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What Richard and the politicians don't understand is that the purpose of IPv6 was to simplify routing.  Yes, it does support enough addresses for every man, woman & child on the planet (actually, there are enough for millions of addresses PER PERSON for thousands of years!)

If a "permanent address" was assigned to a person, this would require akward routing updates if that person moved.  What's similar, but more flexible & likely, is a address registry. ie: ISPs are required to give customers a static IP and report that IP to some governement authority.  The same policy could be applied to companies or anybody who owned a router. 

Big Brother'esque? a bit...
Of course most attempts to protect privacy & web annonymity help perpetuate identity theft, spam and other malicious activity.  So take your pick...

Lest we forget, IP addresses are MACHINE addresses, not human addresses. Machines have no right to privacy or anything else. Do you have a telephone number? Most are so public they are listed in a directory freely available to anyone. Let's get real, IP addresses are not and should not be private...

I don't see how this idea can have any real merit.   Personally identifiable addresses make sense IF you can verify who is actually using the IP address - the same people who cannot police credit card numbers and protect us from identity theft now want another number to keep track of?

Like typical wrong headed politicians these guys are ignoring the problem children of the internet (spammers, hackers, phishers) looking only for a way to squeeze the freedom and finances of the typical law abiding netizen.

I tell you what.  When these glorious foward thinking eggheads can find a way to keep spam out of my inbox and eliminate phishing/spam/viruses then they can move onto clamping down on the regular law abiding citizens.  Until then I'll thank them to mind their own damn business until they can get the obvious stuff right.

The idea of personal ownership of IP addresses can be taken one step further. The crazy UK national ID card scheme, as promoted by ex-prime minister Tony Blair, can be replaced much more simply and more reliably by an international ID number scheme, by using one IPv6 address per person (or more exactly per identity).

That ID number can then be used as the key to a record in any database anywhere, such as phone numbers or biometric data or bank details or health records. Access to one database (e.g. visa permits) could be simply controlled by using algorithms or data stored in any other nominated database (e.g. iris patterns) under the same key.