Tier1 blackholing policy?

[Thomas Schmid <schmid () dfn de>]

Greetings,

I know Tier1s are blackholing traffic all the time :) (de-peering, 
congestion etc.)
but did it became a new role for Tier1s to go from transit provider to
transit blocker?

We received recently customer complaints stating they can't reach 
certain websites.
Investigation showed that the sites were not reachable via Tier1-T, but 
fine via
Tier1-L. I contacted Tier1-T and the answer was something like "yeah, 
this is a known phishing
site and to protect our customers we blackhole that IP" (btw - it was 2 
ASes away from Tier1-T).

Huh? If I want to block something there, it should me my decision or 
that of my country's legal
entities by court order and not being decided by some Tier1's 
intransparent security department.
(Not even mentioning  words like 'CGN', 'legal', 'net neutrality' or 
'censorship') This might be
an acceptable policy for a cable provider but not for a Tier1.

Haven't seen something like this in many years. Did I miss a 
pardigm-shift here and has this
become a common "service" at Tier1s?

   Thomas

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