> Oh, piffle. NAT's don't "harm the Internet", any more than a host of other > things: the fact that other things do harm doesn't mean that NATs don't also do harm, or that the harm done by NAT is somehow lessened or excused. and IMHO most of the other things you mentioned do less harm than NATs, though I agree there are a lot of folks out there who are getting away with screwing the net. > All of which leads me to a simple conclusion: one big reason that you and any > number of other people are upset about NAT's has nothing to do with their > technical shortcomings. Rather, what gets people so aggravated is that they > are killing off the "preferred" alternative. The reason I'm upset about NATs is that they make it difficult to build distributed and peer-to-peer apps, and they encourage a model where the net is centrally controlled (not by a single center, but by a relatively small number of providers who control the center). I didn't get seriously interested in IPv6 until I realized that they were the most likely viable solution to the NAT problem. In hindsight I would have done IPv6 somewhat differently. But it's possible to start IPv6, make applications work with it, and maybe fix a few things about v6 along with way as people learn more about its shortcomings. NATs, on the other hand, are completely intractable. e.g. even if you can come up with a better solution to the firewall access problem (and I think that's possible, though we're nowhere close to that now), as long as you have NATs you're still stuck with the problems inherent in a partitioned address space. Keith