Ha! Just a few months ago, I came across Cloudflare Research's Address Agility blog post (since published in SIGCOMM [0]) that squeezed Internet's waist down to

Ha! Just a few months ago, I came across Cloudflare Research's Address Agility blog post (since published in SIGCOMM [0]) that squeezed Internet's waist down to a single IP (dubbed Ao1), and instead reasoned that perhaps with popularity of TLS, a naming scheme (like the SNI field) is all that's needed, because given the pigeon-hole principle, there will always be more names (variable length puny-codes) than IP addresses (fixed-length hex/octets). Telecom industry perhaps deployed something similar in Multi-protocol Label Switching. Other address translation schemes such as the HTTP Host header, and Google Maglev-esque Virtual IP load balancers (in-use at BigCloud providers) are other attempts at addressing hosts using something other than public IPs (which enabled domain-fronting, once employed by Signal before it was outlawed [1]), squeezing Internet's narrow waist further. I am mostly interested in Ao1 from an anti-censorship point-of-view (IP fronting) as that's the last frontier as far as stateless firewalls go, while names, DNS and SNI, can be hidden away today with DoH/DoT and ECH (encrypted client-hello), respectively. That said, I like the term Simplfying Assumption better as described in a series of posts on it by apenwarr [2][3] while the classic The Rise of Worse is Better pits C against Lisp, arguing that sacrificing correctness, consistency, completeness for the sake of simplicity of the implementation, is a worthwhile trade-off [4]. [0] https://research.cloudflare.com/publications/Fayed2021/ https://research.cloudflare.com/publications/Fayed2021/ [1] Amazon threatens to suspend Signal (2018), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16970199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16970199 [2] The strange story of etherpad (2011), https://apenwarr.ca/log/20110313 https://apenwarr.ca/log/20110313 [3] Conspiracy theories (2004), https://apenwarr.ca/log/200411 https://apenwarr.ca/log/200411 [4] https://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html https://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html