Meathook Reality

Here’s an interesting tale, for anyone out there who understands some of the nitty-gritty of the way the Internet works.

Overview, as I read it, mainly from the affidavits referenced below:

Kid sets up successful hosting business from his parents basement sometime back in ‘98, and has grown it by several hundred percent in the past several years. He’s done this, I assume, by organizing servers, writing some software, advertising, and purchasing bandwidth and colocation space from a provider. Of course, most colo providers have realized that they, too, can sell hosted space, which is all well and good (heck, I ran the Newsnipple Collective right next to Hurricane Electric’s hosting servers). The problem comes when the colo provider decides that they want to buy out one of their customers, and the customer will not cave. In this case, the customer has been trying to move out, despite the fact that the provider has been raising rates. Moving a business is not particularly easy. Doubly so when it depends on being as close to 100% reliable as possible.

Moves on the Internet can be particularly tough. When I moved my servers home from Fremont, the IP addresses changed – this is because I effectively switch Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The ISP provides the connection between your computer(s) and everything else. And every computer on the Internet has at least one address. These addresses are doled out by the American Registry for Internet Numbers. All of the major ISPs lease a block of numbers, and when they connect together, tell each other, through various protocols, how to send data to those blocks. Those blocks are further subdivided into networks, and eventually the networks or individual addresses get assigned to customers. Because of this heirarchy, when a customer moves from one ISP to another, they get a subset of the new ISP’s address. This change causes just about all the normal hassle you would expect: various notification methods must be used to make sure that data gets to the correct place.

Anyway, this post brings to attention a case where a customer has gone so far as to cause a restraining order {pdf} to be taken out to force the ISP to allow them to use their existing addresses, at least until they move.

The most interesting thing I’ve noticed, while following this relatively new case, is that the email, while showing concern for the Internet As We Know It™ because of the possible detrimental effects that forcing ISPs to section off their namespaces could cause, it utterly fails to take into account what appears to be a pretty fascinating back story as to why this customer has gone to such pains.