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Court Says Customers May Take IPs Away From ISP
Jeremy Kister writes "According to a post on the North American Network Operators Group mailing-list, The State of New Jersey has issued a temporary restraining order, allowing a former customer of Net Access Corporation (NAC) to take non-portable IP Address space (issued from ARIN), away from NAC." The post argues: "This is a matter is of great importance to the entire Internet community. This type of precedent is very dangerous. If this ruling is upheld it has
the potential to disrupt routing throughout the Internet, and change practices of business for any Internet Service Provider."
Now I can be banned from Slashdot wherever I go!
Je t'aime Stéphanie
This is like taking your home address with you, when you move.
"But I want to live on 115 Baker Street". How can a judge get that dumb.
nosig today
Unlike the whole "keep your cell-phone number" jiberjoo, this is unneeded and will do nothing but break the internet, will it not?
Isn't the whole DNS system set up to avoid the need to keep your numeric address? I mean, it's irrelevant if it only takes 5 minutes for my new IP to propogate.
Oh well, I hope this breaks the internet. I'm sick of the internet.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Reminds me of "average" people voting regarding nuclear power...
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
I don't understand why this was in a court. What use is this to the person that filed the suit. It can't work. Is this just an asshole with a axe to grind who found a stupid/ignorant judge?
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
... but you don't want to pay for it. Take my word for it.
Mod me troll, if you must, I can't help it.
In other news, the U.S. Post Office is letting users keep their zip codes when they move.
Hands up who understands the legal concept of a temporary restraining order?
Answer : It's temporary, to make sure neither party suffers to greatly until the Actual Judgement gets made.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Full article text - minus karma whoring.
There has been a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) issued by state court
that customers may take non-portable IP space with them when they leave
their provider. Important to realize: THIS TEMPORARY RESTRAINING ORDER HAS
BEEN GRANTED, AND IS CURRENTLY IN EFFECT. THIS IS NOT SOMETHING THAT COULD
HAPPEN, THIS IS SOMETHING THAT HAS HAPPENED. THERE IS AN ABILITY TO
DISSOLVE IT, AND THAT IS WHAT WE ARE TRYING TO DO.
This is a matter is of great importance to the entire Internet community.
This type of precedent is very dangerous. If this ruling is upheld it has
the potential to disrupt routing throughout the Internet, and change
practices of business for any Internet Service Provider.
In the TRO, the specific language that is enforced is as follows:
"NAC shall permit CUSTOMER to continue utilization through any
carrier or carriers of CUSTOMER's choice of any IP addresses that were
utilized by, through or on behalf of CUSTOMER under the April 2003
Agreement during the term thereof (the "Prior CUSTOMER Addresses") and
shall not interfere in any way with the use of the Prior CUSTOMER
Addresses, including, but not limited to:
(i) by reassignment of IP address space to any customer;
aggregation and/or BGP announcement modifications,
(ii) by directly or indirectly causing the occurrence of
superseding or conflicting BGP Global Routing Table entries; filters
and/or access lists, and/or
(iii) by directly or indirectly causing reduced prioritization or
access to and/or from the Prior CUSTOMER Addresses, (c) provide CUSTOMER
with a Letter of Authorization (LOA) within seven (7) days of CUSTOMER's
written request for same to the email address/ticket system
(network@nac.net), and (d) permit announcement of the Prior CUSTOMER
Addresses to any carrier, IP transit or IP peering network."
We believe this order to be in direct violation of ARIN policy and the
standard contract that is signed by every entity that is given an
allocation of IP space. The ARIN contract strictly states that the IP
space is NOT property of the ISP and can not be sold or transferred. The
IP blocks in question in this case are very clearly defined as
non-portable space by ARIN.
Section 9 of ARIN's standard Service Agreement clearly states:
"9. NO PROPERTY RIGHTS. Applicant acknowledges and agrees that the
numbering resources are not property (real, personal or intellectual) and
that Applicant shall not acquire any property rights in or to any
numbering resources by virtue of this Agreement or otherwise. Applicant
further agrees that it will not attempt, directly or indirectly, to obtain
or assert any trademark, service mark, copyright or any other form of
property rights in any numbering resources in the United States or any
other country."
