It's everyone except technical end users. Google - not a carrier unless you use FI/Fiber - wants to intermediate everything. So do Facebook, Microsoft, Slack, Discord and everyone else - you can't be monetized if they don't control the flow. The government wants that too, by the way - it makes stuff like Prism realistic and so much easier.

> NAT and related IPv4 hacks hand a great deal of power to people who want to meter you by the byte, inspect your content for compliance with their business model, and generally define how you are "allowed" to use the internet.

They do no such thing; They already have all that power by virtue of your pipe going through them - even before the CGNAT days, my ISP would require extra payment to let you listen on e.g. TCP ports 25 and 80. Every packet you send or receive goes through your carrier, whether or not they fudge the IP address on it to a different space.

> It doesn't have to be that way.

And yet it can't be any other way because 99.9% of users are indeed better off if their incoming data is filtered. That doesn't have to be that way either - we just have to have secure software so being on the internet without a firewall is not a risk.

The internet is becoming a health-like thing: You need enough people around you to be vaccinated so that you don't suffer viruses/ddos attacks yourself. But most of the population is worse than antivaxers - they don't even know that they can be (or have been) infected, and there's no clinic to just go to even if they did.

... so it effectively does have to be that way, unfortunately.