As much of the article deals with the "address shortage" excuse why not work with (order?) some of these groups to give back some of the IP addresses? How many of these addresses are wasted anyway?

I had a similar idea when working for a multinational telecom equipment supplier. Their network was firewall protected with non-private IP addresses. All public internet traffic was NATed at the firewall (except for a few public facing servers in several DMZ around the world). I thought it would have been a great "public service" action had they renumbered their network with private addresses and given back their million address to the internet community. They didn't agree.

Yes it is a big job, but their network had grown into a unmanageable mess over time anyway. It would have been a clean start with enormous cost savings in future maintenance and it didn't have to be done over night.

It can be only a matter of time until someone starts this.