IPv4 Addresses Now Go for $12, €8.9 a Piece, as Borders Sells 65,536 of Them

Companies looking to buy some chunk of IP addresses were in luck as the now defunct US bookseller Borders offered a stack of 65,536 IP addresses, a full /16 block of IPv4 addresses, for auction.

Cerner, a healthcare software consulting company, bought the whole lot for $12, €8.93 a pop, for a total of $786,432, €585,635, The Register reports. The deal is interesting since it's one of the few of this kind.

Until recently, IPv4 address blocks were exactly marketable assets. In fact, companies that have been granted these addresses can't actually 'sell' them since they don't own them in the first place.

Unlike domain names, IPv4 addresses are not considered property. In this particular case, the deal still has to be approved by ARIN, the North American regional registry.

At $12 per address, this is the highest price anyone has paid for IPv4 addresses. Of course, the fact that there is probably only one other transaction like this makes it easy to break the record.

Earlier this year Microsoft got its hands on quite a lot of IP addresses from the bankrupt Canadian networking giant Nortel. It paid $7.5 million, €5.58 million for the batch, coming in at $11.25, €8.37 per address. Microsoft got 666,624 IP addresses at the time, but the deal also had to be approved by ARIN.

It's unlikely that IP addresses will start trading like domain names any time soon, but there is a real reason why companies are paying big money for something that is, in essence free, IPv4 addresses have run out.

Earlier this year ICANN distributed the last unallocated IPv4 blocks to the five Regional Internet Registries which will, in turn, hand them out to IPs and other companies that request them.

In most places, there are still some IPv4 for those that need them, but the situation is most dire in Asia. And it's only going to get worse, with the very slow adoption of IPv6.