I've always had this sneaking suspicion that Microsoft bought Skype solely under the direction of the government so that it could be centrally administered and monitored by a vendor that is willing to do the job. There certainly has never been a business case for it that would support the obscene valuation even the first time around. I usually see about 20m users logged in and most of them are probably not active let alone terminating calls to a telco so they represent zero revenue.
Along the same lines, I've always had the thought that the reason IPv6 adoption is taking so long is because encryption is actually built into the protocol.
What happens to all those billion dollar wiretapping facilities all over the country once they find out they can't just siphon internet traffic into their facilities anymore?
"Along the same lines, I've always had the thought that the reason IPv6 adoption is taking so long is because encryption is actually built into the protocol"
Are you talking about IPSec? This is still optional in IPv6 and available using IPv4.
I think the reason adoption is slow is that it's not easy to convince managers to allocate people and time to it... "So, it's not yet broken but you want to fix it?"
Might be why Microsoft was willing to pay twice as much as Google for it, too ($8 billion), for something that is hard to imagine they would get their money back in the next 2 decades or longer. So maybe they have a different business model we are not supposed to know about.
