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Currently I can get a domain for less than $US 20 per year and that will get injected in the "DNS routing table" of every provider in the world. I fail to see why a block of IP addresses should cost more.
(a) scarcity: the number of possible IP addresses (4 billion) is rather less than the number of possible domain names (37 ** 63 per name segment) (b) impact on other people's systems: a DNS delegation just sits quitely on a couple of DNS servers in a corner, minding its own business, until someone happens to ask about it; a prefix advertised into the global routing table ends up occupying space in every router in the world with a "full table" and being shuttled around between them fairly often. More DNS delegations means bigger hardware at Verisign (or whoever); more prefixes (eventually) means bigger hardware for all routers that make up the Internet. 2 ** 24 (all possible /24s advertised) is a big number, even at only 64 bytes per routing entry (2 ** 30 bytes of memory). (c) volume: a block of IP addresses consists of multiple addresses; at the US$1250/year mark, that's over 1000 usable addresses. If you were to get 1000 $20 domain names, it'd cost more than US$1250/year :-) (d) scale: the many millions of .com domain names pay for the registry; the few thousand APNIC members need to pay for APNIC to run With all that said, I do sympathise with those with smaller-than-/22 requirements for whom portability and/or the ability to multihome would be useful. And if there's some appropriate way that smaller applications can be fitted within APNIC's requirements it'd be worth considering. However my recollection of what the University of Waikato was doing was that it was largely making allocations along the lines of the proposed "national internet registry" -- at least from the point of view of those receiving the allocations -- and 10 years later, it didn't turn out quite as smoothly as one might have hoped. So if it is done some thought will need to be given as to how one will ensure the "portable" assignments will remain "portable" for an extended period of time. Ewen