Skype-eBay: I agree

Good grief, with a nearly $5 billion carrot (if all financial incentives are met) dangling in front of them, the Skype folks would have been IDIOTS not to take eBay's dumb money.

I say cash the check, sell the eBay stock as soon as you can and invent something else wild and wonderful that we all can't live without.

--Brock

The reality is that government-mandated backdoors will likely be implemented in all commercial VoIP systems, period. However, at this stage, there are millions of people using Skype based merely on the "faith" that it is reasonably secure. That's bad science across the board.

In the real world, those of us "in the know" are not the people I'm most concerned about. It's the folks who do not have technical backgrounds who are most dependent on us to try keep the commercial operations as honest as possible in a very difficult political environment.

--Lauren--

The bad thing of VoIP is that people do not know and do not understand enough of it.
The good thing is that it is very easy to change from one supplier to the other.

And that is why it was a good business for SKYPE and a bad bargain for eBay.
Because open standard will win, being it h323 or SIP.
There will soon be interconneting platforms.
You will be able to belong to a SIP platform and be able to communicate with a H323 platform.
But Skype will still be a propietary island (with a downward number), relying (as they shout) on other people's nodes.

With Vonage for example you pay for a Service, for Skype you pay for a software.

Patrizia