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Comment by anthropodie | Hacker News Reader

NAT is the worst thing that could have happened to Internet. Without NAT people would have been able to host their own blogs, pages, photos decades ago from their home. We could have had far more decentralized applications than we have today and would have prevented this walled garden mess of Internet.

The ability to address any system on the Internet with it's unique IP is what original Internet was supposed to be. NAT was temporary solution to address the issue of limited IPs but now that is single protocol that is preventing the migration to IPv6

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I don't know why this is being down voted. The entire modern bullshit Internet exists because of NAT. We can't host stuff ourselves and have to use some central system. Since nothing is free, the provider has to inject more and more ads everywhere.

I bet the actual cost of NAT when all things are considered is well into the trillions of dollars.

Any attempt to keep IPv4 alive is not a net win. It's another few trillion down the drain.

Because it implies that it is the single reason that people don't host their own sites anymore, when in reality people don't because it is generally too difficult, expensive, unreliable and redundant to do so.

Almost nobody wants to host their own social media or messenger site and if you did your friends wouldn't use it too.

Besides, anyone who currently wants to do so can get a cheap VPS for dollars a month.

There is no telling what would happen. It is only difficult, expensive, unreliable because no one does it?

I think there is proof of the opposite in how people host giant torrents without much issues, some buy seed boxes, their friends use it too.

Agreed. NAT may or may not have made the walled gardens, but it sure killed their competition.

The worst part is that now it's not just baked into the network layer, it's baked into security assumptions as well. What a mess.

Around here (USA) ISPs still give publically routables IPs to customers, and the customer is responsible for running their own NAT if they want to have multiple devices on their network. Most routers support port forwarding, which allows those households to have publically routable TCP or UDP ports on any device within the network. In theory UPNP allows devices to set this up seemlessly.

It has become less common with the rise of clouds. But it used to be common for multiplayer games to be done by one player setting up their instance as a server.

*Some/most ISPs. Some smaller ISPs use CGNAT, and I believe most cellular providers also use CGNAT for IPv4.

I wouldn’t put CGNAT and general NAT in the same basket.

My ISP and every ISP I’ve used since the 90s has given me a public IP, only exception is my cellular links which are CGNAT’d. I’ve got no problems hosting stuff with my current connection, while my LAN devices are on RFC1918 address space.

I guess it depends on where you live here in India only one ISP among several that I have used over 15 years gives public IP.

> Without NAT people would have been able to host their own blogs, pages, photos decades ago from their home.

Reliability would have been horrendous. Stuff would disappear forever much more than it does now. It would have been slow because of limited upstream.

It would have also killed the bandwidth of people not hosting themselves if they were on DOCSIS? ( cable modems ).

Still people are generally not NATed on a home/business connection. NAT is not the problem.

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