[r3trohack3r]

I like the HN approach of taking a charitable interpretation of their message.

Clearly EasyList lived on their free tier for a long time without interruption. Only when they used excessive bandwidth did ToS enforcement happen. When they reached out for support, the support agent rightly pointed out that this isn't a website file.

Reading the ToS, the support agents message appears to be correct. Text files are fine (as is pretty much any format) as long as it isn't the main focus of the HTTP server Cloudflare is fronting. Robots.txt would be fine, turning the list into XML or HTML would not be fine. In this case, the text file isn't there to support the web content of Easy List - it's distributing a text file to applications.

The agent could have added additional context but their message is valid.

[mindslight]

You're still conflating "free tier" with "not a web file". According to the article, they are separate issues and Cloudflare wouldn't be willing to host easylist.txt even on a paid plan.

Meanwhile -

1. easylist.txt is used by every single web page I visit. So the overall purpose argument fails.

2. Web pages commonly use non-directly-renderable data files in formats like JSON or XML, so the file purpose argument fails.

3. Text files are and continue to be one of the major formats displayed by browsers. So the file type argument fails.

4. The size of the file is in line with other files cached by Cloudflare. So that argument fails.

If the Cloudflare support rep said "we just don't feel like doing business with you", that would be a different thing. But instead they're throwing out some arbitrarily-framed unfalsifiable reason as if it's a logical justification. And no, customer service drones and corporate policies don't deserve a fundamental benefit of the doubt, per contra proferentem (ambiguous terms should be construed against the drafter). It's impossible to know what they actually mean here besides "we don't like it", and that is the problem.