Comment by beagle3
2 years ago
Thank you for the elaboration.
I disagree it’s the limited IPv4 address space that promotes centralization, which seems to be the essence of your thesis.
Incumbents and laziness promote centralization. First, people stopped hosting email because gmail (and friends) were free. Now, it’s become hard regardless of whether you own a pristine IPv4 or not - because msft+goog+amzn+etc make it hard, and effectively own email.
I don’t see how the IPv4/CGNAT/IPv6 thing is related. To be decentralized, we need thousands of directly addressable nodes (which IPv4 even today easily and cheaply provides), not that every single node be addressable.
We might just agree to disagree.
It's a fact that with NATs, many nodes are hidden from the Internet -- it's in fact how it works. The only way for two hidden nodes to communicate with each other then, is through a central service. And the hiddenness (statefulness) is what caused you to think that CGNAT provides privacy.
So, in essence, you are already believing in my thesis! There's no agreeing nor disagreeing here, we are effectively on the same page but looking at the different sides of it.
As a side note, the early internet had a lot of P2P phenomenons, Napster etc were all based on the technology, but we don't see them nowadays except maybe BitTorrent. The entire Web 2.0 (so GOOGL, AMZN, etc) was built on the already-existing expectation that there is a central node somewhere.