> 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
