Fred writes:
It seems to me that these two can't both be true.
IP Addresses cannot at once be scarce enough to
charge for and non-scarce enough that scarcity is
a non-issue.
They are becoming scarce in the way that they are managed; they are not yet
scarce in absolute terms (total number of possible addresses). This is the same
problem that the telephone system has and has had in the past; that's why North
American area codes can now contain digits other than 0 and 1 as the second
digit, and local exchange prefixes can now contain 0 and 1 as the second digit.