On Sat, 24 Oct 2026, Kevin Tillery via NANOG wrote:
On 23 October 2026 11:38:43 CEST, Joel M Snyder via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
Folks:
We are trying to monetize some IP addresses that are temporarily not in use, and the potential customer is using a service "IP2Location" which has classified our IPs as data center, rather than ISP. I wrote to "support@" twice with not even an acknowledgement. Does anyone have any ideas on how to get through to them?
I don't know how/why IP2Location suddenly got so important, but if they're going to play a role in the Internet ecosystem, the least they can do is acknowledge messages sent to their official support email address. But I guess this is just the latest in a very long list of organizations who seem to be important glue (at least to some people) but who are not acting responsibly.
Anyway: anyone from IP2Location here? Anyone have any good contacts there? Any advice on how to get them to update?
Thanks as always,
jms
Important note: Since you are trying to "monetize IP addresses" it is clear that IP2Location has the right idea about how these IP addresses are being used, and is, in fact, acting responsibly.
The purpose of these IP information companies (and there are lots) is precisely to determine when an ISP is lying about what their addresses are being used for. Good luck convincing them to fall for the lie.
Why would you assume Joel is lying and "data center use" is the only way to monetize spare IPs? I think it's just as, if not more, likely he's looking at leasing the IPs to an ISP, and that ISP is trying to do some due diligence and not rent IPs that are going to cause customer complaints due to incorrect IP Geo data. Coincidentally, IP2Location is one of the several IP Geo providers (aka snake oil salesmen) I dealt with when $work was having major IP Geo issues due to having purchased a RIPE /16 (for use by broadband Internet subscribers in Florida) before I started here. Allegedly, for IP2Location, all you need to do to fix this is publish a geofeed: https://blog.ip2location.com/knowledge-base/what-is-geofeed/ IIRC, IP2Location is one of the IP Geo providers who sells IP Geo data consumed via bulk file transfer. That makes it highly likely that you'll eventually find someone "using" IP2Location data that's stale (i.e. They setup an automated process [or didn't], and the credit card they were paying IP2Location with expired, so the automated process broke [lost access to download fresh data], but nobody noticed.) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Lewis, MCP :) | I route Blue Stream Fiber, Sr. Neteng | therefore you are _________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________