Steve,
> There was a similar discussion here about five years ago where some
> people proposed market models for address allocation and routing.
> Unfortunately, it's not in the archives.
I think it was on CIDRD, actually, no?
> If anyone has this discussion archived, could they please point me to
> it?
Well, one thing I do have is the draft of: "Suggestions for Market-Based
Allocation of IP Address Blocks", by Paul Resnick (then of AT&T Research, I
don't know where he is now - Paul, you out there?), which I have at:
http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/addr_charging.txt
It never turned into an RFC (shame, I thought it was a really well thought
out draft), and I don't think it's anywhere else permanent.
See http://www.research.att.com/~smb/papers/piara/index.html, by Paul,
Yakov Rekhter, and myself.
This paper was also published in in "Coordination the Internet", MIT
Press, 1997 (Rekhter, Y., Resnick, P., Bellovin, S., "Financial
Incentives for Route Aggregation and Efficient Address Utilization in
the Internet").
Yakov.