Borders, the retail book seller that went bankrupt earlier this year, is trying to sell off its remaining assets. One of them is a large batch of IP addresses it currently controls. The Register reports that according to a New York bankruptcy court filing. Borders plans to sell 65,536 IPv4 addresses to healthcare software vendor Cerner. The asking price is $12 per address which would make the final total to be $786,432.
The story says that the company in charge of selling the IP addresses, StreamBank, was contacted by thousands of potential bidders. They included companies that you would expect would want control of such a large batch of IP addresses, including domain name registries and Internet service providers. In the end, Cerner came up with the highest bid. The deal is not yet official.
The filing said that ARIN, the regional IP address registry for North America, has to consent to the transfer. The heading to approve the sale is expected to happen in court on December 20.
While this kind of deal is unusual, it is not unique. Earlier this year Microsoft spent a whopping $7.5 million in order to obtain control of 666,624 IPv4 addresses from bankrupt telecommunications company Nortel.
With IPv4 addresses now subject to dwindling supplies as companies slowly transition over to IPv6, these kind of IP address deals could become more commonplace in the months ahead.
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