ORorangeboats·Apr 28, 2024
>Can you explain why you believe that? To me it sounds like baseless scaremongering.
One word: centralization.
As we have seen throughout the years, all means of IPv4 lifetime extension have involved the introduction of state, which is bound to a central node. The HTTP/1.1 Host request header allowed the existence of reverse proxies, the invent of NAT allowed routers to no longer be "just" a dumb packet forwarder. Both technologies are involved in state tracking.
NATs also destroyed the possibility for any two nodes on the Internet to communicate with each other directly, unless workarounds like port forwarding are used. This means that all messages on the Internet must go through a central server, where there can be malicious actors sniffing your traffic. Remember Mark Zuckerberg's infamous "they trust me"? [0]
But it was still somewhat
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managable during the early 21st century, when free IPv4 addresses were available. Most people had only one layer of NAT (in their routers) which they owned and controlled back then, so P2P were still mostly doable, and services like Skype relied on that. Life went on.
Fast forward to the 2010s, we ran out of IPv4 addresses. CGNATs were starting to be widely deployed so even port forwarding had become impossible. P2P communications ceased to work. Virtual hosting were now ubiquitous. TURN was invented, which of course increased more centralization. [1] Since central servers have to carry even more traffic now (back then they merely mediated the communication between two nodes behind NAT, now they have to relay the entire traffic), it had become more costly to host web services, increasing the barrier to entry.
In the 2020s, people can no longer host servers inside their homes, many have come to rely on centralized technologies or services e.g. VPSes for that purpose. By now, we have mostly given up on peer-to-peer, and moved onto "federation" where we have a web of central servers that clients can connect to -- in the end though, a central server is still a central server that you have to implicitly trust, and some admins of the Fediverse had been discovered performing suspicious activities.
Perhaps I worded my thoughts too strongly in my previous comment, but the trend of centralization is there and continuing. Your own comment has alluded to that fact. Time has shown repeatedly that privacy never fares well under centralization.
The thing is, the Internet as a whole doesn't have to go down this route, had we simply moved onto IPv6 and restored end-to-end communication. Then P2P is possible again. [2] It's IPv4 and its lack of address space that created an environment where people expect there to be a central node. It's just the natural consequence of the statefulness of IPv4-extending technologies like NAT and CGNAT.
Oh well, CGNAT preserves privacy, so they say.
[0]: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traversal_Using_Relays_around_...
[2]: https://github.com/realrasengan/dwebchat