[ Full ARIN agreement http://www.arin.net/library/agreements/rsa.pdf ]
Further, it is important to realize that this CUSTOMER has already gotten
allocations from ARIN over 15 months ago, and has chosen not to renumber
out of NAC IP space. They have asserted that ARIN did not supply them with
IP space fast enough to allow them to renumber. Since they have gotten
allocations from ARIN, we are confident they have signed ARIN's RSA as
well, and are aware of the above point (9).
If this ruling stands and a new precedent is set, any customer of any
carrier would be allowed to take their IP space with them when they leave
just because it is not convenient for them to renumber. That could be a
single static IP address for a dial-up customer or many thousands of
addresses for a web hosting company. This could mean that if you want to
revoke the address space of a spammer customer, that the court could allow
the customer to simply take the space with them and deny you as the
carrier (and ARIN) their rights to control the space as you (and ARIN)
This really shows the need for more technology savvy judges.
I imagine the thought process was something like: "Hey, if we can have cell number portability, why can't we have IP address portability? Same thing, right?"
Some people are like slinkies--basically useless but they bring a smile to your face when pushed down the stairs.
This will surely be compared to WLNP, but its different in one key way. The internet has a built in system that alleviates the need for IP Portability, that system is called DNS. Regardless of how many times you change IPs, your domain name can remain constant.
Lets pray the courts don't start setting technical policy more than they already are. How long before I have to enter my MAC address at every console just to make sure any random ARP packets intended for a machine I was just at still get to me here?
Josh
How many roads must a man walk down? 42.
Matters relating to the internet should be outside the jurisdiction of such judges. The internet isn't a local thing, it crosses national borders. Allowing any non-global entity to pass judgement on a portion of the internet is one step towards fragmentation.
And talk about turn the DNS system into a tangled weave of crap. This type of thing will completely nullify the idea of ip-address ranges.
To be honest, I was half-way afraid the Slashdot crowd would hail this ruling as a strike for the "little guy", but of course most of us are at least a little more technically savvy than the average judge... I think that it is probable (and clearly this is the case with the Judge) that most people think of IP addresses like phone numbers, which of course is not the case.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
How stupid can these courts get? Why on earth would someone need to take their IPs with them? If they've configured things such that they're dependent on a certain IP, they obviously have very incompetent system s staff.
This is what DNS is for, so you can plunk any IP in and have it resolve properly.
It isn't really that crazy.
:-)
:-)
IP addresses are like phone numbers. Except on the other end, there can be anything. In fact the Internet used to run by dialing the exact computer you wanted to talk to didn't it? Or was that pre-Internet? I am too young to remember
I say we hope he is a bit slow, and let him keep 1 class B and on class D address, two for the price of one.
May I recommend 192.168.*.* and 127.0.0.1
He can have them!
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Ok, he takes a block of IP addresses, and connects to his new ISP. Surprise, nothing works!He calls the ISP and they laugh. He sues, and a different judge rules he can't force the new ISP to use his old IP addresses.
So a block of IP addresses is gone permanently from the internet. Well, at least until overturned on appeal. At the moment, it's not much different from companies sitting on large blocks of addresses and refusing to give them up.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
I can just imagine what the routing [IPv4] tables would look like. It's bad enough _now_ as it is. Time for everybody to upgrade their memory otherwise...
:). Sure, some DNS servers won't honor my short timeout setup, but usually within 24 hours the new information has propagated the Internet as needed.
... can you imagine what the telco's are going through in figuring out routing tables now? Something like this could finally melt the Internet. And ironically my phone line. :)
Is IPv6 routing at the core level any more efficient? Or would this just aggravate this problem?
This is ridiculous -- I've switched core ISP's multiple times for various reasons. The sad thing is reverse lookup on a few very old IP's are still unchanged (and I've even sent them reminders over the years [!]). I've been through controlled migrations where nobody notices anything to cut and switch botch jobs and have had little issue flipping DNS servers over to new IP's (I've always served myself at work, home, other offices I've set up, etc
I've never been willing to pay what it costs to own my IP block or even [!] a single address. I'm not Motorola or Apple and what's the problem with "renting" my IP much like I've only been able to do in the past with my [US] phone number? I love the fact that I was able to port my 20 year home phone line to VoIP -- and because of it dialing in the future will become very interesting. Am I in LA? Chicago? New York? For the poor sap -- is my next call local, long distance, band-b, band-c and what will it cost? Now off-topic and I digress...
