On Tue, 29 Jun 2004, Alex Rubenstein wrote:
No. This is a clear situation where the customer has canceled his service with us in writing.
Ok, important point.
b) In regards to your passage, "because the customer just appears to be another multi-homed customer of yours", this is a key point. The customer *WILL NOT* be a customer of NAC any longer once they physically leave. The key point here is that the customer has gotten a TRO, which allows them to take the IP address space that is allocated to NAC with them, and NOT HAVE ANY SERVICE FROM NAC. NAC WILL NOT BE ONE OF THE NETWORKS THAT THEY ARE MULTIHOMED TO.
This is ths real issue. The restraining order forces you to deliver services to the (ex)customer. Why? Because both the court and apparently the customer do not understand the issue. So things like handing the IP space back to ARIN, assuming it was the only customer on the /24 or you could renumber you other ones, would still be a bad idea. You can play a lot of technical games, but in general courts really dislike technical games. They don't understand them, and consider it close to being in contempt of the court. So the best option you have left is put the ignorance's cost on the people who deserve it. Invoice ex-customer an exorbitant amount of money to keep the infrastructure he needs for his IP's to remain working, *within* your facility. Being under a restraining order doesn't mean you are not entitled to be reimbursed of the costs of the result of such a restraining order. Also, it is not your problem that he can't use his IPs once he moves. He will need to pull a wire, and that happens to be very *very* expensive with NAC, and even if he doesn't want to do business with NAC, he can't use someone elses services. Send the bill. Ensure the payment expires as soon as possible. Then, even if you cannot disconenct the customer until a higher/sane court looked at the matter, you are clearly showing good faith to the courts and the customer, and might actually be awared those bills in a higher court. And talk to the EFF (Cindy Cohn), they might have had similar cases or jurispudence that matches this case closely. You might also want to talk to Robin Gros (former EFF, now IP-Justice) since she might have had similar cases happening when she was working at the EFF herself. And yes, I would also put the restraining order verbatim on a website and solicit comments on it publicly. Paul