I think I’d mostly agree with you if only one layer of NAT is in play, but in reality we have CGNAT and it makes it supremely difficult to host services without a very cooperative ISP (laughable.) And there are more internet subscribers in the world than there are IP’s for them, so CGNAT is required for at least some unfortunate part of the population.
In reality we just really do need more IP’s. 32-bit addresses with 16 bits of ports isn’t enough.
Re:IPv6 Is Hard
by otabdeveloper4 on Tuesday February 18, 2025 @12:28AM
(#43086369)
> makes it supremely difficult to host services without a very cooperative ISP
Sadly, that's a feature, not a bug.
Two layers of NAT sucks, but I guess it could have been avoided if a designed (instead of ad-hoc) solution to the problem was devised.
> And there are more internet subscribers in the world than there are IP’s for them
Is this really true, did somebody actually run the business math? "Internet subscriber" roughly corresponds to "household", not to "person".
No, this isn't right. Instead of having IPv6 we ended up extending IPv4 by using port numbers as extra address bits and using NAT. This transition was painless (for the most part), and didn't require building a second internet.
In a better and saner world we could have got roughly the same thing - except conceptually simpler and standard - instead of IPv6.