Suppose I buy 1000 VMs and use them to DDoS something.
Should the hosting provider wait for a court decision to stop it?
Should the hosting provider wait for a court decision to stop it?
For a webhost, you call the police and....well what they're doing isn't illegal so the police have no reason to care. If they were doing something illegal, ultimately the police might ask (or depending on the law, might need to get a court order) to ask you to shutdown the account. At this point, they'd no longer have access to the account.
In fact, if you imagine a person who does both on the same day, if they got out on bail, they would still be allowed into the house during the course of the eviction process. So they could continue using the house for a minimum of 30 days.
I don't find this comparison to a landlord at all compelling.
Under Damaging a Computer, 1030(a)(5)
> The provision may also be used to prosecute the perpetrators of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which occur, for example, when an attacker overwhelms a server’s ability to process legitimate requests by overloading the server with a flood of illegitimate traffic.