The situation between eBay and Carl Icahn feels like it has escalated beyond business, to the intensely personal. Icahn keeps lobbing pointed criticism of the company, while CEO John Donahoe defends his record and corporate director and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen fights right back.

We don't have a view about whether eBay should split PayPal, the proximate cause of all this. Nor do we have a view as to whether eBay left billions of dollars on the table when it sold Skype to Andreessen's firm. 

The debate does, though, remind us of some of what we despise most about governance in the US, and in tech companies specifically. We explain this conclusion in a current blog post.