IT’S BEEN a strange and disorienting week for those interested in vast amounts of cash being exchanged for apparently not much in the way of goods. Let me list the billion dollar deals. Microsoft paid AOL a billion dollars for various patents; Facebook paid a billion dollars worth of cash and shares for Instagram, a photo-uploading company with a dozen employees; and ATT sold a majority stake in the US Yellow Pages for $950 million.

One has to wonder, at first glance, whether any of the buyers in these deals got their money’s worth.

Microsoft is no slouch in terms of patents that it already owns, and would be hard pushed to extract a billion dollars worth from the intellectual property it obtained from AOL. Instagram’s main twist on other photography services was that it could tint your photographs to make them look like a 1970s polaroid.

I think it’s fair to say that the number of people who use Yellow Pages in the United States, instead of just Googling an address, is plummeting, aging and dying at broadly equal rates.

But there are always other less obvious aspects to such purchases; and not all of them have to do with the value of the goods purchased. Let’s start with Microsoft. The purchase of AOL’s patents does more than simply boost their own armoury of intellectual property. It stops AOL from deploying them against Microsoft in expensive patent litigation. It also stops AOL from selling them to others who make a career from suing companies such as Microsoft for millions.

That these patents are worth this much is not an indication of the riches in Yahoo!’s past. Instead, it’s a stunning indictment of how broken the modern patent system has become. AOL is using the potential of the paths it failed to exploit to hold others who could, or are, doing so to ransom. Perhaps the bitterest example of this is that part of the AOL deal includes the IP assets of Netscape, the browser company AOL bought after it lost the browser war to Microsoft.

Fortunately, before AOL could pull the plug on what was left of Netscape, its engineers open-sourced the browser. The non-profit descendant of that act of liberation, Mozilla, now produces one of Microsoft’s biggest competitors in the browser market, Firefox. That competition is one of the reasons why the web still remains a vibrant environment to develop within.

I doubt that Microsoft would be so brazen as to initiate a patent war against Mozilla using the patents of its forefathers. But it’s genuinely sad that these patents are still being bargained over, long after their owner had abandoned any use for them.

Similar weirdness surrounds the Instagram/Facebook deal. Instagram had about 30 million users, but had only expanded beyond the iPhone/iPad platform last week. It’s growth rate was phenomenal, but it’s almost certainly true that Facebook could have developed a similar application within their own doors.

Mark Zuckerberg stated that Instagram would continue to be developed as an independent product. In a post on Facebook, he said: “It’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all.”

But why this one, and why now? Arguably, it’s because Instagram was one of the few vibrant competitors to Facebook in the mobile photo-sharing environment, and one of the few services currently seeing explosive, Facebook-like growth, in a market that the social networking company might otherwise expect to dominate.

I suspect, however, that the truth was closer to home. Instagram feels very genetically close to Facebook, in how it approached its user acquisition, and how it used a simple interface to draw them in. Another recent independent app-making purchase, OMGPOP, bought for $200 million by games giant Zynga, has the same matching model.

Pulling off such rapid successes is not, despite outer appearances, an easy trick. Facebook may be willing to pay well for the individuals apparently capable of doing so – especially when others would like to acquire that special skill for themselves.

Facebook might not need Instagram, but it would almost certainly rather not have their talent fall into the hands of its competitors. Both Microsoft and Google continue to scramble to understand and deploy similarly popular networks. If Instagram did not fall into a cosy, Silicon Valley bidding war between Facebook and one or other of these companies, its pricing anticipated the immediate threat of one.

If the rise of Instagram reminds us of the soaring pricing of modern net companies, and the sale of Netscape reminds us of its past, Yellow Pages’ value, while high, hints at the other side of that shift. ATT’s Yellow Pages made $855 million in profit in 2010, and then lost $2.27 million in 2011. Most of ATT’s competitors in the US flogged their equivalent directories when the going was good, and ATT may have closed the deal just in time. When rumours of the purchase hit the circuit last month, the division was valued at $1.5 billion.

Perhaps the best you can say about any of these deals is that someone cashed out just in time.