Posted in Menacing Monopoly

Lawsuit scares Google away from bidding for Skype

What a stroke of luck:

Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who became billionaires after selling Skype to eBay in 2005, filed a copyright lawsuit on Wednesday against Skype in the United States District Court of Northern California. The suit comes a little more than two weeks after eBay announced it would sell most of Skype for $1.9 billion to a consortium of investors led by the private equity firm Silver Lake Partners.

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Several potential bidders for Skype, including Google, cited wariness about potential liabilities in the Skype case as a reason for backing away from a potential deal, according to a person briefed on the Skype sales process. It is not clear if the latest suit will delay the Skype sale.

Is there any tech company smaller than Microsoft, Adobe, Yahoo, or Oracle (and excluding hardware manufacturers) that Google bigwigs haven't thought about acquiring?