Microsoft buying Skype must have added additional incentives to centralize. Regulatory, organizational control, auditing, etc. And tinfoil take would include surveiling.

Skype was P2P pre-acquisition.

Microsoft’s acquisition changed Skype to centralize it through their servers (and introduce all sorts of call quality issues).

It’s less about focusing on tinfoil and more about how creating $ for cloud usage, which allowed for centralization and surveillance.

Skype has been enough of a turn off from the performance issues it has / had hat many people moved elsewhere.

In the early 2000s there was a lot of discussion about a US law that required phone providers to provide for wiretapping, with no mention of the underlying tech. Being P2P, that wouldn't work for Skype, so a journalist asked the Skype CEO whether they would comply with the law and he said "We're not US company. Why would we?"

So I don't think it's all that tinfoily to think that once Skype became a US company, the government might have pressured them into making wiretaps possible, since there was a specific law that arguably required it. Considering all that Snowden revealed later, I'm not sure I'd put any digital surveillance in the tinfoil category.

Microsoft at that time said they are moving Skype to centralized server from distributed to reduce code complexity.