YAHOO BE MINE AT LAST
Verizon deal a go
Looks like Yahoo’s 1 billion users will indeed become part of the Verizon family.
The wireless giant is close to inking a revised deal to acquire the Web portal after negotiating a discount of $250 million to $300 million off its original $4.8 billion purchase, according to several reports.
Verizon’s original deal, agreed to back on July 25, has been under intense pressure since Yahoo revealed soon thereafter that it had been the victim of two separate and unprecedented data breaches.
The Post reported on Oct. 7 that Verizon was looking for a discount of $1 billion because of the hacks.
Verizon Chief Executive Lowell McAdam dismissed that report as “pure speculation,” saying hacks are the “state of the way the internet operates.” So much for that. Multiple reports on Wednesday had Verizon getting a discount after news of the hacks emerged.
Yahoo shares, on the strength of the news of a restructured deal, first reported by Bloomberg, closed Wednesday at $45.65, up 1.4 percent.
Verizon, in an arms race with rival AT&T, wants to buy Yahoo to give it a major presence in mobile media so it can target youngsters with ads.
AT&T, meanwhile, is in the process of acquiring Time Warner’s various brands to supercharge its efforts to get into the content business.
Verizon currently owns AOL and wants to integrate Yahoo’s popular sites — Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Mail — and technology into the fold.
Meanwhile, Yahoo is subject to a class-action lawsuit filed in January accusing management of making “materially false and misleading statements” and failing to disclose Yahoo had not encrypted its users information.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating the timing of Yahoo’s disclosures.
Separately, Yahoo confirmed Wednesday that it was notifying users that their accounts had potentially been compromised, but it declined to say how many people were affected.
In a statement, the Sunnyvale, Calif., company tied some of the potential compromises to what it has described as the “state-sponsored actor” responsible for the theft of private data from more than 1 billion user accounts in 2013 and 2014.
The stolen data included email addresses, birth dates and answers to security questions. The catastrophic breach raised questions about Yahoo’s security.