The internet is block happy.

Internet companies have so many layers of blocking and so many blocks in place they can’t tell you who they are blocking at any given moment. Sometimes they can see the block and acknowledge the block and have no clue where it is occurring or how to undo it.

This blog article from Cloudflare is hilarious. Cloudflare, one of the biggest purveyors of blockiness, wrote 20 pages about why you shouldn’t block IPs on the internet. The hypocrisy was unapparent to the authors. Their goal was to get people to stop blocking Cloudflare. Screw everyone else.

Here are some of the blocks I have encountered in 2024.

It says to open a ticket if I think it was a mistake. I got a ticket receipt, but never received a reply. To them, I guess, it wasn’t a mistake and so my ticket was simply ignored.

I signed out of youtube because I had two strikes against my account for using an ad blocker. Now I’m “a bot” that must be stopped from viewing any and all videos “to protect the community”. Just say what you are really trying to do YouTube; exert total control over the users that made your platform popular by adding excessive tracking and ads.

And Google is about to nerf ad blocker extensions in Chrome and Chromium based browsers. Hmmm.

I purchased Windows 11 for a new computer build and had a hell of a time obtaining a copy of it, even though I had a receipt and a license key. First, Microsoft has my residential AT&T IP address flagged as a proxy or anonymizer. Then, Microsoft support doesn’t believe me and/or could not do anything to help me.

I had to go to a friend’s house and use their internet connection to download the Windows 11 installer. And on the first attempt, I got this message:

It wasn’t a block, but it could be a hint why they are blocking large swaths of people from downloading the Windows installer from them – they don’t want to supply the bandwidth.

Why is the Windows 11 installer so protected at all? You need a license to activate it. And I had a license. Why couldn’t I access it? So many questions. The solution is to just not deal with Microsoft anymore.

When will gaming be free from Windows and Microsoft? Cloud gaming was working really well and in a lot of ways was better than having a physical rig at home. But then games started BLOCKING access to their games through cloud services. A cloud gaming computer is still a computer. I still log into my account and download the game and prove ownership and all that. So why are all these game distributors blocking gaming over the cloud? I can think of one reason – they want to have their own cloud service so they are running interference on other cloud gaming providers. It killed Stadia and Geforce Now looks to be next.

That’s a look at just a few services I was using last year and am not using this year because access was taken away and there is no recourse. We are not even given an option of discourse. We abide by their rules or we walk. I am walking.