AOL Sued For Over-Zealous Blocking

mik writes "America Online has been sued by CI Host, a Texas-based hosting company for defamation, interference with contractual rights and unfair competition. CI Host has been awarded a temporary restraining order, though AOL has apparently not complied. This may be the first such in a series of suits leading up to, perhaps, to class-action status relating to AOL's recent zealotry in anti-spam policy resulting in the presumption that shared-hosting providers are guilty (of spamming) unless proven innocent."

Comments

Their servers, their property, their rules...

[KC7GR]

AOL owns all their equipment, and they're paying the (no doubt substantial) monthly bills for electricity, bandwidth, etc. They have absolute authority to operate their stuff any way they choose. If they want to block mail from some other ISP because they don't like the color of the admin's car, well... they can do it. That's the way the Internet, as a whole, operates.

Now, with that said... If they start losing customers because of their blocking policies, I'll wager that they'll rethink said policies in a big hurry.

Now, with all THAT said... I've done a little research. It seems that AOL's accusations that CIHost is a spammer are not entirely unfounded. From what I found, it seems they were spamming their own hosting services less than a year ago. More recently, around the beginning of July, it appears that they provided spam support services.

There are numerous other instances, dating from 2000-2002, from the Google Groups search for the group news.admin.net-abuse.email. In short, it would appear that CIHost, while the number of recent reports seems to have slacked off, may still not be completely free of spammer infestation themselves.

They would be very wise to clean their own house before they start yelling "Foul!" about other ISPs doing nothing more than exercising their private property rights.