What do you mean by popular? I hosted a site on a home machine in the early teens. If you don't know how to do that with NAT, you should not have a web server under your control exposed to the internet.
The early teens didn’t have huge proliferation of ISPs using CGNATs.
These days ISP can’t get hold of new IPv4 blocks, and increasingly don’t provide public IP addresses to residential routers, not without having to pay extra for that lowly single IPv4 address.
Hosting a website behind a NAT isn’t as trivial as it used to be, and for many it’s now impossible without IPv6.
Capitalism, essentially. Companies can make more money from centralized control over systems than from truly distributed systems, and customers are suckers for the simplicity of delegating their needs to single providers.
The reason Google bought and destroyed dejanews.com, for example (try visiting that site) was to weaken one of the distributed sources of competition. Similar for RSS.
It surely was a big factor.
When internet finally became popular, hosting a website on your own machine already became infeasible.
What do you mean by popular? I hosted a site on a home machine in the early teens. If you don't know how to do that with NAT, you should not have a web server under your control exposed to the internet.
The early teens didn’t have huge proliferation of ISPs using CGNATs.
These days ISP can’t get hold of new IPv4 blocks, and increasingly don’t provide public IP addresses to residential routers, not without having to pay extra for that lowly single IPv4 address.
Hosting a website behind a NAT isn’t as trivial as it used to be, and for many it’s now impossible without IPv6.
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> It's baffling to argue that NAT is the real driver of centralization for internet technologies.
It doesn't help.
What is then?
Capitalism, essentially. Companies can make more money from centralized control over systems than from truly distributed systems, and customers are suckers for the simplicity of delegating their needs to single providers.
The reason Google bought and destroyed dejanews.com, for example (try visiting that site) was to weaken one of the distributed sources of competition. Similar for RSS.