And if you seriously believe that Dropbox appeared because of NAT, and not because people prefer out-of-the-box solutions, I can only suggest you to go out of your bubble, and discuss technical issues with random people.
"Intended" btw is not even an argument. Internet wasn't intended for many things which we happily do here.
[–] spauldo 4 hours ago
[–] kalleboo 5 hours ago
CG-NAT breaks all this. iroh relies on relays from people with non-broken internet (no CG-NAT).
[–] broken-kebab 5 hours ago
Yes, and DynDNS too. Which is fine, cause it works, and that is what I said. The claim to which it replies is that people have to pay to Dropbox cause poor souls were stopped from sharing files using existing technologies like FTP by the damned IPv4, and not because they simply prefer an out-of-the-box GUI thing.
[–] kalleboo 4 hours ago
Relying on peer-to-peer relays also doesn't scale, which is why Skype dropped its supernode architecture.
And yes, Dropbox does exist because of NAT, or more generally the fact that "consumers" are second-class citizens on the Internet. If everyone had a publicly routed address and an entry in DNS - which is how the Internet was originally envisioned - we'd have solutions that don't require a third party server.
Both of your examples just show how deep the Stockholm syndrome is. IPv4's limitations have shifted the way people think about networking so much that they rarely even realize they're doing it. But this isn't the way it was supposed to be. "Intended" is completely valid when we're talking about how something has strayed from its original design and the ramifications of it.
I'm not naive enough to think that we can ever get rid of the "consumer" and "producer" ideas that have crept into everyone's head. But it's important to remember that these ideas came about only because of limitations in the protocol, not because they're some kind of natural law of how global networks function.