For many of these sales orgs "remove me from your list" just means "flag my entry so that they'll endeavor to find the flimsiest excuse to call you again." DataDog's justification for "call me again after I told them to never call me again" was that an employee had made the mistake of giving them his information at a conference and was interested in using them for a personal project. So that justified them contacting me even after I told them to remove me from their list.

I used to get daily calls from them and I'd tell them that we already had another monitoring solution and that they'll need to send me written material to present to my team if we were going to switch. They would always say sure, never do it and then call me again the next day.

For a double-digit number of months.

It's absurd and I'm glad at least something is starting to be done.

Also, it's not clear if small claims would have jurisdiction with companies that aren't in the same state.

Additionally, winning in small claims only gives you the right to chase after the award (the court is not going to collect on your behalf) -- so you still have to go to the time, hassle, and expense of trying to collect.

https://www.nbc12.com/2019/12/05/consumers-winning-financial... (robocall specific)

https://www.mahanyertl.com/2018/robocalls-can-sue-telemarket... (conduct your business over mobile)

Specific to business lines, where harassment remains a legal recourse:

https://pocketsense.com/stop-telemarketers-calling-business-...

https://paysimple.com/blog/small-business-tips-for-dealing-w...

https://www.infoworld.com/article/2626467/how-to-sue-telemar...

More to the point, establishing yourself as a litigious asshole may change the counterparty's marketing calculus. Which is the principle point.

Its a regulatory thing, bump the FTC (and in this case ARIN) so they can take action.

Make them jump through a bazillion hoops. Their will bring their managers and directors involved. Make those waste their time as well. Have them write proposals. Get their bosses involved. Have their bosses waste their time. Eventually it would get to an SVP/EVP level of sales which will permanently fix the issue.

I would hope most network administrators would know enough about their job to not fall for car-salesman kind ridiculous methods.

my phone: ringing off the hook for the past three days. WHY.

CEO: "hey we need better internet access at the new office, I setup a call with Cogent, let me know how it goes"

my phone: answered to find its cogent blowing me up

Cogent: car-salesman methods

me: I quit

Cogent every two months since then: "hey I heard you left your job, any need for business internet access?"

They definitely keep you active, they probably successfully establish contact every 2-3 years, as I’m aggressive about not answering calls from numbers I don’t know.

> ARIN has suspended service for all Cogent-registered IP address blocks. Customers with their own IP blocks that are simply being announced by Cogent are not affected.

[1] https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2020-January/10523...

But hopefully this will be noticed by the higher ups and they’ll take sone action.

then let the email filters do their thing.

Cogent's behavior is obnoxious but, really, if you have a direct allocation from ARIN you should probably have a mailbox / phone number set up to handle lots of spam -- you're gonna get way more than just Cogent.

If you can afford to host an Internet service, you can afford transcribing voicemail service in 2020.

Cogent can die in a fire but this is stupid.

This thing is enormous. This just looks...like the whole internet. Do they fully own those undersea lines too like Google does now with theirs? Or are they leased?

I sure hope they don’t turn out to be a front company for a foreign nation’s military lol like I am always on here saying.

Level3 (now CenturyLink) have better coverage - http://www.centurylink-business.com/demos/network-maps.html - but even they have poor coverage in some areas.

How much of it is dark fiber vs. lit?

The place to filter unwanted mail is at the SMTP/MTA level, in my view; not at the distribution of already-public data.

As pointed out by others, this will absolutely not prevent Cogent from spidering this public data. It will, however, negatively affect legitimate users of the data within Cogent’s IP space.

This is the wrong place for a spam filter.

If you're not a cogent customer, you're either not going to become one because of their tactics, or you are going to become one because of their tactics. I guess it's working towards the latter given how long it's been going on for.

But why should the registration data be in the public domain?

I don't publish my name/address/phone number in a phone book (remember those?) for obvious reasons. My domain registration info shouldn't be any different.

'No privacy' shouldn't be the default setting, with the customer having to pay extra for 'private' registration.

This is how the system has worked for a long time, and the data has always been public. It doesn't get abused much, despite and including Cogent's recent spam to the emails that appear there.

Regardless of how you think it should work in the future, this is how it works today. The data is 100% public now. It has been published. The cat is out of the bag.

Blocking Cogent from accessing their WHOIS service will not un-publish the data, and will not prevent those same humans from retrieving the (again, entirely public) information from a different IP range.

It gets abused plenty (I get tonnes of spam to an email address that is published nowhere and is used for nothing except the RIPE whois db), and Cogent's spam is anything but recent. Cogent has been doing this for over a decade.

I expect spammers to be spammy. I expect reputable companies to behave in a reputable way.

Cogent sales people do their best to ensure that nobody confuses Cogent for a reputable company.

Because IPs are a finite and non-sharable resource and if there is an issue with some IP address, there needs to be a point of contact that anyone on the network can access.

Since the network is public, that contact information is public.

And I wish every registry was as sensible as .se and cared as much about the privacy of domain owners as .se does.