(UPDATE) Can a Customer take their IP's with them? (Court says yes!)

Wed Jun 30 15:14:47 UTC 2004

On 2004-06-30-07:38:07, Doug White <doug at clickdoug.com> wrote:
> As more and more of the "facts" come to light, it appears that NAC
> has brought much of this on themselves, and will need to dedicate
> the legal resources to counter the claims of Pegasus, in fact their
> own survival may well depend on it.  I have to admit I have little
> sympathy for them or any provider who hosts spam operations.
[...]
> Obviously spamming is very profitable, and they wish to stay on the
> cash train awhile longer.  NAC likewise did nothing to interrupt
> their own revenue source despite the number of complaints.

This is where I think you're confused.  

If you'd take a moment to verify your "facts" prior to posting, you'd
realize that UCI/Pegasus/DedicatedNow is anything but the spam house
you speak of.  To the contrary, they're a web hosting company, who
sold a good volume of budget-priced dedicated servers a year or two
back.

If you've got any knowledge of the low-end "dedicated server" market,
you'd realize an overwhelming majority of its customers are
inexperienced armchair sysadmins, many of whom operate vulnerable
formmail CGI's, open relays, irresponsible mass-mailing campaigns,
affiliate/reseller programs with *their* customers participating in
the above, and all sorts of things which generate complaints (and
rightfully so).  And of course, when you're dealing with 1000's of
servers deployed, there's only so much policing the provider can do on
a *proactive* basis.

I know firsthand that Pegasus employs full-time folk who actively deal
with abuse/AUP enforcement, including the termination of spammers on
their network.  I'd even go out on a limb and say they're more
responsible than many of their competitors in this regard.  It's not
like they're making a conscious effort to hold on to a couple of
very-low-profit-margin dedicated server customers to extract every
last penny out of them, thus getting their IP space blackholed and
hurting overall customer satisfaction/retention metrics in the
process. :)

Whether or not you approve of their recent legal actions (wrt TRO and
IP address space portability), try not to let that obscure the simple
facts of the matter...

-a