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If the Skype founders succeed in buying back the Internet calling service from EBay Inc., it would dissolve a marriage that made little sense to customers or investors. EBay bought Skype from Scandinavian entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis in 2005 for more than $3.1 billion. The pair are reportedly seeking private equity partners to help them regain the service.

Taking the first steps to unwind its awkward 2005 marriage, EBay Inc. said Tuesday that it planned to spin off Internet phone service Skype through an initial public offering in 2010. The San Jose company said the divorce would allow it to focus on its core e-commerce business, which has struggled in the last year. It announced plans Monday to sell another acquisition, recommendation search engine StumbleUpon, back to its founders.

EBay Inc., long criticized for its high-priced purchase of Internet phone company Skype, is finally getting out of a marriage that was a mismatch from the start. The online auction company said Tuesday that it would sell 65% of Skype to a group of private investors led by Silver Lake in Menlo Park, Calif., for $1.9 billion in cash plus $125 million to be paid later. EBay would retain the remaining 35%. The deal, which is expected to close in the fourth quarter, valued Skype at $2.75 billion -- a good bit less than the $3.13 billion EBay paid in all for its 2005 acquisition.

The Federal Communications Commission should reject a petition by EBay Inc.'s Skype division to require wireless operators to allow any device on their networks, the agency's chairman said. FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin told an audience at the CTIA Wireless trade show in Las Vegas that the industry's recent push toward openness makes such a rule unnecessary. Skype provides free voice calls and videoconferencing over Internet connections.

A Canadian researcher has discovered that a Chinese version of EBay Inc.'s Skype communications software snoops on text chats that contain certain keywords, including "democracy." The revelation is of interest not only to rights groups that monitor Internet censorship. The discovery also probably intrigues law enforcement and intelligence agencies in other countries, because they have been bothered by the growing use of Skype, which claims 338 million users across the world.

A federal judge has thrown out an antitrust lawsuit filed by the distributor of Morpheus file-sharing software against Internet phone service provider Skype Technologies, EBay Inc. and other defendants. StreamCast Networks Inc. had sought more than $4.1 billion in unspecified damages and a court order blocking EBay from selling Skype services.

They are legendary programmers whose software changed the way people make phone calls and swap music. Skype made them rich. Kazaa for years kept them out of the U.S. to avoid being served a lawsuit by the recording industry -- then cost them millions to settle last summer. Now the two Scandinavian entrepreneurs, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, are working on the future of television through their new online video service, Joost.

Internet phone services let people make calls for little or no money. Some customers are getting what they pay for. A software problem left many users of Skype, the popular program that routes calls over the Internet, unable to connect Thursday. Skype told customers early in the day that it hoped to fix the glitch within 24 hours. The EBay Inc.

EBay Inc.'s Skype Internet phone and chat service was unavailable to millions of users for a second day Friday because of a software glitch, which the company's website said should be fixed within 24 hours. "The problems have certainly not gone away," Skype spokesman Villu Arak said. About 2.6 million Skype users were online as of 9 a.m. London time, compared with "better days," when about 8 million to 9 million people would be using the service, Arak said.

A two-day outage that left millions of Skype users unable to use the popular Internet phone service was caused by an abnormally high number of restarts after people had downloaded a Windows security update, the company said Monday. The worldwide outage, which began Thursday and ended Saturday, left millions of Skype users unable to log on to make phone calls or send instant messages. Luxembourg-based Skype Ltd., part of online auction giant EBay Inc.