Does anyone own the patent to make calls over the net?

Well, in a Internet Phone industry that’s waiting to explode uncontrollably, who owns the Patent to the Internet Phone can be literally a Million Dollar question - or is it a Billion Dollar question? While we can debate about the uncertainties of the size of the market, what is certain is that Net2Phone has dragged Ebay for apparently infringing its patent for placing calls over the net.

Ebay owns Skype the popular brand name in the VoIP world - thats growing more popular by the day. The lawsuit alleges that Ebay infringed Net2 Phone patent under US Patent Class 704 that broadly covers data processing encompassing speech signal processing, linguistics, language translation, and audio compression/decompression.

Net2Phone is seeking damages and an injunction against further infringement. That means it would like to see use of Skype shut down completely. Its surprising then that Net2Phone waited this long for Skype to grow this popular before it was dragged to court. Does it mean until now Net2Phone was not bothered over its patent rights or was it so careless or perhaps blissfully ignorant?

If this is allowed I wonder who is going to be the next to sue whom on the same grounds quoting infringement of data processing patents over the internet? Would it be Microsoft suing others like Yahoo and Google for copying its Emailing Idea (considering MSN Hotmail was the webs first Free Email system) or would it be the US Defence department itself suing the rest of the world for using the Internet that it originally designed and developed for its own use?

But do MSN Hotmail and the US Defence Department hold patents for any of these they claim their own? Now that I suppose would really be a multi trillion dollar question.