In message <alpine.lrh.2.21.2001031657540....@bigone.uneedus.com>, hostmas...@uneedus.com wrote:
>There are those that wanted to become landlords of IPv4. I think this >kinda shoots down those hopes. It would appear so. To be frank however, I'm not fully persuaded that the term "landlord" should be so cavalierly tossed around as an epithet with distinctly negative connotations. After all, landlords are job creators! Just ask our Job Creator in Chief! Consideration should also be given to the possibility that Internet landlords could be a good thing. Imagine if you will that in some cases, counties and municipalities might snatch up blocks of IP addresses and then use them to provide the Internet equivalent of Section 8 housing for poor folks who would otherwise be obliged to go without. But seriously folks, the truth is that I myself have never resolved my own internal debate between top-down socialism and unfettered laissez faire capitalism. Thus, one day I'll be out in the streets defending the absolute right of Walmart to chase homeless people off their private property, and the next day I'll be out in the streets protesting the stranglehold that the 1% has on the media. In theory, the entire RIR system could simply cease to exist, except for their record keeping role, and all of the remaining IPs could be sold off to the highest bidders. This would result in the laissez faire capitalism end game for IP addresses, and yes, there would inevitably be robber baron landlords and perhaps even an eventual very destructive attempt on someone's part to "corner the market". Or we can just keep things as they are now, which is a kind of benevolent socialism where we make at least some effort, pretentious or otherwise, to give "to each according to his needs." I don't know the right answer, and to be frank, I worry a lot about anybody who thinks that they do. The present system has worked for quite a long time, but not without what I see as many notable failures, the most grotesque of which having only been recently uncovered by myself in a different region. One short anecdote may help to illustrate the fundamentally insoluable economics conundrum. Recently, while talking via skype to my new friend Jan in South Africa, he noted to me that the government there is now being forced... by dire financial circumstances... to seriously consider privatizing some or all of Eskom, the country's government-owned and massively money-losing electric utility. (Note also that Eskom's huge financial troubles have been linked to allegations of corruption.) I laughed when Jan told me this, and informed him that here in my home state of California, our governor has publicly speculated about going in the exact opposite direction... perhaps having the state take over the troubled and embattled Pacific Gas & Electric Company... PG&E... in the wake of its apparent failures to perform routine maintenance... generally considered to be the root cause of numerous massive wildfires... thereby hopefully insuring that in future, paying regular dividends to shareholders will no longer take precedence over badly needed maintenance expenditures. So which is better? Socialist state control or laissez faire capitalism? I think it's funamentally an insoluable debate, an economic Catch-22 in which you are damned if you do and damned if you don't, and that at base anyone vigorously arguing in favor of one or the other is really arguing only in favor of rearranging the pieces on the board, without materially changing the game, and is really just arguing in favor of exchanging one set of crooks for a different one... no offense to any present company intended. Regards, rfg _______________________________________________ ARIN-PPML You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the ARIN Public Policy Mailing List (ARIN-PPML@arin.net). Unsubscribe or manage your mailing list subscription at: https://lists.arin.net/mailman/listinfo/arin-ppml Please contact i...@arin.net if you experience any issues.