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This is artificial scarcity for you. Numbers. They're paying millions of dollars for a set of numbers.
From 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?
http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/index.html https://www.arin.net/resources/request/ipv4_depletion.html https://www.arin.net/policy/nrpm.html#four
Why is this on the front page of Hacker news when the article is from march?
How does one go about acquiring IPV4 addresses as an investment? Thoughts on viability of ROI?
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.)
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The sale was a part of the normal economy. One company paid another company for something, and the sale was recorded in their books. The "something" is not illegal. The term "black market" is usually reserved for transactions that happen outside of the regular economy, usually because they are illegal.
I would love to hear the story behind how Apple got the 17.0.0.0 subnet.
This is artificial scarcity for you. Numbers. They're paying millions of dollars for a set of numbers.
This sounds clever but actually bespeaks a lack of understanding what an IP address is. Microsoft didn't buy a "set of numbers"; they bought the rights, previously secured by another company, to insert prefixes into hundreds of thousands of routers operated (at galactic levels of expense) by hundreds of companies around the world.
IPV6 really can't come soon enough.