Even after innumberable discussions about this subject, I still don't get why people are so afraid of NAT. The main concern seems to be about ISPs starting to

Even after innumberable discussions about this subject, I still don't get why people are so afraid of NAT. The main concern seems to be about ISPs starting to NAT everybody and their dog. Well, guess what, they just can't do that. For starters because their users would get very angry when their torrents stop working, and would jump ship for any other ISP that announces that it either doesn't do NAT or has implemented IPv6. There is still a huge amount of work that can be done to compress the usage of v4 address space. Maybe not much that the RIRs or the ISPs can do, but as the cost of owning a static IPv4 address goes up (and I believe that it will go _way_ up), end users will start compressing their public services into fewer addresses and giving back small subnets to their providers to reduce costs. I mean, who the hell needs to have a mail server and a web server in two different public addresses when they can just do port-forwarding over a single address? (And since most servers are on DMZs with private addressing, they are mostly doing it already, it's just a matter of renumbering.) The case most likely to go NAT is also the most likely to go IPv6: mobile devices. These are mostly behind NAT already, and going IPv6 would actually reduce costs for ISPs. It would also put ISPs in the track for more extensive IPv6, since the major problem now is that people have little knowledge of how IPv6 works and ISPs are trying to avoid the pain. The issue is, of course, that 99.9% of mobile devices don't support dual-stack and even in a pure v6 configuration don't actually work properly. For this I predict that in 10 years the move to IPv6 will still be half-way. Considering that we are so close to IPv4 depletion and there is virtually _no_ IPv6 to be seen, I'm being faily optimistic.