It's not a pretty picture. Now a long and drawn-out study on the subject from the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) asks many of the same questions and makes a predictable selection of suggestions, none of which will change the basic facts.

The report seems optimistic, as I once was, about the potential for re-allocating existing, but under-utilized address space. How much there really is may be debatable, but the real problem with the scheme is that recovering meaningful amounts of the space is politically inconceivable, It would require confiscating the space from its current owners and forcing them to reorganize their networks. Ain't going to happen.

And this is the irony of the proposal: It assumes a burden on the Internet community not too much greater than that for adopting IPv6, which makes the transfer moot anyway.

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