[joshaidan]

So, $7.5 million for 666,624 IP addresses. Now the question is, how much is the 16,777,214 IP addresses that Apple owns worth? (Apple owns the entire 17.0.0.0 Class A subnet) Was this factored into Apple's valuation?

I would love to hear the story behind how Apple got the 17.0.0.0 subnet.

[wmf]

If you want to be optimistic you could carry a /8 on your books at ~$150M. That's a drop in the bucket for most companies that hold /8s, so it's probably not worth arguing about.

The legacy class As were given out by Jon Postel just for asking; if you would ever need more than 256 subnets then a class B wouldn't be big enough so you got a class A.

[jcampbell1]

I have no idea, but I think it is even more ridiculous that Ford Motor Company has 19.0.0.0 At some price, I am sure Ford would be willing to sell, but I am not sure it would be worth the hassle for $150M.

[js2]

HP has both 15/8 and 16/8, the latter originally from Compaq. You can see the other "legacy" allocations here:

http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-addr...

Nicely tabulated http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/02/13/where-did-all-the-ip-num...

[rweir]

the story is "they asked for it and were allocated it under the allocation rules at the time". pre-CIDR, you could get a class A, B or C (mostly), and a class-B isn't /that/ many IPs for a large and growing company when effectively no one else used the Internet at all.