On Mar 4, 2022, at 14:03 , Matthew Petach <mpetach@netflight.com> wrote:
On Fri, Mar 4, 2022 at 12:55 PM Martin Hannigan <hannigan@gmail.com <mailto:hannigan@gmail.com>> wrote:
I would argue they don't have much of a choice:
"The economic sanctions put in place as a result of the invasion and the increasingly uncertain security situation make it impossible for Cogent to continue to provide you with service."
I would expect to see others follow suit if that is the case.
That's an interesting slope to slide along...
I fully understand ISPs disconnecting customers for non-payment; we've all had to do that at one point or another in our careers, I'm sure. However, that's generally done *after* the customer has demonstrated an inability or unwillingness to pay their bills.
This doesn't seem to indicate that any existing invoices have gone unpaid past their due date, but simply that there is *concern* that a future bill might go unpaid due to the economic sanctions.
Sanctions cut both ways, and there is the possibility that Cogent’s legal team has said “Continue to do business with X in Russia puts you at risk of violating sanctions.” It’s not clear whether that’s the case or not, but I will say that if I were doing business there and my legal team said something like that, I’d seriously consider dropping the relevant customers quickly if it wouldn’t be a worse consequence than violating said sanctions (which seems unlikely).
I'm not sure that's a good precedent for a service provider to create; "we may terminate your service at any point if we suspect that at an unspecified time in the future, you may become unable to pay future invoices."
Yeah, I don’t think that’s what is happening here. Think of this more like businesses that were trading with Cuba during the Kennedy administration. All of that abruptly stopped pretty much one day.
If and when bills go unpaid, I fully support turning off customers. I worry about the precedent of disconnecting based on suspicions of what might happen in the future, however.
What about “If and when it becomes clear that it’s illegal to keep those customers”? Owen