Comment by BirdieNZ
13 hours ago
From a Georgist perspective, IPv4 is actually a form of land (it's a finite "natural resource", although that's not quite proper), and you could make a case for "land rent" being taxed on the addresses. This is the same as radio broadcast frequencies, web addresses, actual land, un-mined gold/oil/coal/whatever, and other finite natural resources that create monopolistic tendencies.
Whereas IPv6 is effectively unlimited, so by Georgist principles should be free. I wonder if charging 'rent' on IPv4 addresses would be enough to get people to switch over?
Incidentally, auctions of time bounded licenses, which are what we use to allocate frequency spectrum, have the same theoretical pareto efficiency as a value tax.
>IPv4 is actually a form of land (it's a finite "natural resource", although that's not quite proper),
It's closer to radiofrequencies I think, these are heavily regulated.
However radiofrequencies are purely natural resources, while IPv4 have a specific copyrightable spec design, domains have trademarkable TLDs