[rShergold]

The physical network itself evolved away from peer -> peer back to client -> server. With IPv6 I'd hoped we would today be living in a world where I could send my friend the url fe80::1ff:fe23:4567:890a/cat.mov and they could download a video directly from my phone. No matter where my phone happens to be in the world. People could host "micro services" on their personal devices and the whole world could access them. If someone wants to know if I'm free on a date they could connect to my phone's calendar app directly and ask. There are so may possibilities of truly peer to peer applications.

But the network itself prevents this. Bittorrent has to jump though multiple NAT busting hoops to allow two internet users to talk to each other directly. limited IPv4 addresses mean home internet connections have dynamic IP addresses which means no one can realistically host at home. Because no one hosts at home they consume far more than they upload. Because of this the physical network was built with a much higher download bandwidth than upload. It's a vicious cycle that wasn't intentional it just sort of evolved that way.

[granshaw]

This so much. People don’t realize how much ubiquitous NAT has eroded individuals’ online capabilities and freedoms and shifted the internet from what it was meant to be (much more bidirectional than it is now)

I shudder when tech folks themselves insist on NAT as a core security tenet - sure it might be a convenient extra layer but it’s so sad what’s been sacrificed in its name