Debate swirls over IPv4 resale rules

netbuzz writes: A bankruptcy court recently approved Nortel’s sale of almost 670,000 IPv4 addresses to Microsoft for $7.5 million. Despite this precedent, there remains great disagreement in Internet policy circles about how future sales of IPv4 addresses – particularly the largest blocks issued during the Internet’s early years – will proceed. Says a broker of the Nortel/Microsoft deal: ``It means that the pejorative term ‘black market’ is a thing of the past, and the creation of an open, legitimate secondary market for the sale of number blocks, under a legal framework, is now undisputed.’’ Yet the details are very much still being disputed.