Hopefully the courts don't see phone number portability as precedence
This is only akin to telephone number portability if people needed to know what port to switch to at the company. You know like in the old days where they had actual plugs that they moved? DNS is the phone number, and it already is portable. That is the whole idea behind dynamic. Moving an IP is like keeping the port the phone company switches you to. It really is useless to anyone except the phone company or ISP in this case.
If average people cannot vote and decide about nuclear power, however uneducated they may be, who should decide?
If the average person has the power to vote for a leader, and that leader has the power to implement nuclear power, then there isn't much difference in putting anything to the vote.
The reality is, we have to respect everyones opinions for what they are, no matter how irrelevant they may be.
I agree with you though about the judge, in terms of law, this is about right and wrong, and in terms of is someone entitled to keep an IP address, isn't it simply a case that it never belonged to his ISP in the first place? only through licensing?
I thought ICANN had the final word?
Seems strange to me!
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
However, this became a big problem as the Internet grew and grew, and the BGP tables grew and grew, so finally companies stopped doing this, and now IP ranges are considered to be not portable unless they're a certain size. `CIDRize or die' was the saying ... and people chose not to die.
The court needs a clue though. As does the customer who asked for the TRO -- they'll find that many (most?) ISPs will not route to their IP range at their new ISP, in spite of what the court said. I guess their old ISP could set up a VPN for them, but I'm guessing they won't.
Not.No, judges are not simply ignorant because they haven't been studying computers and using the internet for the past 10 years. Judges must work within the boundaries of the law, and in many cases, the law is not equipped to deal with modern circumstances such as IP addresses. I didn't get a chance to look into the details of this yet, but neither did the judge. That's why he issued a temporary restraining order, and not a permanent decision.
When asked what exactly it was then, he said it was 'an exit circular with many lanes' (exact quote - we're talking about the exit of J29 M1 for any UK readers). When asked to point out where, in the Highway Code, 'an exit circular with many lanes' was defined he refused to comment and suggested we move on. Since the entire case was that someone had incorrectly changed lanes on a roundabout without indicating in time, thus smashing into the rear left-hand side of me, 'moving on' was rather difficult as everything was based around the fact it took place on a roundabout.
The guy in question fulfilled all the cliches - an impossibly Oxford Don-type accent which was obviously put on (I know some Oxford dons, and besides this guy came from Mansfield which has a totally different accent), absolutely smug in his self-delusion of superiority...the works.
When my solicitor apologised for losing the case afterwards, my comment to him was "Don't worry. My no claims bonus is unaffected, it's a nice sunny day, and I've managed to see purest legal farce in action. I'm still happy".
I learned to never underestimate legal stupidity that day.
Cheers,
Ian
Much different from cell phone number portability. When you want to call mom you key in a 7-10 digit address to ring mom's phone. Most users won't key in "mom". If mom changes her phone number she has to tell everyone her new number, so even if you set up a voice dialing entry, you're not isolated from having to know her number at least once so you can update your phone book entry.
However, when you want to do a keyword search do you type in 216.239.57.99 or do you type in google.com?
When you check your email do you type in 64.4.32.7 or do you type in hotmail.com?
When you want to look at porn do you type in 64.71.165.211 or do you type in thehun.com?
Have you *ever* seen those IP addresses before today? Probably not. You don't need to know them to reach them.
Do you have any idea that when you type in thehun.com, sometimes you see 216.218.206.40 and sometimes you see 64.71.165.211 and sometimes it's 216.218.255.232? Would you know if they changed? Would you know if there were a hundred of them? This stuff is kept hidden from you by DNS for a reason.
If a user ever needs to see an IP address, someone has done something wrong. The purpose of DNS is to make physical IP address assignments irrelevant.
And not only is it dumb, but it's extremely hard to do. IP address networks are segmented, and routers need to be able to rely on cases where it can say "Well, I don't know what's on the other end of this network, BUT I DO KNOW FOR A FACT THAT *THIS* END *ALWAYS* HAS ADDRESSES IN THE 216.139.128.x RANGE!"
