[Fwd: Kremen VS Arin Antitrust Lawsuit - Anyone have feedback?]

Fri Sep 8 18:01:23 UTC 2006

3) What's wrong with treating assignments like property and setting up a
market to buy and sell them? There's plenty of precedent for this: 

 Mineral rights, mining claims, Oil and gas leases, radio spectrum.  

 If a given commodity is truly scarce, nothing works as good as the free
market in encouraging consumers to conserve and make the best use of it.

I think you're dead-on there, but you forget who you're really trying to
convince.  It'll happen eventually but in the meantime the greybeards
who were largely responsible for the Internet as we know it (and who by
and large still wield significant influence if not still stewardship)
will be dragged there kicking and screaming from their
academic/pseudo-Marxist ideals, some of whom seem to still resent the
commercialization of the Internet.  It's also hard to see the faults in
the system when you are insulated by your position as member of the
politburo. 

The flip side of the coin of course is that if you let the free market
reign on IP's, you may price developing countries right off the Internet
which I don't think anyone sees as a desirable outcome.  There's sure to
be a happy middle ground that people smarter than I will figure out, and
maybe it takes a silly lawsuit such as this to kick things off.

Andrew Cruse 

Another somewhat important point is that we also need to conserve
routing entries.  If you make a market for addresses without regard to
routability, you risk creating a situation where you flood the world
with /32's.  No thanks.

Tony

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