Collective punishment — when a service blocks you for what someone else did

This is not a bug: it is how IP-address blocking normally works. Here is why it hits blameless people, and what can be done about it.

Why an address identifies nobody

The idea that an IP address identifies an internet user has been false for fifteen years.

On mobile networks, CGNAT (Carrier-Grade NAT) makes hundreds of subscribers share one public address at the same instant. You and the person next to you on the tram go out through the same address.

At a fixed-line provider, the address is regularly reassigned. The one you have today belonged to someone else yesterday, along with whatever they did with it.

On a consumer VPN, a few thousand customers share a few hundred addresses.

In hosting, an entire range belongs to one provider and gets treated as a block.

In all four cases, blocking "the address" means blocking a group of people who have nothing in common except their operator.

What it looks like in practice

Situation	What the user experiences
Sign-up refused without reason on a service never used before	The address is flagged for a stranger's activity
A captcha on every page, indefinitely	The address's reputation is degraded
A whole country or hosting range blocked	A coarse-grained decision, with no individual review
Account suspended shortly after creation	A correlation, not a behaviour

Reddit and Vinted are two examples users often cite — sign-ups blocked outright, accounts closed with no detailed reason. They are not isolated cases: this is the mechanical result of moderation at scale, where blocking costs nothing and reviewing does not.

Why services do it anyway

Arithmetic. Individually reviewing millions of accounts is impossible; blocking an address costs one line of configuration. The sum is quickly done, and it is done at the expense of an invisible minority: those who are blocked appear nowhere in the service's statistics, since they never managed to sign up.

This is not malice. It is an externality — a cost the service does not carry and passes on to others.

What a dedicated address changes

A dedicated mobile address — yours, not shared with other customers — does not give you priority and shelters you from no rule. It does one thing, and one only:

it takes you out of the group.

You no longer inherit a stranger's history, and a decision about you is about your behaviour, not someone else's. That is exactly what individual treatment means — and exactly what range-blocking destroys.

Two honest caveats:

A mobile address is still structurally better treated than a hosting address, because a service cannot ban it without banning real customers along with you. That is a constraint it is under, not a favour it does you.
It protects against no report concerning what you actually do. A clean address only answers accusations that were never about you.

What it does not entitle you to

Getting out of collective punishment means asking to be judged on your own acts. It does not mean escaping judgement.

Recreating an account to get around an active suspension breaches the terms of every service concerned. This site does not explain how to do it, and a dedicated address will not help: the sanction applies to the account, the device and often the payment method, not just the address.

If your account went down and you believe it unjustified, the route is appeal — not recreation. It is described in Automated moderation: your rights against the machine, and it has the advantage of being enforceable.

How many contexts behind one address?

The right answer is one, for the very reason this whole article is about: as soon as two activities share an address, they also share each other's fate. You have not divided a cost, you have correlated two risks.

The full reasoning is in Compartmentalising what you do.