[gnramires]

I think NAT is a bit of an unfortunate "janky" solution of addressing protocols (giving some security and some address expansion, and sacrificing interoperability and connectivity). I think the security part should be fixed by proper firewalls and/or authentication -- in fact some kind of security mechanism should be default for home routers and such.

I think ideally we should also think of new interoperable defenses that fill the NAT gap. Perhaps each device should have an authentication key apart from its IP, which it could pass onto trusted devices like local network routers, which would only allow authenticated incoming data. Maybe even better would be a global scheme including this authentication and also more private addressed (than IP), although that would probably require a redesign of IP and might be a project for the far future.