"This is not ... this is the internet." That is exactly the type of conceptual roadblock I was alluding to in my comment. But if you look at what people, not

"This is not ... this is the internet." That is exactly the type of conceptual roadblock I was alluding to in my comment. But if you look at what people, not just nerds, want to do over the internet a significant portion (perhaps even the majority) of it is the same old stuff they did in 1970's. Send person-to-person messages and make person-to-person telephone calls. The new dimension is of course person-to-person video, and we now have more ubiquitous bandwidth to make this happen that we didn't have in the 1990's. Whether you see possibilities or just impediments depends on how you define the problem. If you define the problem as achieving some sort of perfectly anonymous communication, an anonyous interchange of bits, then you are outside of the problem I'm discussing. It may be a fascinating problem, but it is not one that interests me. I'm talking about doing those same old things we were doing in the 1970's, with the same degree of privacy we had (absence of advertisements and senseless statistical analysis of every word we say for commercial purposes), using the internet. Millions of people manage to call their friends and family despite the issues of "discovery phase" and "trust". Millions of people have a connetion to a telephone network despite the potential of "spam" (cold calling? telemarketing?) Again, if you redefine the problem your own way++ you can argue endlessly against any sort of simple proposal, e.g. one that aims to make something we've all been doing since the 1970's easy, for everyone, not just nerds: connecting, directly, to people you know.+++ Facebook seems to revolve around the idea of communicating with people ("friends") you know in real life, not online acquaintences you have never met. Is that the reason it's popular? I don't know. And I don't really care. Even if there was no such thing as a "social network" (buzzword), I see a utility in being able to stay in contact with people I know in real life. I fail to see Facebook, which is roughly the real world equivalent of a megaphone, as being necessary to do that. Why do I have to route all by bits through Facebook's website? The answer is: I don't. And NAT traversal is the solution. ++ We need a way to have anonymous communication with strangers. As other commenters have said, that problem is for the cypherpunks. +++ And I'm pretty sure this is how the very early internet was, before firewall mania and NAT. People had met the others they were connecting to in real life. Or, at least, they had their real life contact information and could pick up the phone and call them, or send them a letter.