John said:
Well, you could acquire a company that already has one. 
That has been the suggestion from several people.
I've even considered it, especially when one of my local
competitors has a /18, and they are much smaller than we are.
We 'NAT' an incredible amount of dial-up and commercial customers
to reduce our need for public IP's, and trends thankfully went to
customers WANTING to be NAT'd and Proxied for 'firewall' reasons,
with only a few public IP's.
It seems a poor reasons for acquiring a company, as they
really do not "own" the address space. --Mike--
Companies with large quantities of usable IP space
typically got it prior to ARIN's existance in which case they
do, indeed, "own" it.
  --msa
> It seems a poor reasons for acquiring a company, as they
> really do not "own" the address space. --Mike--
  Companies with large quantities of usable IP space
typically got it priorto ARIN's existance in which case they
do, indeed, "own" it.
But as Stanford University has shown:
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2000/0124ipv4.html
there is another way. Anyone know whether ARIN has started to allocate
yet IPs from the former class A of Stanford?
  --msa
Hank
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2000/0124ipv4.html
"We don't have any plans to renumber our network," says Richard Moore,
division manager for network services at Michigan State University. Moore
says the university is using a fraction of the Class A space that was
originally allocated to Merit, a consortium of Michigan universities and
colleges.
Wow. I bet MERIT is proud to have Richard onboard. And here I was
worried that *I* had made an ass of myself in public. Thanks Richard. I
feel MUCH better about myself now.