> It will centralize the internet further and squash many attempts for alternative communications.

Would it? It seems to me that a future where 1. every home land-line Internet connection is CGNATed; but 2. every cellular Internet connection is a public IPv6 prefix (as is already mostly the case today!); is actually a promising one. Provided, that is, that residential ISPs also get off their collective asses and provide the promised "hosted edge compute" capabilities they've been tinkering with for the last 10 years.

Since the Internet's inception, people on residential connections have been stuck in a broken mindset of "your home PC can act as a monolithic Internet peer — but only an unreliable one, that can't receive messages when it's shut off and is prone to being DDoSed — so you probably shouldn't actually use it as a server/p2p node, for anything other than, say, VoIP, or hosting an ephemeral multiplayer FPS game session. And you can tinker with a development web-server on your home network — but if you want to actually host anything, you should go pay a cloud provider."

Whereas, in a world with no well-Internet-connected home PCs providing the illusion of the possibility of hosting a home server, only instead:

1. home PCs — which can compute well, but can't be a network-ingress, and also might go down (often for laptops, less often for desktops, but both far more often than a real server would);

2. smartphones — which can network-ingress, but can't spend long periods computing (without burning all your battery life), and which will go down / out of wireless range extremely often; and

3. both commercial, and more importantly ISP-residential, edge-compute clusters — which would give tiny compute slices per workload, but ones with full network-ingress, and would never go down;

...then it'd be clear to all the people who had been thinking until that point that they could get away with p2p on home PCs using STUN/TURN-based protocols, that they would have to do something else; that operating systems (esp. mobile ones) and their client-server/p2p applications would have to evolve to become inherently edge-hybrid; that applications would need to evolve frameworks to embed persistent network-ingress "edge components" that could be shipped automatically and implicitly to the active network's associated edge deploy environment as part of the application's runtime; etc.

If you can't picture that: think about a web server backend that automatically deploys/updates an associated Cloudflare Worker whenever it boots up; and which then expects to be talked to through that Cloudflare Worker proxying requests to it; and where that Worker can also buffer requests, store data into its edge key-value store, etc.

But instead of a web server backend, it's the Minecraft app on your phone; and instead of Cloudflare, it's your residential ISP; and instead of the edge worker making a forward connection to your phone, your phone holds open an ngrok-like reverse connection to the edge worker to receive requests.

(Oh, and one other point of necessary evolution: that the "server component" of any p2p app would also be a mobile workload — not shiftable to the edge itself, but rather through the persistent edge workload to any [similarly reverse-connected, not always online] "compute host nodes" owned by the same user/organization. Such that you could buy a little NUC/NAS-like box to shove under your TV at home, whose marketed purpose would be compute+storage offload for the workloads launched on your phone; or such that your office could have some server racks for free auto-offload of "server components" of apps running on any employee machine — reversing the usual "cloud app with local client" relationship into "local app with slaved cloud workload." Where, in either case, the relevant workloads are still canonically on your phone/PC, so if the "compute offload" has to be drained for an update, the workloads just temporarily migrate back to your phone/PC.)

From my perspective, this would actually be a much better Internet in practice than the one we have today. Individuals would be far more able to host persistent, accessible services on a whim, without investment into local infra or being beholden to a commercial provider with a ToU. Individuals would be paying their ISPs for edge hosting, yes (if they don't have a server with a public IP to run an "edge layer" on themselves); but —

* those would be small fixed costs (as apps' network-ingress components would be small fixed workloads);

* and would likely be sold as free value-adds of data plans (just like web hosting, email, and access to locally-mirrored NNTP groups used to be sold as value-adds of residential Internet plans);

* and such workloads would only be smarter versions of the "dumb pipe" the residential ISP was already providing, not backends in-and-of themselves; and so wouldn't be subject to a VPS-host-like "you can't host X/Y/Z on our servers" type ToU, because users are not hosting anything per se;

* and as such edge workloads live on a very high-level abstraction layer, an edge-hosting ISP would be empowered to do all sorts of things to defend such workloads from DDoS attacks (e.g. putting the known-protocol workload behind a layer-7 WAF), that it can't do for individual customers' single-homed single-IP single-port, arbitrary-protocol home PC server processes.