GoFuckYourself.com - Adult Webmaster Forum - Microsoft buys Nortel's vintage web addresses

Cha-ching!
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Quote:

WILMINGTON, Del. (MarketWatch) -- Nortel Networks Corp. NRTLQ -0.36% won court approval Tuesday to sell 666,624 IP addresses of an increasingly scarce vintage to Microsoft Corp. MSFT -2.96% for $7.5 million.

For Nortel, the sale was a welcome opportunity to cash out on strings of numbers that were handed out for free at the dawning of the Internet.

The Canadian company has been liquidating assets since June 2009. Last year, Nortel tripped over a brief opportunity to get money for Web identifiers accumulated during the years when the rising technology star was buying businesses.

The addresses being sold are among the last of the IPv4 addresses, created in 1981 and now almost completely used up. The strings of numbers identify particular devices--computers, Web-enabled phones and other gadgets--hooked to the Internet.

A new batch of addresses is already being handed out, the IPv6 standard, which promises an unlimited supply for the future.

Regular warnings of an Internet space crunch once the IPv4 addresses were all distributed culminated in an official announcement in February that the Web was full--at least as far as the 4.3 billion original strings of identifiers were concerned.

The American Registry for Internet Numbers, one of five registries worldwide that maintains the database of Web identifiers, raised some questions about Nortel's planned sale, but resolved them in talks with Microsoft, Nortel attorneys told Judge Kevin Gross at a hearing in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del. Gross signed off on the sale.

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