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Cogent Cut Off from ARIN Whois for Scraping Net Engineers' Contact Details and Sliding them to Sales

posted by martyb on Friday January 10 2020, @08:08PM   
from the sudden-outbreak-of-common-sense? dept.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Cogent cut off from ARIN Whois after scraping net engineers' contact details and sliding them to sales staff:

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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Original Submission

• To the NANOG archives... To the NANOG archives... (Score: 2, Interesting) by maggotbrain on Friday January 10 2020, @08:56PM (1 child)

  by maggotbrain (6063) on Friday January 10 2020, @08:56PM (#942037)

  Had to take a peek in to see how the crusty 'ol network operators were handling this news on NANOG. Seems the ARIN has blocked all Cogent registered IP addresses [nanog.org] (not those customers who are only announced from Cogent) from access. Good for them. Cogent thread [nanog.org] As usual, there are some amusing anecdotes:

  About every six months I am contacted by a new person whom I've never heard of before. My theory is that each newbie Cogent sales rep has been assigned a bunch of random cold leads to call and attempt to sell. The most recent tactic is to request 1 or 10Gb IP transit at impossible to service sites, such as AT&T Long Lines towers on top of 1000 meter high mountains, in Deadhorse Alaska, or the CLLI codes for the COs of tiny coastal villages on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Invariably I never hear anything back from that person again. The cycle repeats again six months later.

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• Re:To the NANOG archives... (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 11 2020, @03:18AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 11 2020, @03:18AM (#942147)

  Thanks for posting your findings - saved me some digging! Appreciate the life-hours saved!

  Parent