From: Rick Adams
So, to sum up, ANS is discriminating against users of a network because of their natural origin and there is no basis in law to support this position. Pretty xenophobic for a group that claims to be an international provider.
As a matter of business policy, we attempt to ascertain the country of origin for any network announced over the ANSNET backbone. We already know that it is illegal (according to Dept. of Treasury and Commerce) for us to exchange traffic with certain countries under any circumstances (e.g. Irag), and only when granted a special license for other countries (e.g. Libya, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, and Cambodia). CIX assumes no liability or responsibility for the networks they announce to ANSNET. We do not get up-to-date information on the nets announced by the CIX including the country of origin other than by inspecting dumps of the CIX router tables. We only recently became aware of the former Soviet Union network announcement from the CIX routing table dump. Until recently, the Soviet Union was on one of the dept. of Commerce restriction lists. While we have recieved some preliminary advise that carrying transit traffic to/from the former Soviet Union is ok, we are still awaiting verification through independent counsel that there are no other legal liabilities. We expect a positive reply to this shortly (perhaps by the the actual config. run). We do not view this as a matter of paranoia (although others may), and this has nothing to do with NSF, other than they have asked us not to announce this net to the federal agency networks. We view this verification simply as prudent business practice. Jordan