[Laforet]

I had to read the article twice to be sure that it was a utilitarian move (however questionable it might be) rather than a grand ideological stand that the article seems to spend much time portraying.

FWIW, data center IP addresses are already being treated as second class citizens by major content/service providers, and this has become an escalating barrier to self hosting. I am honestly not sure what the author is trying to accomplish.

[chrisweekly]

> "data center IP addresses are already being treated as second class citizens by major content/service providers, and this has become an escalating barrier to self hosting"

Could you please expand on this a bit?

[thrdbndndn]

DC IPs are often:

1. totally blocked by some services (especially those related to copyright, like almost all the streaming services), 2. treated as suspicious by lots of CDNs (so you would get captchas more frequently; have stricter rate control, etc.)

[chrisweekly]

Thanks. Still interested in OP's response too.

Also, what qualifies as a data center?

[Laforet]

Hi, OP here. I did not respond since another poster had beaten me to it but here we go.

The reply above yours is mostly correct though I have to admit that “data center IP” could be a bit of a misnomer when it comes to IP reputation. There are essentially 4 categories:

- Residential landline connections are the most mundane but are also least restricted because this is where your average users are found. The odds of bad actors on the same network is fairly low, and most ISPs will overlook minor transgressions to not incur additional customer support costs.

- Mobile data connections are often behind CG-NAT. Blocking entire IP range tends to generate a lot of false positives so it doesn’t happen very often.

- Institutional IP ranges (such as 17.0.0.0/8 or any org that maintains their own ASN) tends to get a pass as well because they tends to have their own IT and networking department to take collective responsibility if something untoward was to happen.

- This leaves public could and hosting services on the lowest tier because these networks have very low barrier of entry for bad actors . Connections from these IP addresses are also far more likely to be bots and scrapers than a human user so most TDS systems are all too happy to block them.

[immibis]

It is ideological. No utilitarian explanation was provided.