People choosing to delegate association decisions to others is not new; the mechanism might be novel, but seems to be hardly relevant to the basic effect.
Sure, but the scale and the lack of oversight in the new methods is a lot scarier. Everything you can think of that works like this—DNSBLs, the TSA watchlist, etc.—creates a Kafka-esque hell for a non-negligible set of people. Whereas what these replaced was just lists maintained by people, somewhere—where those people could be reached and pleaded with.
