Isn't this because of the various safe harbor provisions ? If you start policing content then you cease to be a mere pipe and your gain much higher legal responsibility for whatever content passes through your systems.

In general I think it is a very bad idea to give this kind of policing power in the hands of private companies. They tend to be very conservative to avoid legal liability and they can also take arbitrary decisions. When Cloudfront decided to cutoff the Daily Stormer they crossed a line and many people were justifiably upset. It's the job of the legal system.

announcing bgp routes that someone else owns is completely cut and dried wrongdoing, there are no shades of gray there. it's like stealing postal mail from someone else's mailbox.

If someone reports to you that a bad actor (spammer, bruteforcer, whatever) is on your network, it would seem to eliminate your plausible deniability and safe harbor defense.

The real problem is economic; for any given ISP, they are going to side with their customers over some rando complainer most of the time. You don't get rich by disconnecting your own customers unless you absolutely have to.

Sometimes, this is good, if you're the one who might get disconnected (Cox was a great ISP to have, because for many years they would blithely ignore Bittorrent complaints and give you a dozen or so 'strikes' without consequence); it's awful and obnoxious if you are on the receiving end of an attack, and some shitlord low-budget VPS reseller or datacenter operator won't unplug the control server or whatever, or drags their feet to a ridiculous extent.

All about whose ox is getting gored.

>If someone reports to you that a bad actor (spammer, bruteforcer, whatever) is on your network, it would seem to eliminate your plausible deniability and safe harbor defense.

Sure, that seems like it could never be abused at all.

Policing content isn't the same thing as stopping active damage to the internet. Even in the US where free speech is king, you can't go around slashing tires or taking down stop signs and say it's protected by the 1st amendment or something.

Maybe they are afraid that once you start doing this, it may never end. Once you cut somebody out from your network, then you can no longer argue that you are just the dump pipe and don't judge your customers. This can lead to demands for cutting access to sites hosting controversial content etc. All this may generate tons of extra work and no matter what you do, you certainly are not going to please everybody.

Yeah but if someone comes along, cuts open your dumb pipe and redirects the flow somewhere else you obviously have a right to go after them.

As others have stated this isn't about blocking content, this is about cutting off an entity that was actively damaging infrastructure.

Every party involved there has to be careful and do their due diligence though; you can't just cut it off because there might be an actual legitimate business or a critical service in there.

You could also get corporate censorship of the Internet, simply because a hosting provider may allow a lot of content that is offensive, but not illegal. I wrote about this last year using The Daily Stormer as an example:

https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-...

Ah, you beat me to it.

The article seems to make no mention at all of the possibility of collateral damage.

Were any honest actors harmed by this 'shunning'? Seems unlikely that this 'Bitcanal' web-hosting company was used exclusively by malicious parties.

Also, if this 'shunning' idea were to really catch on, couldn't it end up colliding with net-neutrality laws?