How does one go about acquiring IPV4 addresses as an investment? Thoughts on viability of ROI?
Bad ROI. For Microsoft, this is more like insurance. Pay now a little to avoid a potential, small probability, high future loss.
Microsoft spends $7.5m on IP addresses
11–20 of 44 posts
Re: Microsoft spends $7.5m on IP addresses
#12How can Nortel sell something they do not own?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion#Markets...
"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."
Re: Microsoft spends $7.5m on IP addresses
#13It 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.
Re: Microsoft spends $7.5m on IP addresses
#14There's something missing in this article. Why do Microsoft need all these IP-adresses? I'm sure someone here can give me a clever answer.
I'm guessing it's related to their cloud offering. The ability to have a big pool of IP addresses that they can offer to people using their cloud means they don't have to ration them quite as strictly. Amazon already limits you in the amount of elastic IPs that you get out of the box (you can request more http://aws.amazon.com/contact-us/eip_limit_request/ but you need to fill out a form). As things get more scarce,…
What about IPv6?
Re: Microsoft spends $7.5m on IP addresses
#15One 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.)
Re: Microsoft spends $7.5m on IP addresses
#16One 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.)
I think the implied point in the article is that in this case Microsoft and Nortel had to disclose the sale details, but in most other circumstances, the would not have done that. It seems that the author implies that this sale is an indication that a black market is forming, not that this was a black market transaction.
Re: Microsoft spends $7.5m on IP addresses
#17How can Nortel sell something they do not own? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion#Markets... "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."
These are "Legacy" IPv4 addresses, that were allocated before the formation of any RIR
Re: Microsoft spends $7.5m on IP addresses
#18From March. It is a little curious that MS is buying something that ARIN is giving away for free.
Microsoft bought 666K addresses. How many addresses does ARIN even have now, and how likely are they to assign such a large block to a single entity at this point?
Zero, and thus zero. No more IPv4 addresses exist; anyone wanting a new block of them would have to get them on the secondary market like this.
Edit: I stand corrected; while the root IPv4 namespace has no more available addresses to distribute to the regional registries like ARIN, the regional registries themselves still have some addresses left.
Re: Microsoft spends $7.5m on IP addresses
#19This is artificial scarcity for you. Numbers. They're paying millions of dollars for a set of numbers.
Re: Microsoft spends $7.5m on IP addresses
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm guessing it's related to their cloud offering. The ability to have a big pool of IP addresses that they can offer to people using their cloud means they don't have to ration them quite as strictly. Amazon already limits you in the amount of elastic IPs that you get out of the box (you can request more http://aws.amazon.com/contact-us/eip_limit_request/ but you need to fill out a form). As things get more scarce,…
What about IPv6?
How many ISPs and consumers are set up to use it? I think it's still a while before IPv6 will be viable.