Reuters reports IAC will keep Ask.com, Match.com, Evite, Citysearch, and Excite, while spinning off its HSN home shopping network, Interval time-share business, Ticketmaster ticket service, and its mortgage referral business LendingTree.

IAC’s Barry Diller said, "We’ve been a complex enterprise almost from the very beginning 12 years ago, with hundreds of transactions over those years. And while we’ve created a lot of value, I’ve always believed our complexity and many mouthfuls of sentences to explain who we are and what our strategy is have hampered clarity and understanding with all our constituencies, particularly investors."

Sure, it makes sense to spin-off those units that don’t gel together, but it seems that IAC will retain a mishmash of companies: search, dating, invites, local. Not a whole lot of synergy there.

No, wait! I get it….

• Find a date on Match.com
• Check they’re not a criminal using Ask.com
• Find a restaurant for that first date using Citysearch
• Invite a few friends using Evite–in case he is a psycho
• Over dinner, reminisce about the days when people actually used Excite.

Makes perfect sense.

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IAC will keep its Media & Advertising sectory, which includes Ask.com, and its Emerging Businesses sector, along with a handful of investments in other firms.

However, the IAC board has decided a few brands and their underlying parts will have to fend for themselves in the marketplace. Lending Tree received particular attention from IAC chairman Barry Diller during the company’s third quarter earnings announcement, as that unit suffered from the global real estate and lending slowdown.

The moves take IAC out of the mortgage, event ticketing, travel, and most shopping businesses that had been under the corporate umbrella.

"I’ve always believed our complexity and many mouthfuls of sentences to explain who we are and what our strategy is have hampered clarity and understanding with all our constituencies, particularly investors," said Diller in a statement.

Those spun-off units provided IAC with the resources it needed to invest in Internet brands, like Ask. Now that those Internet business units have begun to show "real scale" according to Diller, it became time to cut loose the other companies.

In late December, Baker published a blog post detailing how he got the name and phone number of a spammer, and then proceeded to call him "to let him know how I feel about their spam."

According to Baker, he had been receiving a large amount of image spam from an online pharmacy called RXCart.org, a site that sells prescription pills in bulk. In the blog post, Baker alleged that RXCart.org orders were processed by Health Solutions Network, whom he also assumes is responsible for the spam.

Health Solutions Network is run by Ralph Penton, a Washington state resident, easily enough found through public information published on the Internet. Health Solutions Network took about as kindly to the spammer accusations as Penton did about being told off on the telephone by a complete stranger.

Penton and his company filed suit against Baker, alleging defamation, tortious interference with contracts, restraint of trade, trademark infringement and trademark dilution, fraud, and harassment by phone.

Baker shouldn’t have been surprised by being served the papers. The company came right on his blog and gave him notice in the comments section. Among their objections:

Health Solutions Network, LLC (HSN) does not currently, nor has the Company ever processed orders for RxCart.org. Your claim to that effect is not accurately founded and is false. This we can prove.

In the case you cite in your BLOG, you have found HSN because the clever spammer wanted you to. The spammer is hiding behind an attractive target to divert the vigilant attention of fed up, but uninformed individuals. [...]

The Conclusion in your BLOG that HSN is a spammer is completely and totally false.

Informing your readership to follow the same path that you did to HSN is irresponsible and uninformed and has resulted in possible criminal harassment. HSN has filed a complaint with the Snohomish County Police Department. [...]

In addition, the phone company is now working in conjunction with the sheriff’s department actively tracing all inbound phone calls that are made to the phone number listed on the original blog post. All calls will be treated as harassment and acted on accordingly.

If HSN’s defense is accurate, then there are two important takeaways from this case, both related to Internet research. The first is that the Web is well-suited for clandestine, nearly anonymous tomfoolery. For those that know what they’re doing, it’s easy to be somebody else.

The second thing we learn is that privacy for the non-hackers out there may be a thing of the past. Nobody knows better than Google’s Eric Schmidt how easy it is to get a wealth of kinda-sorta-public-but-kinda-sorta-private information off the Web.

Via Media Law Resource Center

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