> and this statement makes me sad and angry

Your MAC and/or IP address should not identify you, and never should have been used as an identifier. It's the identity of a communication endpoint.

If the OSI model is about making the core of the network stupid and fast, which has proven benefits of scalability and/or extensibility, then identity/authentication is not the network layer's job and never was.

If a protocol assumes all hosts on a subnet are trustworthy (ARP/DHCP for example), it's an upper-level protocol design failure, not really having to do with transport (TCP/UDP)/network (IP) layers.

We need some kind of DNS-style federated service that can map the identity (MAC address?) of a non-stationary device to its IP address.

There's an elaborate protocol framework that does this for cellular data, I don't know much about it.

There is also SCTP.

Marketers or whatever your business is who depend on users having a persistent network wide identity are scammy. Many people who want at least a small CHANCE at privacy are happy with this situation (rotating IP addresses). Names are resolved through DNS, including load balancer endpoints where many names can share one IP.

Privacy is not the same as anonymity. I would like to have a network-wide identity that I can use to authenticate and communicate with my friends and family. This is not the same thing as allowing marketers to track me.

That sounds awesome, but if it’s network-wide, then marketers (who are also in the network) can also use it. Even if it’s some sort of cryptographically-secure bitstring, all it would take is for you or one of your contacts to leak it once. I don’t think it’s possible to have a persistent, global, private identifier: they seem mutually-exclusive.

Why does it make you sad and angry? It sounds quite reasonable to me. I'm especially happy that we went for human readable names rather than wierd letter/number combinations. Also nobody seems to know when to use these [] brackets around the addresses, and they are even hard to type for people who don't use the US keyboard layout. Last but not least NAT is not just a IP-range splitter but also a security feature.

I literally don't see a single thing to be sad about. Angry is even a little harder and honestly a little surprising.

The end-to-end principle where any node on the internet can talk to any other one. This allows anyone to start a service and services (and people) talk to each other without intermediaries. It levels the playing field. Losing that concentrates power and takes options from individuals.

Yep. CG-NAT puts all the power on your ISP.

You want VOIP, sorry your double nat'ed connection messes up about half the time, you better by telephone service with us instead.

How so? It's just a way of representation. The power is still with the ISPs, backbone providers and governments. Power would only flow to the end user if the communication technology itself would enable him direct 1:1 communication to everybody else.

E.g. if everybody uses IPv6 China can still block you when you are located in their network. Not a single grain more power to you.

Perhaps you don't remember the days when every computer on the internet was an equal peer. To be honest, I don't quite remember it either; I only caught the very tail end. But time was you could run a website off your home computer, or your own email server. Now you have to go pay money and hand over trust to one of the huge hosting providers, and the internet is a sort-of-bipartite graph with two classes of citizens: The home clients, and the corporate servers.

> But time was you could run a website off your home computer, or your own email server. Now you have to go pay money and hand over trust to one of the huge hosting providers

You still can, and you really don't have to host with a big provider if you don't want to. The only reason we hear about it so much is because all the engineering articles come from people who work at companies with insanely high scaling requirements. If you want to throw up an XAMPP server at home you still can, though you'll need to acquire either a static IP or a dynamic DNS record to point people to.

> though you'll need to acquire either a static IP or a dynamic DNS record

That's the whole point. With some ISPs using CG-NAT, you don't have a public IP.

I have three computers at home running an SSH server. Two have to be on non-default ports, since I only have one IP.

And in fact I run a Jabber server off my home IP. But if my ISP catches me at it, they could point to the line in their contract saying "no servers" and demand that I turn it off. (Or just block it outright.) They probably won't, but still.

Even multiplayer games were played by directly connecting to game servers that could be operated by anyone, no company-hosted clouds that will shut down after a few years.