The amount of automated and apparently-manual attempted credit card fraud (and exploit attempts, for that matter) any halfway-prominent site with a CC form is subjected to is hard to appreciate if you've never seen it. It's a whole lot. They aren't even necessarily trying to buy what you have, but to validate that their stolen cards work. And they're quite busy. If too much of that gets through—really, any more than a very tiny amount of it gets through—you're gonna have an extremely bad time.
Various CC service providers like Stripe do provide tools to try to block those attempts, but defense in depth is usually a very good idea, including fairly aggressive firewall-level blocking.
A couple of examples I can think of is blocking bots from scraping their site for pricing and details and from resellers from buying up all of the stock (see sneakers, electronics, etc). The last example doesn't directly impact their bottom line, but it will make customers go elsewhere.
I'm not understanding the generalized sentiment here. How would, for example, a retailer benefit from this strategy? How does it protect their bottom line?
I can see how a particular kind of "facilitated user economy," such as games, gambling and promotional companies could benefit, but it doesn't seem that broadly applicable to what most people would consider a "mainstream" business.
> so we can lay off the IP-based reputation stuff and the geo-blocking: it's tying some form of personal ID to your browsing activity
And a new market for identity theft is born.
Also, as someone who serves content and geo blocks it, that's not up to me, that's up to the owner of the content or whoever happens to be licensing it for them. So, even if you sent me a picture of your government ID, it changes nothing.