I think the decision by Google to not buy Skype is great. Skype uses supernodes/decentralized address book and other trickery to keep the most of the load off t

I think the decision by Google to not buy Skype is great. Skype uses supernodes/decentralized address book and other trickery to keep the most of the load off their servers/NAT proxies. Whatever advantage Skype got from decentralization when it started in 2003 is now long gone. Bandwidth is ridiculously cheap and voice calls don't really take more than 16kbps with modern codecs. If two Skype clients can't connect to each other directly due to NAT, they proxy the connection via supernode. Any Skype client with a public IP address can be a supernode, so they might use your bandwidth and computer to route calls. Skype brand and userbase alone are not worth $8,5B. Their P2P decentralization technology is worth ~$0.