And I'd be surprised if it couldn't lead to a successful legal claim against them for damages.

Wait, you want to expose your shady spam operation so you can claim damages? Tell me how that works out for you.

Where exactly does the quoted text mention shady spam operations? It's about DDoS victims, not cybercriminals.

>We are NOT a DDoS Mitigation Service. Yes, we have a lot of DDoS mitigation in place. No, this isn’t here so that you can get cheap DDoS mitigation. You cannot use any services here if you are, have been or think you may be the direct target of a DDoS attack. Contact us instead for a referral to a real DDoS mitigation company. If you come on this system knowingly bringing a DDoS on your heels we shut down service (we may also wildcard your DNS to localhost and set the TTL on your zone out to a year. You’ve been warned).

> If you come on this system knowingly bringing a DDoS on your heels

So hosting a minecraft server? Or a game server of any kind? An IRC server? An internet forum? An email provider?

All things notorious for attracting DDoS attacks.

What motivates a DDoS attacker? Are they all just wannabe vigilantes seeking to right some perceived wrong (such as being banned from a club, opposing political views, etc)? Is there ever a clear economic motive?

Yes, most are wannabe vigilantes.

Sometimes ransom but CloudFlare has kind of killed that line of business.

Correct me if I am wrong, but a TTL is specific to nameservers. So if you switch from easyDNS to say cloudflare your TTLs get completely reset and the caching does as well.

In theory, maybe? But if the TTL is 1 year, why would my caching resolver try to find the new nameservers?

Also, there's a long tail of totally garbage behavior in the DNS space. At my last job, as part of moving our domains off of Dyn/Oracle, we delegated the domains to our self hosting via the domain registry, and changed the NS records at Dyn to point only at our self hosting, but we were still seeing a steady trickle of traffic to Dyn after 30 days.

Firstly, in practice this would be very unlikely to affect a domain for an extended period of time, none of the big providers really treat TTLs like that. It's the mere spirit of the thing that counts.

However, I don't see why changing your nameservers would help if your resolver was always hitting a cache entry with a 1yr TTL.

It would change the Authoritative server's TTL but it wouldn't necessarily propagate to caching DNS servers.

agree it's an overkill solution -

but, devils advocate, maybe it's just there to scare off potential spammers/scammers?

Having worked at an ISP in security/spam/abuse, these people are a huge drain on resources.

Speaking as a consumer, I'm kind of tired of companies giving themselves enormous amounts of power and then saying, "don't worry, we won't use it."

That's not a professional relationship to me. And I would hazard a guess that if I tried to contract with EasyDNS and added clauses that gave myself similar amounts of power over them, they wouldn't be as trusting of me.

The point of a legal document is to set explicit boundaries, not to set a "tone" to the relationship or scare off scammers. Setting tone is what your FAQ is for.

>but, devils advocate, maybe it's just there to scare off potential spammers/scammers?

Why are you engaging in these bizarre mental gymnastics to defend this? The threat is made in a context strictly unrelated to spammers/scammers.

It doesn't matter because it also scares off everyone else also wanting to do business with them.