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IP isn’t supposed to have “private address space”. The only reason it does is because the address space is scarce. NAT does not make your network “private” or provide security, firewalls and good host software do that. NAT literally breaks IP.


RFC 1918 (Address Allocation for Private Internets) disagrees with you, and has done since at least 1996.


RFC 1918 describes space for entirely private networks, not “private extensions” to the public globally routable internet. There’s a subtle but important difference. The private addresses strictly aren’t routable on the public internet. NAT (which there’s also an RFC for) is what what allows packets to flow between private disjoint IP networks. IP is only scoped to work within a single network, whether it’s public or private or triangle.


That screws up when two private entities merge and discover that they're using the same RFC1918 block.

(or just want to interoperate, even)


End-to-end principle disagrees with you. As does my network. All routable IP space baby. Makes things a breeze.


IPv6 got a private address space, even if we shouldn't run out of IPv6 addresses anytime soon.




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