Two years after its bankruptcy filing, Nortel Networks Ltd. still has things to sell.

Bankruptcy court documents say Nortel put 666,624 IPv4 addresses up for sale last year, and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) emerged as the winner this week, with a $7.5 million bid.

As Domain Incite notes, that's $11.25 per address, making the IPv4 address space theoretically worth around $48.3 billion.

Why this matters
As the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) ran out of IPv4 numbers, everybody liked to joke that a black market for addresses might pop up. "Black market" is a bit of a misnomer, given that the sales are done on the up-and-up, but the deal shows that if you've got enough addresses, you can find a buyer.

For more
Here's more on the IPv4 apocalypse (and on Nortel's other pending selloffs).

— Craig Matsumoto, West Coast Editor, Light Reading