The part that has me uneasy about that action is that the chance that Cogent sales reps are using Cogent IPs is probably low. They're probably doing this work at home. They wouldn't be blocked at all.
Also, the chance that there are people that wish to use ARIN Whois services that are not Cogent employees and yet come from Cogent IP space is quite high. They would be blocked and yet, didn't do anything.
That said, if there's a stern warning about Cogent abusing the system, maybe their customers finding out is a good thing for the overall community. ;-)
-----
Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions
http://www.ics-il.com
Midwest-IX
http://www.midwest-ix.com
From: "Matt Harris" <matt@netfire.net>
To: "Martin Hannigan" <hannigan@gmail.com>
Cc: "John Curran" <jcurran@arin.net>, "North American Network Operators' Group" <nanog@nanog.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 7, 2020 4:48:58 PM
Subject: Re: FYI - Suspension of Cogent access to ARIN Whois
On 7 Jan 2020, at 5:01 AM, Martijn Schmidt via NANOG <nanog@nanog.org> wrote:
>
> Out of curiosity, since we aren't affected by this ourselves, I know of cases where Cogent has sub-allocated IP space to its customers but which those customers originate from their own ASN and then announce to multiple upstream providers.
>
> So while the IP space is registered to Cogent and allocated to its customer, the AS-path might be something like ^174_456$ but it's entirely possible that ARIN would observe it as ^123_456$ instead. Are such IP address blocks affected by the suspension?
As noted earlier, ARIN has suspended service for all Cogent-registered IP address blocks - this is being done as a discrete IP block access list applied to relevant ARIN Whois services, so the routing of the blocks are immaterial - a customer using a suballocation of Cogent space could be affected but customers with their own IP blocks blocks that are simply being routed by Cogent are not affected.
This is a disproportionate response IMHO. $0.02
YMMV,
-M<
Seems entirely reasonable to me. You break the rules, you lose the privilege. Works the same way with my 7 year old.