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Comment by fulafel | Hacker News Reader

Anyone have pointers to the history of IP addresses becoming tradeable, as opposed to just being allocations and up to registrar to reallocate?

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The pivotal event was the Nortel-Microsoft deal where a court overruled the IANA hippies and said that IP blocks look like property and quack like property so they must be property.

Interesting. Followup question, is this the case only for ARIN addresses / US court system, or does it work like that elsewhere too?

AFAIK all the RIRs eventually decided to allow IP trading so no more precedents are needed.

And thank goodness to! The only way these IP addresses are getting efficiently used (now) is there is an actual value and market for IPv4.

AWS charges $1/month or $12/year to sit on an IP address unused. This price / value pressure has freed up a TON of address space and pushed down pricing signals on a lot of ipv4 usage (ie, you can say is it worth $300M to buy a class A or maybe we should spend $200M to get IPv6 going.

Even if this was the case (efficient market hypothesis is a dogma...) it could have been better if the money went to the internet orgs and could have been used to incentivise the migration off of ipv4. See the problems in eg the idea of all carbon trading credits being owned by the historically biggest CO2 emitter companies.

Dogma or not, there's always some cost to giving up addresses so nobody would give them up for free. A transfer tax to help pay for the transition would be an interesting idea but I don't know if IANA or the RIRs could plausibly implement that.

It appears to have started in 1993: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing

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