On Wed, May 01, 2002 at 02:55:02PM -0700, lear@cisco.com said:
I don't know if this is an annual argument yet, but the frog is in the pot, and the flame is on. Guess who's playing the part of the frog? Answer: ISPs who do this sort of thing. Value added security is a nice thing. Crippling Internet connections will turn the Internet into the phone company, where only the ISP gets to say what services are good and which ones are bad. While an ISP might view it appealing to be a baby bell, remember from whence we all come: the notion that the middle should not inhibit the endpoints from doing what they want. You find this to be a support headache? Offer a deal on Norton Internet Security or some such. Offer to do rules merges. Even offer a provisioning interface to some access-lists. Just make sure that when that next really fun game is delivered on a play station that speaka de IP your customers can play it, and that you haven't built a business model around them not being able to play it.
As long as it is _clear_ from the get-go that customers behind NAT are getting that service, and not publicly-routable IP space, I don't see the problem. If they don't like it, they don't have to sign up to begin with - as long as there is no doubt as to what kind of service they're getting, there shouldn't be a problem (legally, at any rate). This is not to say that if, as Eliot posits, the next Big Thing on the market requires public IPs that your customer base won't all jump ship. That's a risk that providers will have to weigh against the benefits of NAT.
Eliot
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