The advent of NAT in home routers killed so many useful applications. Things like sending a file to someone in a peer-to-peer fashion, without middlemen, used t

The advent of NAT in home routers killed so many useful applications. Things like sending a file to someone in a peer-to-peer fashion, without middlemen, used to just work in the 90s. Then came NAT, and everything broke. I wonder if the centralized internet we have today - where information sharing between people usually involves large server farms run by big corporations - would have happened without NAT. Maybe, without NAT, people would have just stuck with the old way of doing things. Why involve a third party when you can just connect directly? NAT made it easy for the centralized services to take over. When NAT came, all the good p2p apps of the 90s and early 00s either ceased working completely, or at least became unreliable (applications were then trying all kinds of tricks for NAT traversal, but it was often slow or failed). The generally overly complex configuration for port-forwarding on routers didn't help either - if you ever tried to walk someone through setting it up back then via chat or telephone, you'll know what I mean... With a clean slate like that, with the vacuum that was created, the centralized services could just walk in. Simply because they worked. Together with all the user tracking and surveillance that came with it.