Techniques for creating consent contracts for devices that indicate whether the devices consent to receiving network-based communications from other devices. Further, the techniques include enforcing the consent contracts such that network-based communications are either allowed or disallowed in the network-communications layer prior to the network communications reaching the devices. Rather than simply allowing a device to communicate with any other device over a network, the techniques described herein include building in consent for network-based communications where the consent is consulted at one or more points in a communication process to make informed decisions about network-based traffic.