[colmmacc]

Skype's founders are Danish and Swedish, and the business had offices in London, Luxembourg, Estonia (well that's Blue Moon, where the p2p was developed) and more.

I'm not sure how much diligence Ebay ever did on their purchase of Skype, but it never seemed to me like they had a credible business plan for what to do with it. Something something about integrating with sellers. Felt more like the leadership there suffered from some Bay Area strategic acquisition envy. I remember being on painful calls with Ebay and Skype engineering who had very different ideas of how infrastructure should be deployed.

Anyway, Ebay spun off Skype (at a loss) to private equity ... not to MS. Skype floated around in PE for a few years before the (enormous) MS purchase. MS promptly put Skype in an advertising division of all places. I've heard rumors that the DoJ encouraged MS to make the acquisition ... to get Skype calls in the hands of an entity that would be more favorable to lawful interception requests. MS certainly has a painful history with the DoJ, but I really don't know if it's credible or not.

[easytiger]

My understanding, potentially flawed, was that the eBay purchase was so poorly overseen, that eBay didn't buy the Skype IP itself, retained in another company thus giving a neutered failure of a deal