Seems like a really weird choice of question. Thinking of germans, a bakery seems more likely something they'd know of; perhaps a supermarket works more internationally (I'm sure there's exceptions to that as well). Maybe the distance in driving, cycling, or public transport minutes to surrounding cities could be a universal question to ask

In fact I don't feel like a hosting service should need to do this at all. If you pay your bills and aren't on the Stasi blacklist you should be good to go. I don't want or expect the likes of Hetzner to be responsible for policing.

It might be good point-of-difference for some hosting service: have brutal KYC so your netblock is well regarded.

My home DNS server blocks all requests to .ru and .cn, but I can't do IP-address-block blocking because shady Chinese companies or individuals just need to rent some computing on AWS or DigitalOcean in order to become indistinguishable from American companies. And specially DigitalOcean seems to be the favorite platform for doing scams.

We're OK with having license plates attached to our cars, but not to be forced to expose our nationality to infrastructure providers? There's really no privacy-sensitive stuff which needs to be protected in that case.

I think that having a blacklist with some ID (bank account, national ID, CA cert) that's hard to replace is a good compromise.

You could try giving people moral purity tests before you let them in (doesn't some of the tildeverse work like that?) but I think it's a dark road.

It feels like it's a check to get a general feeling if things sound plausible. Like no Russian accent for a German name, some knowledge of the surroundings, a valid phone number.