Yes and it's always been contentious, and as the Internet integrates itself more and more into our lives, the questions about which layers of the network stack ought to follow which principles are worth continually focusing on.
I've been on the Internet since 1994, and it has always been the case that if you made a sufficiently odious pest of yourself over a long enough period of time, that someone would contact your university, employer or ISP, and you would lose your account, or at least your access to Usenet.
You were always perfectly free to go find a new account elsewhere if anyone would have you. But there was always a point where if you passed far enough beyond socially acceptable behavior, your Internet provider might choose to stop doing business with you.
This was especially true in the case of harassment, attacks on network infrastructure, and criminal behavior.
This is why *chan websites have gotten so popular. Being anonymous in everything you post is refreshing. Short of posting illegal content, almost anything goes.
No, anonymity is refreshing because a world where you are always on the record with your most formal identity with everything you say runs largely against the ways humans develop their worldviews: by trying on certain opinions, sorting themselves out, and participating in low stakes interactions where they can make mistakes and learn with minimal consequence.
This doesn't mean 'planning a coup' is one of these contexts, but you are focusing on a very narrow example of the broad social system impact of anonymity in online communication.
Other than anonymity, talking to people who have no incentive to karma-farm is very refreshing.
In websites like Reddit/HackerNews, the karma system gamifies posting. You "lose" if you post any wrongthink, and you "win" when you reiterate whatever is socially acceptable.
This means there are consequences to posting. In *chan websites, there is no consequence to posting your thoughts (or just trolling, because that's fun sometimes).
Are they popular ? They may be infamous, but I feel most of the brain matter has been evacuated from English-speaking boards a decade ago and they at best sustain their existing demographic.
Yes the "point where you passed far enough" is another way of saying there is contention, I'm not sure what your point is. If it was a zero or one state, there is no contention over it.
It's as old as any "service" has existed, nevermind internet.
If you go into a store or cafe and start shouting at the top of your lungs, the owner is free to refuse service, kick you out and/or even ban you from ever entering their store again.
What's the difference between that store owner and an ISP?
You're free to go to any other store that will have you, and is ok with your shouting. If it turns out there are no stores ok with it, whose problem is that? Should store owners be prohibited from refusing service to anyone, no matter what their behaviour?
You can start your own store, so long as you can pay rent, have suppliers that will sell you goods, etc - but again, no one is obligated to do any of that.
(I get there's protected classes that prevent discrimination based on things like age, gender, ethnicity, etc, but that's a separate issue, and tangential to their behaviour which is what we're discussing here.)
That's not really true. The early-ish internet saw plenty of, say, communists peering with Hayek libertarians inside Exodus cages, and other such unexpected arrangements. You also had LUGs, lan parties, BBSs and IRC channels that had very diverse users, but tolerated, and even thrived on, offensive speech and trolls. The community's glue was love of the technology and the medium, with political, ethnic, or other tribal interests being anywhere from completely unimportant to secondary.
Damn near every channel on 2010 EFNet or DALNet would be deemed in violation of most of 2020's TOS. To say nothing of mid-90s EFNet. Whoo-boy, the eggdrop bots logging those channels could get probably a thousand well-known, well-respected developers and network engineers working at FAANGs today fired, if someone took the time.
Not to mention many of us would be quick to identify the people in the logs as fucking crazy people, only to realize we're reading words written by our teenage selves.
When I worked at an ISP years back, if we had a DDOS attack against a customer the way we handled that was to drop all traffic incoming towards that customer's IP at our external peer level (meaning the bigger ISP we were getting most of the external Internet from). That was necessary so all of that DDOS traffic wasn't eating from the bandwidth available to all other customers that weren't being DDOS-ed. But it also meant that the DDOS-ed customer was losing all Internet access (which wasn't really much of a change considering that they were receiving a DDOS that filled all their allocated bandwidth).
Repeat customers that would get DDOS too many times (cybercafes would fall into that category often) would have to either pay more to cover for the cost of the network engineers dealing with the DDOS or get the boot.
From what I remember it's quite similar with many service providers, including hosting providers. Their TOS will allow them discretion to stop providing services to anyone that may negatively impact their business, it's not like there's any law that forces them to provide service to a customer.
Back when I was a kid the red-headed step children of the Internet were the warez, neo-nazi, « revolutionary » (read bomb-making), spam and snuff sites. I'm probably missing a few categories. And that's just the contentious stuff. There are things that even the most zealous free speech maniacs would have a hard time convincing themselves should be allowed even a modicum of publicity. Child porn is the most blatant one.
So you're literally using banning child porn to justify banning political discussion: exactly what free speech advocates predicted when censorship hit the internet.
Everything to do with warez for one, even sites that didn't directly host IP-infringing content, would very often get the boot because it's a huge hassle for hosts to deal with the amount of trouble these websites generate.
Service-providers giving the boot to « problematic » users is as far as I know as old as the Internet.