Matthew Crocker wrote:
Technically no, There is no reason for a customer to have direct access to the net so long as the ISP can provide appropriate proxies for the services required.
It gets complex, it gets hard to manage but it can be done. There is a stigma against proxing because of the early days when stale content was all over the place. Does a dynamically assigned dialup/DSL user even need a valid routable IP? For games? Maybe games should be more NAT friendly.
How many ISPs actively provide ALG´s for the 50% of their traffic which consists of the
peer2peer applications? Or is the most popular "killer app" not a required service?
RIAA & friends would love you if you declared HTTP the only allowed protocol. Would
also give a boost to the applications implementing IP over HTTP.
Pete
