, I would expect that will create nasty accounting/auditing/taxation problems. For example when an "asset" that the organisation has "owned" for years suddenly appears from out of nowhere on the organisation's balance sheet. If the organisation has no need for some of its IP space and it's not *that* valuable, a CFO might be minded to hand it back rather than face the prospect of retrospectively readjusting their accounts and tax returns for the last umpteen years.