As you are probably all aware Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have Terms of Use (ToU) and Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs) which you agree to when you sign up with them, and seldom read properly no doubt. If you did you would probably never sign up in the first place, though in most cases these draconian rules are never brought to bear on a majority of users. ToUs and AUPs are comprehensive and cover just about every sort of internet behaviour you can possibly imagine, even the most trivial.

ISP websites do not usually publish a contact email address, you just fill in a website form, the exception being  abuse@whoever.com which anyone can post to directly. So what if a political opponent, or a cop, is monitoring you on the internet and discovers who your ISP is, often just by using your IP address and WHOIS? What is to stop them sending abuse reports to your ISP? Even worse, what if a group of people send multiple abuse reports? Your account could be terminated instantly by the ISP abuse department, as happened to me, after I was targeted and netstalked by a group of people.

Although there are plenty of alternative ISPs around it is often time-consuming and costly to switch from one to another, especially if you have a contract, and you are left for a while without any internet access. A useful tip though if it happens to you is to trot off to a local library and use their wifi hotspot, or one of their computers, as an interim measure.

There must surely be some ISPs who are immune to this sort of induced censorship, though extensive ToUs and AUPs are obviously there to protect them from possible litigation and police seizures.