At least over here the major difference was that before that you could demand that you had a phone line pretty much no matter where you lived and it cost about £50 to get it installed, now it costs £1000 and that is if you already live near an existing line. There was an old lady on the news yesterday, her safety alarm would not work any more because the telephone station in their are were being dismantled.

Yay privatization!

>> Because allowing the Skype PtP client on to office computers makes them insecure, and probably uncontrollably violates the Congress firewalls in the process.

Can you provide a link that discusses this in detail? I'd like to know what about Skype is inherently insecure.

As much as people complain about some government/company having the ability to do 'something', completely decentralized systems are also subject to wide spread abuse that is nearly impossible to stop. Think about the proposed "mesh" networking - you traffic goes through who knows whom's device, your IP address comes from where? Your DNS queries come from who knows where? If I can feed you your IP address and DNS results and your data passes through my network - then I own you. Witness what has happened with even fairly simply systems such as SMTP. The world is inundated with SPAM because the system in inherently decentralized and it is impossible to verify where email is coming from. Put all your network traffic through a decentralized system and no one is going to be happy with the results. You think SPAM is bad? You've not seen anything compared to what would happen if you could not say where your IP/DNS/Traffic is from.