Likely bad news and writing on the wall for the open-but-competitive culture at Packet. Equinix has been historically turning every single acquisition into a closed-off enterprise-only product/service, especially in the IXP space.
or perhaps you mean something else with open?
Good on them for being proactive about it instead of waiting until you had created a server. Could you imagine a production server being frozen while they wait for you to verify your identity?
Fraud is incredibly prevalent in the hosting space. Spammers, CC fraud, hackers, etc.. all stand to benefit from servers not obtained in their own name.
All of those can get fake id scans for a couple of dollars each.
Hosting / pay for remote virtual stuff is notorious for abuse. I'm surprised AWS doesn't require an ID to get started these days. I understand why smaller player do, though.