Fred writes: > It seems to me that these two can't both be true. > IP Addresses cannot at once be scarce enough to > charge for and non-scarce enough that scarcity is > a non-issue.
They are becoming scarce in the way that they are managed; they are not yet scarce in absolute terms (total number of possible addresses). This is the same problem that the telephone system has and has had in the past; that's why North American area codes can now contain digits other than 0 and 1 as the second digit, and local exchange prefixes can now contain 0 and 1 as the second digit.
