Rumoursville: Google sniffing round Skype
It's been a while since the last juicy web business rumour, so this will do nicely. — Currently in favour around London's webbist community is the rumour that Google has been in negotiations to buy Skype, the web telephony firm, from eBay.
Context & Ripple Effects
The rumour lands roughly two years into eBay's ownership of Skype, a stretch the trade press had already written off: Techdirt dismissed eBay's latest Skype plans as 'no more convincing' back in June 2006, and by that August the New York Times was framing eBay as gambling on a Google partnership to make the internet phone service pay off. A Google buyout would be the exit that partnership talk only hinted at.
It also slots into an established pattern: this is the second time in two years Google has been cast as the buyer in a major unconfirmed deal — Search Engine Watch ran the same exercise over an Opera acquisition rumour in December 2005. As the source here is London web-community chatter rather than any filing or statement, the claim stays firmly in rumoured territory.
First-order effects
- For eBay, credible outside interest offers an exit path from an acquisition it has spent two years failing to justify publicly — and immediate leverage over how Skype is priced, run, or resold.
- For Google, buying Skype outright would upgrade the partnership role the New York Times described in 2006 into direct ownership of Skype's users and its peer-to-peer calling technology.
Second-order effects
- Even unresolved, a named deep-pocketed suitor resets the market: any other bidder for Skype, or any partner eBay might court instead, now negotiates against the valuation implied by Google's interest.
- A completed deal would leave rivals in web communications answering to a combined Google search-plus-Skype offering rather than competing with the two separately.
Third-order effects
- With Opera in 2005 and Skype in 2007, a structural pattern is forming: Google functions as the market's default imagined acquirer, meaning rumours attach to it regardless of intent — and those rumours alone move seller expectations and valuations.
- If the deal logic holds — one web giant shedding a misfit asset to another — large-scale M&A shifts from startups buying startups toward portfolio trading between incumbents.
The trend: Big-web M&A is entering a rumour-driven phase in which Google is repeatedly cast as the default buyer for scale assets their current owners cannot monetise.