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Re: Addresses and ports and taxes -- oh my!

2000-08-03 22:10:06
Geeks like us care about end-to-end transparency.  Refrigerator's don't.

NATs cause a lot more problems than the loss of transparency.
see http://www.cs.utk.edu/~moore/what-nats-break.html

Most people are going to buy products based on the functions they
perform (utility), not on their architecture.  If someone develops
a nice household/Internet gateway that does something useful (and
doesn't require a UNIX administrator), people will buy it, regardless
of whether it performs some politically/religiously incorrect protocol
transformations.

true enough...but they will insist that the product work as advertised.
and if households have NATs in them, the number of things that those 
products can do will be considerably reduced.  hence the number of
products available, and the utility of a household network connection,
will also be reduced.

And, if IPvX addresses cost money, a lot of households will pay money
for devices that enable them to operate with only one IP address.

true enough, at least if the addresses cost more than the NAT box.
but if you have to have a NAT box then the money you spend is
for the purpose of making your network less functional.
personally, I'd rather get something useful for my money.

folks who think this is a religious argument aren't paying attention.

but the bottom line is that we need to make sure that

a) IPv6 address blocks of reasonable size have near-zero cost
b) NATs aren't part of IPv6

Keith