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I was working in IT at a large British university when Spotify launched, and we had to block certain ports because early versions of Spotify used a peer to peer swarm to reduce the load on their servers, and it was so popular with students that it was completely jamming up the network.



I remember hitting something like this in my student halls. Internet provider aggressively throttled any p2p traffic.

I had to use a VPN to get Spotify to play smoothly and not repeatedly buffer when playing a song.


afaik Skype also was using peer-to-peer until Microsoft bought them.


I wonder if Skype would have survived had they used an open protocol.




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