Verizon!'s top! lawyer! ponders! walking! away! from! Yahoo! gobble!

Verizon has acknowledged that it could call off its $4.8bn acquisition of Yahoo!, after the Purple Palace fell victim to the largest user data breach on record. Speaking with reporters at an event Thursday, Verizon general counsel Craig Silliman said Verizon does feel the exposure of 500 million Yahoo! Mail accounts could …

[Ole Juul]

business

Verison is going to play this to the hilt.

[a_yank_lurker]

Re: business

They have a legitimate reason to reduce their offer significantly.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: business

Heck, they have a legitimate reason to just call the whole thing off. What Yahoo! was caught doing could well be considered a failure of fiduciary or regulatory duty, making them poison in a legal sense.

[Eddy Ito]

Re: business

Don't forget that half the value of Yahoo is the consumer data which Verizon can now likely buy much cheaper online from the hackers.

[Gnosis_Carmot]

Re: business

Cheaper, yes. However, that would open them up to a major class-action sue-grenade from any lawyer looking to get rich quick.

[devangm]

They need to show their shareholders they are doing everything they can in good faith. They might have a reason to reduce the offer, but what they got still isn't a bad deal.

[DavCrav]

"They might have a reason to reduce the offer, but what they got still isn't a bad deal."

Really? They are buying Yahoo!, and the price had a bn at the end. I think that's a bad deal, personally. I think at the time someone on the comments here accurately valued it as being worth 18p, three buttons and a pen top. Not a whole pen, mind.

[VLSI]

Well, according to this: http://adage.com/article/digital/tim-armstrong-yahoo-verizon-deal-means-ad-world/305157/

"AOL and Yahoo sites had an unduplicated U.S. audience of 236 million unique visitors in June, surpassing Facebook's 209 million and trailing only Google's 242 million, according to ComScore."

You have to squint to compare all those eyeballs, but it's not too shabby for spending around 9 billion. It's not about the data, but the eyeballs.

[Charles 9]

But how many do Verizon ALREADY have? They're one of the biggest communications companies in the country, after all. How many of those eyeballs are UNIQUE to them?

[Anonymous Coward]

We are confident in Yahoo's value

I hope whoever's come up with this (off the usual "response generator") has already booked a job appointment with several potential employers. I'm sure there's a neverending demand for such creative nonsense.

[Destroy All Monsters]

Re: We are confident in Yahoo's value

But the value is left unstated---

[Anonymous Coward]

Disclosure

No doubt they would be able to call it off.

When asked about potential liabilities, Yahoo did not disclose that data breach to the buyer.

They were aware of the breach at the time.

They did not disclose it to the government as required by law.

They did not disclose it to the buyer even though there are huge financial liabilities in the form of fines and court cases.

My question: how many active email accounts are there now? I know I finally deactivated mine after this mess - I doubt that I'm alone. And if enough people are doing the same thing, that affects their value also.

[Elf]

Re: Disclosure

I logged in, looked around. I have had a Yahoo! account for as long as it's really been around. Hell, I lived three blocks from the effing Purple Monstrosity in SOMA (San Francisco). It was like 20 EMails (I don't use POP, and their WebMail was 'Meh'). None of their services ever *really* appealed to me (they were a Great Directory). Whole thing was cobwebs and crickets. Nothing worth saving, nothing to move.

That Service Provider has displayed an unacceptable level of responsibility with user data, the law, and to The Shareholders (whom I could care less about but I Totally wanted to type "Please, won't you think of The ShareHolders?").

Instituting the Nuclear Option was the Only Option. So, we make two.