To clarify. Because of this lawsuit, Apple moved facetime away from being peer-to-peer to now being routed through Apple's servers. Since they have to use the centralized model, opening up the protocol for others to use would also require using Apple's servers to play nicely. So Apple would be footing the bill.

Thanks; it's just a present irritant because the Hangouts client for iPad is presently broken (no video), and Skype doesn't support video conference calls in their tablet clients, so I don't have a free cross-platform multi-way tablet-based video-chat protocol that works, and another entry in that space would be convenient.