How NAT broke the open Internet and made peer-to-peer a pipe dream
Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT
Network Address Translation (NAT) was introduced in 1994 as a short-term fix for IPv4 address exhaustion, but it has had a lasting, corrosive effect on the Internet's architecture. By hiding devices behind a single public IP, NAT made it nearly impossible to host services from home, forcing a reliance on port forwarding, UPnP, STUN, TURN, and ICE—none of which fully restore true peer-to-peer connectivity. Even IPv6, the supposed long-term solution, is often undermined by ISPs that continue to apply NAT-like restrictions. This post argues that NAT is the original sin of Internet centralization, normalizing a client-server model and making self-hosting difficult, which has contributed to the rise of walled gardens.
NAT certainly isn’t the only reason why the modern internet is full of centralized walled gardens, but it was the first — it’s why it’s hard to send a file to someone, it’s why you don’t run your email on your own computer, and why running your own services at all is difficult and often expensive.
- solatic
> There’s lots of things you can blame for killing the open Internet, but I think NAT was one of the earliest. Running a server used to be trivial: run an executable, tell people your address, done... It also trained everyone to think client‐server is natural. “My device talks to The Cloud which talks to other devices” feels normal, when that feeling originated as an artifact of address scarcity.
A lot of this feels like a requiem for the days when the only people on the Internet were "high-computer-skill" type folks. Most people will gravitate to "user-friendly" solutions: Gmail and other managed email providers were popular because they didn't stop working when you shut down your computer to save electricity, when your server's hard drive crashed, when you upgraded your computer to something with a faster processor, more RAM, and a newer operating system. It was hard enough to educate laypeople about URLs and email addresses (AOL keywords, anyone?), let alone a combination of random numbers in an IP address, or convincing people to register domain names.
Yes, NAT shoved fences into a network that was all about connecting everybody. But we'd still end up with server-client cloud architectures, even if we had started with IPv6 in the beginning. ISPs would have just sold highly restrictive firewalls as part of their home-install basic boxes, and we'd still have ended up with those fences.
- elric
Calling NAT the original sin is a serious exaggeration. Carrier Grade NAT (CGNAT) is a truly evil concept that restricts the freedoms of the CGNATed users. But regular NAT is fine as long as you can control it. "No one wanting to bother with port forwarding" is largely a matter of shitty UX on the home gateway side and laziness on the side of the operator. Same with UPnP.
If anything, NAT has saved millions of wildly insecure devices running unpatched old Windows versions from getting pwned the second they connect to the open internet.
- miki123211
The designers of the internet made one fundamental mistake, namely applying meatspace norms to cyberspace.
In the "real world", you don't really need that much security. Your actual security comes from the fact that all the worst criminals are already locked up, most of the would-be criminals are afraid of being locked up, and if somebody does actually commit a crime, they will get locked up and won't be able to do it again for a good while. A lot of real-world security is about post-factum detection (think alarms, CCTV, panic buttons etc), because in the real world, detection and prevention are two sides of the same coin.
This only works because if a real-world crime happens, the criminal by definition is in the same location as the victim, and law enforcement cares most about the community they serve. If the criminal is across the world, as is the case in cyberspace, even if it's a friendly country, it's often "not their problem". This means internet systems need actual security, and NAT provides exactly that.
If not for NAT, we'd all need a firewall, and things would be almost if not exactly the same. In the real world, "leave things relatively open, because locks are mostly for keeping honest people honest" is a valid strategy. This strategy doesn't work on the internet.
- mittensc
I remember times before NAT and SSL
You could share things easily, sure, but anyone could get hacked pretty easily and very targetted.
After NAT, sharing was still easy lots of 'piracy' apps, various messengers with NAT passthrough
Both before and after you needed to be technical, you can't ask someone that doesnt know about computers to set up an FTP server, and if they did it would be a nightmare and they'd likely share their whole drive
Same goes for anything else.
Anyway, we'll get the whole non-nat with IPv6, let's see what that brings
- cm2187
NATs are also firewalls. I think people forget that before NATs, when you would install Windows, the minute you connected it to the internet, you had to rush to update it before a virus would infect it. The OS of the 90s weren't secure enough to be exposed to the WAN.
- g023
I miss the old days of ICQ and just dragging a file onto the person you are sending your file and bam, done like dinner.
- thomastjeffery
The consequences are so much more significant than people seem to realize.
Because of NAT, hierarchy (centralized servers) is the foundational design pattern of the internet, and anyone who wants any semblance of anarchy (decentralized networks) must use a workaround that is itself hierarchical and costly. We are all interconnected, but only a wealthy few can truly speak fist.
- exabrial
I think its funny everyone thinks that ISPs, Device Manufacturers, and Cloud Providers are going to let your connect back directly to your "home" with IOT devices.
Absolutely not. They can charge your $9.99/mo so you can connect their craptastic app to their craptastic cloud so you can "use their app from anywhere".