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Comment by catblast01 | Hacker News Reader

It’s just silly to suggest this when quite simply not all IPs behave equally and the differences are not subtle. It’s annoying when “bad” IPs get reassigned and change, but that is a relatively infrequent event - and certainly CloudFlare is at least adaptive. It’s just not a principal aligned with reality.

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The problem that no one seems to acknowledge: one IP doesn't necessarily mean one person or entity behind it. Residential ISPs often use a single public IP as an exit point for many subscribers simultaneously. So if one, just one, of these subscribers does something that our internet overlord Cloudflare considers nefarious, everyone else sharing this IP gets punished for doing nothing wrong.

This specific problem happens all the time. That’s the ISPs problem, not cloudflare. The ISP has a user negatively impacting other users, best course of action would be remove that user and notify cloudflare after.

Do ISPs actually do any of this? Does any ISP ever do any of this? I don't think so. Also, no one knows what was the particular thing that pissed off Cloudflare, because it's a black box.

I'll say it again: centralizing the internet around a single company is a terrible idea. Especially so when said company terminates TLS and thus has access to unencrypted traffic.

ISPs don’t because they don’t care. Until there’s a legal or monetary reason to do so ISP providers will do the bare minimum. My spouse worked for a large American ISP for would hear all the time that apartment complexes would not be able to access certain services because one user did something that got the IP blocked and nobody cared because it wasn’t their problem.

ISPs don't care so they don't do anything. Website operators don't care so they offload the responsibility to Cloudflare. Cloudflare doesn't care so it bans and/or humiliates unrelated people however it sees fit. Nice.

It's Cloudflare's problem too if my customers can't access my site because I made the poor choice of trusting Cloudflare's antibot protection.

This specific issue is going to be solved by IPv6 though.

In 50 years when half the internet users will finally have access to IPv6. Or, I'm pretty sure some people, or Cloudflare, will start banning entire /32 or even bigger subnets because why not. Oh you're from Russia? Here, have a 403 for no apparent reason.

Considering the current adoption rates, I'm eyeballing 5 years :

https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

It may be important to tease out the mobile operators and VPS providers like AWS/Azure/GCP first. They have skewed the numbers a bit. Almost all VPS providers and cell providers are IPv6 now. Residential is hit-or-miss. Maybe that will change as more people use Starlink and other newer tech.

Yeah, in no small part because cellular operators tend to be newer than landline ISPs...

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