Damien Leroy and Olivier Bonaventure. A Secure Mechanism for Address Block Allocation and Distribution. In Amitabha Das, Francis Bu Sung Lee, Hung Keng Pung, and Lawrence Wai Choong Wong, editor, Proc. IFIP Networking, pages 748-755, Singapore, May 2008. Springer Verlag.     

The Internet community is seeing both a growth in the allocation of IPv4 addresses and also the end of the IPv4 addressing space. According to the latests predictions, the IPv4 addressing space will be exhausted in 2011-2012. Instead of focussing on the development of IPv6, ARIN is considering to allow owners of IPv4 addresses to sell them to anyone instead of giving them back for free to ARIN when they are not used anymore.