This is not the surprise. Regulation pressure especialy in the KYC part as well as anti-money laundering and terorrism financing is geting stonger and they are actualy forcedto obey such regulations in order to keep their business and to run it legitimately. But this also represents certain level of protection for users, despite the lower level of anonimity.
It's definitely not the surprise, but the surprise is how quickly they switched from "recommending" people with higher trade volumes to verify their ID, to actually requiring them to present ID before they can resume trading. That was surprising to me, I would have expected that process to take much longer than it actually did.
Also, it seems like that although I only got the ban a few days ago, people have been getting it as early as a month ago. Makes me wonder if this is actually a universal move across the entire platform.
All advertisers had to verify themselves before this anyways, and also since Localbitcoins was already protected by escrow (that's how it works), as well as the fact that LBC accounts will still be traded on the underground markets after this ban, I don't see how it really protects the users any more than it had previously.