But that's how the world works right now: every provider has acceptable use policy, and not just for emails. Not necessarily because they care, but because they are beholden to an AUP, from their upstream or peers. Which makes it viral: if they won't hold AUP, they'd get cut off, and there's very little use in an internet service provider without connectivity.

> Give most servers "Internet*" access where some ports are missing?

Disallow SMTP traffic unless an account has a certain reputation or verified identity related to it?

I mean, they don't have to do that, and I would agree the government shouldn't force it to happen. But if someone is constantly causing you problems you shouldn't be required to deal with their shit. If you don't want to behave, expect consequences from everyone else in society.

If every time my friends invited me over I brought over another random person that smears feces all over the walls and pees in the corner I probably won't get invited over very often. Linode (and other cheap VPS hosts) are that person constantly enabling abusive people and subjecting them to others.

> Linode respond swiftly to abuse reports[0], block outgoing SMTP by default

One instance of them supposedly responding quickly to an email abuse report isn't showing they're consistently responsive to abuse reports. I don't know if they are or are not. I don't even know that this blog post even refers to Linode, they're not mentioned once.

And its not true they always block outgoing SMTP by default. Loads of old accounts do not have SMTP blocked. New accounts since 2019 sometimes have it blocked, but given the last few times I've made an account and didn't have any blocks it doesn't seem that often. Maybe I just got lucky though.

And don't get me wrong here, I'm not intentionally singling out Linode here. There's loads of cheap VPS providers that enable this kind of abuse. They're not necessarily better or worse in this regard to many others.

> 90% of the spam that I receive from a DMARC-validated sender comes from Google; should every Gmail user be punished because Google aren’t “doing enough”?

Yes. Just like those telephone companies originating most of the spam phone calls should get disconnected. If they're going to enable abusers, they should get cut off.