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by jaoane 367 days ago
CGNAT is completely irrelevant to the average person. It’s only an issue if you expect others to connect to you, which is something that almost all people don’t need.

(inb4 but the internet was made to receive connections! Well yes, decades ago maybe. But that’s not the way things have evolved. Get with the times.)

2 comments

Cloudflare sometimes preventing access to some sites and annoying CAPTCHA challenges due to CGNAT are relevant to the average person.

Full IPv6 support should be a requirement for both ISPs as well as websites and other servers.

> Cloudflare sometimes preventing access to some sites and annoying CAPTCHA challenges due to CGNAT are relevant to the average person.

They would be, but thankfully CGNAT doesn’t cause that.

It contributes to it, because now you're behind the same public IP address as X other people. You're then X-times more likely to get flagged as suspicious and need to enter a CAPTCHA X-times more frequently.
Cloudflare easily detects that using your discrete external port range and knows better than to show you a CAPTCHA.
Anecdotal experience (I know, of course... this is sample size n=1) tells me that you can't be further from the truth.

Putting CF aside, anyone who has tried to edit Wikipedia anonymously should understand the pain of CGNAT.

Someone should tell Cloudflare that because it's not been my experience at all.

(now n=2)

It's not a direct cause, but if an IP is hitting my website with spam, I don't care if it's a spam bot or a CGNAT exit point. The only way to stop the spam is to take action against the IP address. For CGNAT customers, that means extra CAPTCHAs or worse.

You can ask your ISP for your own IPv6 subnet if you don't want to be lumped in with the people whose computers and phones are part of a scraping/spamming botnet.

> It’s only an issue if you expect others to connect to you, which is something that almost all people don’t need.

Unless they're playing video games:

* https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=27339...

* https://www.checkmynat.com/posts/optimizing-nat-settings-for...

The video game industry is bigger than movies, television, and music combined:

* https://www.marketing-beat.co.uk/2024/10/22/dentsu-gaming-da...

So I think CGNAT / double-NAT can hit a lot of folks.

> Well yes, decades ago maybe. But that’s not the way things have evolved. Get with the times.

Why? Why should I accept the enshittification of the Internat that has evolved to this point? Why cannot people push for something better?

Pathetic that in 2025 there still are games that rely on p2p connections, to the detriment of the experience because cheating can’t be detected server-side. GTA 5 is one of them.
If I've purchased a video game, why should I have to be reliant on the publisher's servers being up? Self-hosting should be a thing:

* https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41339173-Self-Hosted-...

At the very least if a game publisher wants to power down their own servers because they don't feel it's "worth" supporting their customers, they should post the server code so that the customers can continue to use the product they 'bought'.

Completely agree with the last paragraph.