Author here, I know this is a dismissive comment, but I'll bite anyway.
As far as I understand the history of the IP protocol, initially an IP address pointed to a host. (/etc/hosts file seems that way)
Then it was realized a single entity might have multiple network interfaces, and an IP started to point to a network card on a host. (a host can have many IP's). Then all the VRF, dummy devices, tuntaps, VETH and containers. I guess an IP is now pointing to a container or VM. But there is more. For performance you can (almost should!) have an unique IP address per NUMA node. Or even logical CPU.
In modern internet a server IP: points to a single CPU on a container in a VM on a host.
Then consider Anycast, like 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8. An IP means something else... it means a resource.
On the "client" side we have customer NAT's. CG NAT's and VPN's. An IP means similarly little.
"So, test we did. From a /20 address set, to a /24 and then, from June 2021, to an address set of one /32, and equivalently a /128 (Ao1). It doesn’t just work. It really works"
We're able to serve "all cloudflare" from /32.
There is this whole trend of getting denser and denser IP usage. It's not avoidable. It's not "breaking the Internet" in any way more than "NAT's are breaking the Internet". The network evolves, because it has to. And for one, I don't think this is inherently bad.
>It's not avoidable. It's not "breaking the Internet" in any way more than "NAT's are breaking the Internet".
I agree. NATs, particularly the Carrier NAT that smartphone users are behind, has broken the internet. It's made it so most people do not have ports and cannot participate in the internet. So now software developers cannot write software that uses the internet (without depending on third parties). This is bad. So is what you've done.
> And for one, I don't think this is inherently bad.
Ao1 has super nice censorship resistance properties. With DoH + ECH, that essentially is game over for most firewalls. Can't wait to see just how Cloudflare rolls Ao1 out (I'd imagine it'd be opt-in, like Green Compute).
> Then it was realized a single entity might have multiple network interfaces, and an IP started to point to a network card on a host
Another perspective is that the connection of an IP to specific content or individuals was a bug of the Internet’s original design and thankfully we’re finally finding ways to disassociate them.
How?
Original internet design meant a decentralized network of devices, which need a resolvable IP.
Once you are behind a middleman, you have to orchestrate a delicate dance to be able to reach something.
What’s breaking the internet model is the internet becoming too popular and running out of addresses. There’s nothing specific to Cloudflare here. You’re free to do the same thing to conserve your own address space. It’s sort of a super-fancy NAT.
The internets a set of abstractions, as long as they still implement some common protocols and don’t create a walled garden, is there any real social or technical issue with them doing unusual things in their network?
I can totally see an argument against their CDN being too pervasive and problematic for TOR users, but this seems fine IMO.
