Skype's Principal Architect explains why peer-to-peer was eliminated
Peer-to-peer technologies not only make Skype obsolete, but also make it much harder to spy on people.<p>By the way, use WebRTC or some completely peer-based video conferencing (WebRTC still uses central servers to establish connections).  Don't use Skype.  Doesn't make any sense from a technology standpoint or from a privacy standpoint or anything.<p>I am actually amazed by how little discussion there is on Hacker News and reddit about peer-to-peer technologies for things like video conferencing, publishing and realtime data collaboration.<p>This whole NSA thing should be enough to push things like named data networking/content centric networking, WebRTC and meshnets (<a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan</a>) into the mainstream.<p>I believe that we are going to move away from a lot of traditional ways of doing things pretty soon.  For one, obviously centralized servers have to go.  Replace that with encrypted, privacy-focused data oriented networking.<p>Replace centralized internet backbones with wifi meshnets, private laser systems, even private fiber networks, etc.<p>Its very nice to have a simple programming language and API available with things like Webkit and Mozilla browsers, but that still puts too much power in the hands of a few companies, and locks us into particular implementations, and also traps us within the browser.<p>Programmers and businesses do need easy-to-use, cross-platform and cross-device APIs and programming languages.  I think we can port a lot of the Web APIs to a language-neutral, binary-neutral, implementation-neutral semantic representation.  Dump as much of the unnecessary complexity from Web APIs as possible.<p>Take a look at what HTML/SVG etc. provide and re-engineer a more general purpose solution for representing all kinds of things _including_ software source code that is based on truly semantic representation inspired by description logics which separates presentation from display/editing.