Many platforms (e.g. Amazon, Google) will block your account without warning and any new ones you create trying to get back into their platform, and defend their behaviour with generic 'violation of T&Cs' statements to kick you off their platforms permanently. I'm not condoning this behaviour, but at least EasyDNS spell this out plainly. And since DNS is their core product, the mechanism makes sense.
It does indeed go beyond a suspension, it's a ban, and that's why I equate it to Amazon and Google blocking any new accounts - they are banning you from their platform, arguably for life. At least EasyDNS offer it to be 12 months.
I'm no DNS expert, but AFAIK, you can transfer the zone to another provider (one that you don't violate the T&Cs with) and from there you could conceivably regain control over the domain.
You completely misunderstand, this is strictly different from a ban. This is like DDoSing someone after you banned them.
The TTL tells DNS resolvers to cache the "localhost" result for 1 year, it's specifically an attempt to prevent you from regaining control over the domain at another provider.
Okay, fair point. I can only assume they would only do this for persistent and malicious violation of the rules; it's a pretty good incentive not to do anything nasty with them if they can lock you globally out of your zone for a year. In fairness, so could any other provider if they so chose. As a registrar, I can guess the amount of abuse they have to deal with (spam domains, illegal content etc.) is high enough that they're pretty tired of dealing with it, so they take the Roosevelt approach:
Speak softly, and carry a big stick.
Again, I don't agree with this approach personally if it affected me, but I do understand it from a business POV. Letting the customer know in advance that they do have this power will weed out the ones who are most likely to fall into it.
I get suspending someone, I don't get "we may also wildcard your DNS to localhost and set the TTL on your zone out to a year"