Skype Becomes a Scourge

Here's a good measure of how close a new technology is to hitting the mainstream: the number of people complaining about how big a danger it's becoming.

The complaints usually turn out to be overblown. The Internet was supposed to turn us into a bunch of laptop potatoes addicted to sex, sports and gambling. It turned out that email, search and news were the big draws. We also hear how nanotech is supposed to kill us with toxic nanotubes and insidious yet tiny robots, just as music swapping will surely send Celine Dion and Clay Aiken to the poorhouse.

Now it's VoIP's (voice-over-Internet protocol) turn in the pillory, and the poster child for this latest menace is Skype. First released in August 2003, Skype is used by 55 million people around the world -- a user base larger than the populations of California and Texas combined. That brisk growth rate put Skype in the spotlight and made it a coveted target for eBay, which paid $2.5 billion for the company in September, vowing to pony up another $1.5 billion if certain goals were met by 2008. ...