Skype’s future just got cloudier. In a regulatory filing this week, Ebay, which in 2005 acquired Skype for a final price of $3.1bn, said it might shut down the internet telephony service if it can’t resolve a legal dispute with Skype’s founders or develop an alternative technology.
The technology used to power Skype is still owned by the company’s founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. Their new company, Joltid, licenses the technology back to Ebay.
But Joltid has accused Ebay of violating the terms of that agreement by using parts of the code it did not license, and has threatened to withdraw the technology. Ebay has asked a British court to intervene, and the case is pending.
In this week’s filing, Ebay said that while it expects to prevail in court, it was working to develop an alternative to the Joltid technology.
