Comment by tim_at_ping

You've definitely got an interesting view point and I appreciate your take as a stakeholder.

To address the first point, I had to look up tortious interference haha but after seeing the main elements, I don't think we'd be close to meeting that threshold. Mainly because:

1. Offering a service which is then engaged with by a end user != Convincing/Interrupting/Interfering 2. We don't ever know the internet contracts they've signed + I actually don't know whether AUP prohibit this kind of activity (I don't think its common, at least in the UK, from my knowledge) 3. I think most ISPs would be hard stretched to provide any material damage

To your second point, since you're a smaller ISP I can understand your position somewhat and my original post was more to do with the big players; we have a lot of experience with large ISPs and they tend to be happy to lease IP space / IP transit if the price is right.

As someone that knows the space very well, I also think the risks here are pretty overstated and subnet bans are incredibly rare and usually caused by activity en masse across an entire block. The likelihood that every single one / or most of your customers would be web-scraping with their IP address is pretty much zero. I guess the effect of activity also depends a lot on what activity it is and how the network is ran - we're very strict on the traffic that can go through the network and everything high-risk is blocked i.e government, edu, banking and extra-extra-bad stuff to avoid issues; I concede that if the company running the network is allowing mailing and everything else under the sun it would have a larger effect on stakeholders such as yourself but I think to broadly say web-scraping on a small portion of IPs on an AS ends in the ISP having to purchase new prefixes is a stretch and hypothetical. If you do actually have experience and have had to purchase new subnets in the past because of this stuff then I'd definitely be interested to hear more (tim@pingproxies.com) and I'd be happy to remove any IPs from your AS if they're present in our network.

Cheers, Tim at Ping