[Arnt]

The internet as a whole doesn't need to benefit; the buyer and seller do. The internet as a whole benefits from the liberty that lets us act without permission from central authorities.

Also, we're currently in a world where no large company owns even 1% of the addresses, and heading towards one where IPv6 is the majority of traffic. Have a look at http://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html and pretend to be an IPv4 address investor. The year-end figures are about 0.4, 1.0, 2.5 and 5.7%, so a little over 100% yearly growth for each of the past three years. If that goes on, we'll pass 50% IPv6 in 2017, and if that happens I rather doubt that IPv4 addresses will be worth much.

Of course that projection doesn't have to be right. Perhaps IPv6 growth slows down. But if you were an investor, would you invest heavily in v4 addresses on the assumption that IPv6 growth slows down? If so, why do you assume it'll slow down?

Oh, and I do think IPv6 will render IPv4 moot. Assuming that trading goes on, IPv4 will increasingly use tunnels and long-prefix routes, and then it'll have the kind of reliability problems v6 had around 2005.