Gert, While I personally cannot attend RIPE 57, I would like to bring to your and this group's attention a paper that Bill Lehr, Tom Vest, and I have developed for TPRC which occurs in Washington DC at the end of next week. Tom may be available, and I do not know about Bill. The following was sent to ARIN's policy list, for your information. The paper is not at all limited to ARIN. Now please see below. -- We would like to bring to your attention a paper that Bill Lehr, Tom Vest, and I wrote for the upcoming TPRC conference, at the end of this month, the title of which is "Running on Empty: The Challenge of managing Internet addresses". The paper looks at transfer markets and specific proposals from the RIRs and provides pluses and minuses to the theoretical space, as well as some commentary on specific proposals. The authors concur that the results of the proposed market initiatives will likely depend on variety of identifiable parameters (e.g., specific transfer policy mechanisms, possible IPv4 reservation policies, secure inter-domain routing initiatives, etc.), but do not agree on the appropriate weighting of risks. In talking about specific RIR proposals we note extreme differences in what we presume to be the assumptions of the authors about ability to enforce regulations and the priorities that an RIR should have. We also look at the impact of transfer markets on IPv6 adoption, and to a lesser extent, on the interdependency between addressing and routing. We hope this paper is useful to continuing a dialog that leads to appropriate evolution of RIR policies. You can find it here <http://tprcweb.com/files/Lehr%20Vest%20Lear%20Internet%20Address%20TPRC%208_15_08.pdf> or by going to www.tprc.org and looking at the detailed agenda for Saturday, along with several other interesting and related papers. Yours, Bill Lehr Tom Vest Eliot Lear