Not commenting on the acquisitions rumors; > The acquisition of Skype, after which all the peer-to-peer traffic was routed through Microsoft, essentially allow

Not commenting on the acquisitions rumors; > The acquisition of Skype, after which all the peer-to-peer traffic was routed through Microsoft, essentially allowing them to snoop on the conversations. To pre-empt the technical counter argument that this was done to improve the service: It only improved the service for some edge cases, for everybody else the service got worse because of the extra round-trip latency. So if that was the real reason then you’d have expected to see the traffic routed to the central servers only if one of those edge cases was detected. IIRC the main reasons this was done are (i) due to the complexity of porting P2P code across many platforms and (ii) for resource consumption on mobile devices. These are hardly edge cases.