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.