Arnold Nipper writes:
Simon Poole wrote: ...
A note on the side: not allowing purchase of IP addresses in other countries would very likely be illegal at least inside the EU including any other restrictions on usage of not nationally obtained IP addresses.
I can't see this. Don't take it as buying but paying sort of tax for it.
If it's considered a lease or a purchase dosen't matter, only governments raise taxes.
The main problem is that if it's a small enough ammount to be painless, it's too expensive to bill for (a one time bill for $10 is clearly not going to make any sense at all).
It should be *no* problem to do this for a 2 or 3-year period (one time for setup, recurrent for maintaining). This would give a "bill" for about $50 once in three years.
Except that going to a system like this has significant implications in two ways: - the fact that you are now selling/leasing IP numbers has legal consequences (guarentees and liabilities), that you very likely will not be able to avoid (better never allocate an IP number twice :-)).* - currently IP number registration is very much "assign and forget", a significant amount of infrastructure and cost is involved if you regulary have to chase IP number owners down. Simon * very likely this already applies now, however at least I sleep better as long as we're not asking money for the service :-).