I am considering switching to OVH, and I am reading the service specific 
terms.  Most of it seems fine, but I don't understand some of the 
limitations put on IRC:

> For security reasons, OVHcloud reserves the right to proceed with the 
> immediate suspension without notice of any OVHcloud Service on which 
> there is a public service Proxy, IRC, VPN or TOR which is available 
> free of charge or for a fee, and for which OVHcloud has knowledge of 
> its fraudulent or illegal misuse.

> Customer is prohibited from using or allowing the Services to be used 
> for any intrusive activity or any intrusion attempts (including, but 
> not limited to port scans, sniffing, spoofing), and any activity or 
> contentious behavior such as traffic exchanging (Hitleap, Jingling), 
> Black Hat SEO (downloading and uploading videos from and to online 
> gaming platforms), crypto-currency mining, video game bots, etc. 
> Anonymization services or public proxy (including VPN, Tor, P2P, IRC) 
> and cardsharing (CCCam or equivalent) are not permitted on the 
> Services.

> The Customer acknowledges that, for security reasons, some features 
> and protocols (such as IRC or peer-to-peer file exchanges) are likely 
> to be restricted under the Services.

I understand that public proxies, VPNs, and Tor can be easily abused.  I 
do not, however, understand why IRC is in the list---I currently host a 
small IRC network with a few friends (https://irc.runxiyu.org/), and I 
don't really see how normal uses of Internet Relay Chat is relevant to 
anonymization.  It's just a chat protocol.

My question is therefore an inquiry on what OVH's policies are for IRC 
networks that do not serve anonymization purposes at all, and how are 
"some features and protocols such as IRC" restricted.

As another network administrator says: "evidently IRC is 'anonymization' 
despite it by default showing everyone's IPs to everyone, but other 
messaging protocols that actually do anonymization aren't"

(Note that one of the servers of irc.runxiyu.org has a Tor hidden 
service, so users who use Tor can connect to it.  If this is not allowed 
on OVH, I could just not install it when I switch.)

--
Best regards,
Runxi Yu (they/them)
https://runxiyu.org/