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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.

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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.

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