Cogent Cut Off from ARIN Whois for Scraping Net Engineers' Contact Details and Sliding them to Sales
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:
There are still corners of the internet that function like the old days, and US regional internet registry ARIN has just proved it - much to the joy of network engineers.
[...] "ARIN has repeatedly informed Cogent that their use of the ARIN Whois for solicitation is contrary to the terms of use and that they must stop," ARIN's CEO John Curran posted to a mailing list this week.
"Despite ARIN's multiple written demands to Cogent to cease these prohibited activities, ARIN has continued to receive complaints... For this reason, ARIN has suspended Cogent Communications' use of ARIN's Whois database effective today and continuing for a period of six months."
[...] So what's being going on? Well, according to the longer letter [PDF] sent to Cogent's CEO Dave Schaeffer from ARIN's Curran, the regional Internet registry (RIR) has received "numerous complaints of Cogent personnel repeatedly using the database to solicit customers" - largely emails and phone calls offering internet engineers bandwidth and similar services.
No one likes sales reps calling, especially engineers who go out of their way to make sure they are not easily contactable.
And that, [it] seems, was Cogent's downfall because - being engineers - many of them have set up specific emails just for ARIN correspondence and others never gave out their phone numbers except to ARIN because, well, they had to. So when the sales reps came calling the engineers knew straight away where they had culled their information.
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