As someone who runs mail servers, I wish they'd be MORE strict to stop the drive-by spammers. Every so often our servers get blocked because someone starts sending spam from a machine on the same netblock.

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

I agree. I'm currently using Linode. If they started requiring every account to have a valid US passport, I'd happily comply.

I wish these companies were forced to get the nationality of the person or the companies owners and be forced to assign them to IP address blocks which identifies these nationalities.

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 don't think you can KYC your way to stopping spammers without stepping on some protected classes.

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.

Sure, it's not solid, but they knew I was a private customer, so what should they do? Do a request to a private credit bureau like the SCHUFA (like Equifax) to check if my provided details are valid?

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.

Boy we're playing IRL Papers, Please now!