Subject: Re: Bringing back Internet transparency

From: [email-masked] (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2013 19:53:06 -0400 (EDT)

> From: Joe Touch <[email-masked]>

    > "what people want" (ISP operators, or at least some of them), was an
    > artificial way to differentiate home customers from commercial
    > providers.
    > I.e., they wanted to create a differentiation that wasn't part of the
    > Internet architecture, so they put one in.
    > NATs did other things ... but IMO mostly as a by-product of this
    > primary motivation.

I'm not so sure about that.

For the first couple of years that I had an ISP connection (which soon had an
early NAT box on it), whenever I called up the ISP (then, and still, one of
the largest in the US) with a service call, the first thing I had to do was
unplug the NAT box and plug in a host directly!

It was only after everyone's house had multiple PC's (which was really only
after wireless became common - I don't think too many people were willing to
wire their houses for Ethernet :-) that they kind of expected there to be a
NAT box there.

But in any event, it's doesn't void my point: if people want something, we
have two choices: i) blow people off, and they'll adopt some point solution
that interacts poorly with everything else, or ii) give people the
_capabilities_ they need/want (and thereby have some chance at minimizing the
brain damage - since generally people don't care _how_ it works, as long as it
_does_ what they want).

I guess this is just a long-winded, engineering take on 'the customer is
always right'.

	Noel