EBay Acquiring VeriSign Processing for $370 Million

Forum124 was one of the first in a wave of readers to tell us that eBay is acquiring VeriSign's payment processing business for US$370 million. VeriSign will be merged with PayPal and is estimated to generate a 20 percent operating margin which eBay hopes to help offset the recently reported high purchase price of Skype.

Comments

Uh-oh

[iamdrscience]

Great, all they need to do now is buy Amazon and they'll own half the internet.

Re:Uh-oh

[hotdiggitydawg]

Apparently they sniped Google at the last minute...

Re:Uh-oh

[TedCheshireAcad]

EBAY MUST FEED.

Ebay takes umbrage at the sight of your small torso and weak, flaccid limbs.

Re:Trust?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please wait while we process your credit ca^^439 Ba ding ding ding bwaaaaaaaaaaaaaap bwaaaaaaaaaaaaaap boom bom ding ding ding...

With all these acquisitions, it's risky to

[TarrySingh]

look for a job currently. I think I'll just wait till we're down to a handful of companies before starting to look for job again.

Re:RTFA - EBay not acquiring VeriSign

[stevey]

Shame I was looking forward to the browser updates:

Do you trust this certificate?

"A++++ excellent certificate, would do secure business with it again!!! "

eBay must have lots of experience with this

[gringer]

eBay you say?

I wonder how many bidders there were in the auction...

CLOSING SOON! Payment processing division of an ENORMOUS leading software company.

Current Bid: US $30,000 (Reserve not met)

Buy It Now price: US $370,000,000
Condition: very good condition
Item Location: Mountain View, CA 94043
Ships to: USA only
Shipping costs: ChUS $39.00 - US Postal Service Priority Mail (within United States)

Please check out my other divisions at http://www.verisign.com/verisign-inc/index.html

great

[Anonymous Coward]

now we have to compete for ssl tickets

Re:Verisign is teh suck

[speculatrix]

spent 2 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars designing and developing a retail solution based around a particular domain name

Have you ever considered that putting all your eggs into SUCH a critical but easy to lose resource such as a domain name is really REALLY stupid? Did you really have no "plan B", to have a couple of other good (but maybe not QUITE so good) domain names that would allow continuity of business? Even if you didn't lose control of the domains, any kind of major outage or error on your DNS hosting for just a day would have been disastrous!

Of course, you might have been talking about sex.com, in which case, yeah, I'd be pissed off too, and maybe a tad bitter, as that case dragged on for *years*.

This sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Well you guys sat back and let this all happen. Let us all rejoice in 2, possibly 3 megacorps owning the entire internet. that's healthy and American. What's wrong with all you commies ? Let us all pray to Google, Ebay and whoever the other one is, Yahoo or whatever. But no. Something is wrong. It's just not American enough.

I know! Let's merge Google with Yahoo and with Ebay and create:

Gayoogle-Bay !

Bow down and worship this beast. Then let's consolidate all the hosts and ISPs into one blob. Then a global currency and lets all stick microchips that track us everywhere into the lining of our rectums.

ooooh it's the future. ooooooh its like coool duuuuuuuude. What's wrong with you

Great News!

[Trix606]

I'm sure they'll be sending me an e-mail shortly to update my account settings due to the merger.

Re:Seriously bad mix

[Bloke down the pub]

Now, why a random part of an online company is worth $370 million is beyond me.

I was going to answer "Because it has .com on the end and it's like to do with intarwebs and stuff", but I was interrupted by a call from the 1990s asking when I'm going to return their business model.

Re:email from Verisign CEO Stratton Sclavos

[Linux-Fiend]

Translation:

Dear Lemmings,

It's been great driving us around aimlessly but I think it's about time I cashed out. Thank you.

Sincerly,

the CEO