[dn3500]

I was there when we turned on the Internet in 1981. At the time I would have defined the Internet as the set of all endpoints reachable using IPv4. By that definition, none of us today are even on the Internet. You can't send a SYN packet and have it arrive at my house, and I can't send a SYN packet to your house. That means we are entirely dependent on the big guys like Facebook if we want to communicate with each other. Yes, there are some protocols like bittorrent that get around this, but that's the default situation today.

[jameshart]

The WAN port on my home WiFi router in my basement has a directly pingable IPv4 address - I would have thought that was still the most common way people’s houses are connected to the internet?

[dn3500]

You could be right. I haven't had one since 2018. ChatGPT says 70% of residential customers worldwide do still have routable addresses so I may have spoken too much from my own experience. I'm sure it depends on where you are, and I don't live in the US, which has a large number of IPv4 addresses per capita. Also IPv6 changes things.