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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

If residential IPs were blocked, cutting off innocent users from services as IPs rotate, customers would bring lawsuits against ISPs and cell providers. Blocked IPs would have to be parked. Impacted users would rush to VPNs and other privacy tools, damaging the ad industry that is the backbone of most big tech. Everyone would rather deal with today's problems than that chaos.

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> customers would bring lawsuits against ISPs and cell providers

What would the case be against ISPs here?

Failure to provide the contracted service. If you pay for internet, but they aasign you an IP that is already blacklisted, you are not getting internet.

I don’t see any way for that to work out.

Your ISP is not responsible for ensuring that the connection they give you works to access any particular sites (see, for example, all the sites that already implement geo-fencing to block or alter the experience based on country of origin).

And if the blacklist is on the upstream provider? So you literally cannot send packets beyond your residential ISP? Have fun surfing the comcast homepage.

It’s not clear what you’re trying to say. Nobody’s arguing that 3rd parties blocking ASs, ISPs, regions, etc is fun for the people who get blocked.

But that doesn’t somehow create a civil case against your ISP for not acting in response to the 3rd party action.

So if I drive my Toyota to the corner store and they tell me to go away, I'm not welcome, I should sue Toyota for failing to get me to the store?

I hate to break it to you but services have been routinely blocking residential IPs associated with being part of VPN endpoints for the better part of a decade now. Akamai will even sell you (granted they are just reselling another vendors product) a database to do this.

The number of residential IPs acting as endpoints is vanishingly small. It isn't an issue. The number of residential IPs that are part of botnets is something else. They are not blocked. Their bad traffic might be, but nobody cuts of an IP simply because a machine on it got a virus once upon a time. If they did, we would all have to negotiate for a new IP every time a machine was compromised.

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