How can Nortel sell something they do not own?<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion#Markets_in_IP_addresses" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion#Markets...</a><p>"The concept of legal "ownership" of IP addresses as property is explicitly denied by ARIN and RIPE NCC policy documents and by the ARIN Registration Services Agreement. It is not even clear in which country's legal system the lawsuits would be resolved."
So, $7.5 million for 666,624 IP addresses. Now the question is, how much is the 16,777,214 IP addresses that Apple owns worth? (Apple owns the entire 17.0.0.0 Class A subnet) Was this factored into Apple's valuation?<p>I would love to hear the story behind how Apple got the 17.0.0.0 subnet.
It could be an investment on the formation of a black market, or insurance against the exhaustion of the IPv4 space. Now, since they make the IPv6 stack of the most popular desktop OS in the world, I'm not sure what this means.
I think strategically it's a wise move. For MS 7.5m is a small sum. In case IPv6 will not be deployed at the speed we all want their investment will pay off tenfold because IPv4 addresses will be gold. They try to hedge the address exhaustion risk.
One company sold an asset to another company, and kept normal records of the sale. I don't consider that the "black market." It's just the natural secondary market. (Yes, I'm only making a semantic distinction, but I think it's misleading to use the same term to refer to, say, the cocaine economy and the above-board sale of IP addresses.)