Doing this will cause routing tables to grow exponentially if it continues unchecked, as it greatly reduces the hierarchical, logical nature of IP addresses and how they correspond to geographic providers of bandwidth.
This is bad, this is VERY BAD for the internet. I appreciate the person's concerns, but there is already a solution out there for portable addressing. It is known as DNS. They need to update their DNS records to point to new IPs from their new ISP, not strong arm their old ISP through the legal system into breaking the internet.
This is a failure of the legal system which will cause lasting damage to the internet, in my humble opinion.
"Give away the stone, let the oceans take and transmutate this cold and faded anchor." - Maynard James Keenan
Your argument doesn't make sense. The web address is completely different from the IP address.
The problem is that IP addresses need to be assigned in blocks to keep the size of a full routing table down. Basically this ruling is nothing more than an indirect Internet Tax. The result of this ruling will be that backbone providers have to raise service rates to support the increased memory and processor requirements of their routers.
The size of a BGP routing table was skyrocketing until about 5-7 years ago. That's when groups like ARIN started saying, "we have to fix this".
The way to fix it is a logical method of subnetting. Big Blocks assigned to backbone providers...Smaller blocks within those assigned to the ISPs that connect to them...a few subnets givent to the customers that connect to them. If you move, you get new addresses. DNS solves all the problem of moving except the internal cost to readdress your machines. If your intelligent, you use DHCP for everything but servers so most of the work is easy. If your even more intelligent you run 95+% of your devices on internal addresses and NAT at your gateway so the work is even easier.
The problem is that users and some stupid programmers don't want to do what makes sense (utilizing DNS and NAT properly).
Plain and simple this ruling is ridiculous. Someone should buy this Judge, and more importantly, the fool that filed the complaint and his lawyer a copy of DNS for dummies.
...it looks like they may have actually tried. D'oh! Didn't see that little paragraph in there.
Though the claim about the Alabama state legislature is pure nonsense, it is similar to an event that happened more than a century ago. In 1897 the Indiana House of Representatives unanimously passed a measure redefining the area of a circle and the value of pi. (House Bill no. 246, introduced by Rep. Taylor I. Record.) The bill died in the state Senate.
Research? How much research did you do on it? 2 seconds of reading comments on Slashdot? I know that's all I've done, and I'm willing to admit it, and give the judge the benefit of the doubt. S/He's issued a temporary restraining order in this case. Are you ignorant to the fact this means that the case is still open and under review? Would the judge not also be ignorant if he just threw the case out without looking at it closely enough? Generally, a restraining order prevents any further damage from being committed while the case is under review. Yes, it may be true that the complainant has no legal argument, but in our legal system we give a benefit of the doubt to victims and complainants. The judge in this case took a quick look at the facts, thought the case had some merit, and decided to take a closer look at it.
I spent half my day yesterday reading the NANOG thread related to this. Knew I should have submitted it. =)
Anyways, the customer wanted to avoid renumbering their network computers. Their argument was that there is a significant amount of inconvenience involved in renumbering their network. (Yes, we all know how easy it would be to use a NAT. The judge obviously does not.) The original NANOG discussion started here.
I think they were also leveraging a supposed anti-competitiveness nature to non-portable IP space. Yes, that's right. One of a bajillion ISP's is hurting competition by following the globally accepted rules of the Internet that is the foundation of CIDR.
--LordPixie
You don't understand apparently that ip addresses are hierarchical too. They move in blocks and they are routed in blocks. The routers that are up high in the backbones of the internet don't know that your ip address it at your house - they think bigger. They think along the lines of 200.*.*.* is this way or something.
That's oversimplified of course, but essentially, the precendent this sets is that routers will have to remember every IP address in existance and which direction traffic to it should go. Without being able to trust that larger blocks are largely unbroken, routing will get out of control, out of hand, out of the realm of the processing power or storage of current routing technology, etc....
-N
I've nothing to say here...
The company in question is Pegasus Web Technology run by a Mr. Jason Silvergate.
-davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
In some ways I'm not sure how this is different on the surface from cell phone number portability.
