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Looking at the Skype founders' company website, they license three different products/technologies: PeerEnabler, PeerCache, and Global Index.

In their words:

• PeerEnabler is "a virtual Content Distribution Network"
• PeerCache is "a cache product that enabled network operators to optimize peer-to-peer traffic"
• Global Index is their flagship product and "is the world's most technologically advanced, scalable and field-tested peer-to-peer technology. Global Index creates a self-organizing and self-healing distributed storage, transport and data object management system that does away with the costs of traditional datacenter solutions and enables a range of applications from communications to broadcasting and beyond."

They also explicitly state that Global Index is used in Skype.

If isp want communities inside the isp they would implement peercache. However the number of isp that support this is almost non-existant.

An other otpion would be for the ips to tell that conenctions inside the isp are faster, document it. however if this is the case most isp fail to communicate this.

Azureus has supported JPC (http://www.joltid.com/index.php/peercache) for quite a while now.

BT is not anonymous, nor are these attempts at decentralizing BT.

Its funny you should mention that couse this new azureus release also has a couple of extra configutation tickboxes (server ->networks):

• The public network (not anonymous)
• I2P network
• The Onion Router (TOR) Network
• Prompt for selection when a download with an anonymous tracker (?) is added

However, none of this matters if you combine it with the JPC plugin. It basicly asks your provider (or whoever provides your DNS name resolution) if they have/want a copy of the file you are downloading/sharing. If they do you can download from there thus saving your provider a huge upstream bandwith bill through caching. Wasn`t bittorent around two thirds of the internet traffic by now? The bandwith saving would be huge, and this is one of the biggest costs ISP`s have. Its the idea the original Kazaa people tried to get rich of after they sold Kazaa to some australians. They retained the right to the kazaa protocol. They call their implementation peercache

I imagene telling you provider what you are downloading is *not* what you want if you are with one of those big American providers ratting their customers to the ??aa. Ofcourse if you are with an ISP that dutifully forwards ??aa hatemail but doesn`t reveal your name then you are off a little better. You just might get huge speed improvements and they might pass the saving on to... whoever makes the money. Or they might keep the money for when the ??aa comes knocking on their door about the terabytes of files they are caching/"hosting" for their customers.

BT is not anonymous, nor are these attempts at decentralizing BT.

Its funny you should mention that couse this new azureus release also has a couple of extra configutation tickboxes (server ->networks):

• The public network (not anonymous)
• I2P network
• The Onion Router (TOR) Network
• Prompt for selection when a download with an anonymous tracker (?) is added

However, none of this matters if you combine it with the JPC plugin. It basicly asks your provider (or whoever provides your DNS name resolution) if they have/want a copy of the file you are downloading/sharing. If they do you can download from there thus saving your provider a huge upstream bandwith bill through caching. Wasn`t bittorent around two thirds of the internet traffic by now? The bandwith saving would be huge, and this is one of the biggest costs ISP`s have. Its the idea the original Kazaa people tried to get rich of after they sold Kazaa to some australians. They retained the right to the kazaa protocol. They call their implementation peercache

I imagene telling you provider what you are downloading is *not* what you want if you are with one of those big American providers ratting their customers to the ??aa. Ofcourse if you are with an ISP that dutifully forwards ??aa hatemail but doesn`t reveal your name then you are off a little better. You just might get huge speed improvements and they might pass the saving on to... whoever makes the money. Or they might keep the money for when the ??aa comes knocking on their door about the terabytes of files they are caching/"hosting" for their customers.

I was also interested to see they included 'Joltid Peer Cache (JPC)' - in their words "Joltid Peer Cache (JPC) is now integrated into Azureus. For users whose ISP support this, JPC should allow faster downloads, while helping the ISP reduce its bandwidth costs. The JPC Plugin is safe in the way that your ISP won't know what you are downloading, and can't use it to spy on you."

Given that torrents are supposed to account from anywhere between 30-70% of all internet traffic, depending on who you believe - this could go a long way towards easing bandwidth consumption issues. Of course, I have no idea how many ISPs are actually using this, the website http://www.joltid.com/index.php/peercache/ is rather limited in it's information, and a google for the name reveals that there is still some question over the legality, so a lot of ISPs are keeping their heads down and using it on the quiet.

For flash traffic, such as a new game demo being released - or even torrented anime, which often sees in excess of 10-20 thousand people downloading it within 48 hours for the more popular series, this could save ISPs a lot of money.

While they share some of the same founders, Skype uses a different network with the same technology. See JoltID about the network. See the Skype Developer Zone for more on the APIs.

Go to Help -> About... there you can see the
licenses and also what codecs Skype is using.
Such as Global IP Sound and
Joltid

Well, lets look at Kazaa.

It's website is in English. It's software is in English, and it does not have a Norwegian version of the software and probably never will. Take a look at their Languages page. It doesn't even have plans to open a Norweigan version of their software, but yet they want to release it in Spanish, French and German? Spanish is basically the second most spoken language in the United States, not Norway. Now, if we take a look at the most common languages in Norway, we can see here and here that hardly anyone speaks English in Norway. Most speak, um, Norwegian (most common dialect is Bokmål).

So, as we can plainly see, Kazaa is targeting the US demographic, not Norway/Denmark/Estonia. Yet their servers and establishments are in Denmark? Why? It's to gain marketshare and profit from the American people, yet not contribute the US. In fact, they're taking money away from the American government. There are no US taxes on the products, so your basically throwing your money away. (Yes, Money, there is now "Kazaa Plus" which costs $$$). Kazaa's advertisments target US customers, it's product is made for US customers and it's only intrest is in the US customer base.

Kazaa is obviously not interested in P2P technology or it's future. It stole Gntuella's technology spec and re-wrote it. Kazaa also has Network Supernodes (dedicated nodes, always on) and other centralized components. So if you took those away, expect drastic changes in performance. The RIAA has pretty much presumed Kazaa was built just like that for a while. Kazaa is all about money. Take away the money, watch the developers flee. The "developers" of Kazaa have already started up similar companies. They know Kazaa will be shut down eventually, and of course they need to keep making their un-deserved millions.

Kazaa will eventually be shut down, even if it means Jennifer Gardner running out of an exploding building in the Netherlands.

Is it really as decentralized as it's touted to be?