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For the use case of blocking general web form spam, we've had good results with relying solely on IP reputation crowdsourced via AbuseIPDB:

https://www.abuseipdb.com/about

Occasionally we're an early target of a fresh IP, but we report it back to the database to help later victims. The more people contribute to such a system, the better it gets.

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Many IPs are shared by more than one endpoint, and hundreds or thousands of endpoints sometimes share a single IP. Say a home router is compromised on an ISP using CGNAT and you block by IP, you could potentially be blocking an entire neighborhood of innocent users.

Having parts of the Internet blocked for huge numbers of their customers puts pressure on ISPs to monitor and censor users traffic, which is not the direction I want to see the Internet go.

IPs do not have a one-to-one relationship with users, and I feel strongly that they shouldn't be treated as if they do.

Thank you, that's well-put. I also share that value.

Another value that I hold is that the cost of bad actors shouldn't be externalized to innocent people, i.e. that it's unfair for me to pay the cost of completing a captcha just because somebody somewhere else is misbehaving.

I'm not sure how to reconcile those.

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