How NAT quietly reshaped the internet into a client-server web

Network Address Translation, introduced in RFC 1631 in 1994 as a stopgap for IP address depletion, let multiple devices share a single public IP by rewriting packet headers. That fix, paired with restrictive ISPs and CGNAT, made it hard for ordinary devices to act as servers, pushing users toward centralized cloud services instead of direct peer-to-peer connections.