NAT is just the Internet version of a business phone PBX. It's the same situation of cost of phone lines / IPv4 addresses and the number of local users. Also add in the (perceived) ease of managing users behind a NAT/PBX. Businesses are slowly getting away from a phone on every desk due to company issued cell phones and remote workers. I'm not sure how that will play out with remote workers and VPN, which seem to be doing fine with RFC1918 space. On Sat, Jun 20, 2026 at 11:21 PM Saku Ytti via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
On Sat, 20 Jun 2026 at 22:37, John Levine via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
Those all had significant security benefits. IPv6, not so much.
I think it's easy to argue IPv4+IPv6 expose more surface area for attackers. But I don't actually think infosec matters at all, not the way we approach it, so I wouldn't use it, unless in bad faith when that's the best way to market it. There are superior arguments to restore a single stack.
I believe we can objectively state that the market always expected us to solve this, the market always expected IP addresses not to have economic value. If the market had anticipated that IP addresses are worth hundreds of billions of dollars, we would have run out of them during the IT bubble. But remarkably little, irrelevant, amount of hoarding happened even at the very end, at the very end some started a bunch of fake companies to get a single block per company, but it wasn't meaningful amount by any means.
We have underperformed market expectations and created a market where none was designed to be. If we want to retcon that as a desirable outcome, we have a lot of work to do, I can come up with many improvements in our protocols to facilitate market creation for various protocol level resources where no such limits exist today.
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