The big difference is that phone companies don't buy their phone numbers off the government, whereas ISPs do pay for their IP ranges. Ignoring the technical side of things (block routing), this would be equivalent to a customer switching his car rental from Hertz to Avis, but insisting that he be able to take the same physical car with the other "provider". Even worse, in fact, since the car in question is the property of the rental agency, which could make a deal to sell it to the competition, whereas an IP range is only leased by an ISP and can't be resold.
#!/usr/bin/english
No, it won't help. With either IPv6 or IPv4, you still need the global routing table entries. That's where the problem is. The global routers will say something like 1.2.3.0/24 are routed to some network equipment in New Jersey. With this ruling, those same global tables in all those routers need to add another entry for a particular IP address in that range to instead go to some other providor. Now imagine if everyone kept their own personal IP address. Those tables wouldn't be able to cleanly route chunks of the IP address space to the ISPs using them, but instead must be filled with tons and tons of rules for individual addresses.
IPv6 works in a very similar fashion. The only difference between IPv6 and IPv4 in terms of the routing is that the address ranges/chunks are much more abundant and much larger. If anything, IPv6 will make it flat out impossible for the Internet to work if people keep personal IP addresses, because there is no possible way the routers could handle the mapping tables.
Ranges need to be kept to individual ISPs as they are now. AT&T leases a big chunk of several billion IPv6 addresses and then assigns those as they see fit to their customers and internal network equipment. All the global routers need to know then is that any address in that chunk AT&T leases just gets routed along to AT&T's network. If a customer leaves AT&T, they need to get an IP address in the range of their new ISP. Otherwise, the new ISP needs to add tons of special routing rules to their equipment, AT&T needs to add tons of special routing rules to their equipment, the backbones and global routers need special rules, anyone that has any rules regarding AT&T and/or the new ISP would need special rules added, etc.
So what's the big deal? Sure, the customer in question has a severe case of recto-cranial inversion. But why is everybody saying that this TRO heralds the doom of the route tables?
The judge doesn't know the technical issues, so he's issued the TRO to keep things static until he can examine everything and issue a ruling.
Note that the judge isn't insisting that the customer be able to take his numbers, just that the ISP can't prevent it. In other words, they can't BGP-advertise those numbers, or sell them to another customer, etc. The judge is just asking (okay, ordering) the ISP to set those IPs aside for the time being. If the customer can find somebody who'll advertise 'em, then that's fine too.
In a little while, the judge will have studied the situation, and gotten amicus curiae briefs, and probably expert testimony, and will issue a fair ruling (which, I expect, will tell the customer to go away and quit whining about his IPs). But for him to be fair in his ruling, he has to make sure that those IPs aren't recycled first, and that's why he issued the TRO.
The article makes it sound like the judge ruled that the IPs are portable; even the subject says it: "Can a Customer take their IP's with them? (Court says yes!)". The article talks about this as a ruling that may set a precident. It's just a TRO; the judge is putting the brakes on things until he can figure out what's what. There's no ruling, there's no precident, and I expect everything will go back to normal soon.
Your honor,
I am moving, please tell the govt to let me take my GPS co-ordinates with me!
doh...
-Lucas
Haven't seen this mentioned here already, but a small update is that according to a later NANOG post, ARIN's legal eagles will be taking up this case.
This is good news.
This Just In:
The court has just declared that customers may also take their postal addresses with them when they move.
So now if your customers, friends, and relatives have come to know your address as "1010 Elwood Drive" and you move across town or to a new city, you can bring the address with you to avoid confusion! Isn't that great!?
Soon each building, or even each office or apartment within a building will have it's own completely unique address without regard to where it is physically located.
We should make judges and lawyers in charge of more things so we can get great conveniences like this in all our life!
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
HOW temporary is it? How long will it take to arrive at a permanent decision? How about the appeals process? Will it be like this all the way to the Supreme Court?
Besides, what will the plaintif do with their address block? They can take the numbers with them, sure. But how will the judge order other networks to route traffic to those addresses? Does this judge think Taiwan and Germany are in his jurisdiction?
This judge is not only ignorant of technology, he is ignorant of legislation as well. Apparently he has never heard of international agreements.
IANAL, but
/32 increments, and indeed, a naive reading of the article might indicate that if I assign a client, and that client sues, the routing table of the internet might soon have 2^32 routes, and most routers crash.
1) the article seems to say a different thing than the actual TRO
2) I'll explain why if the court had ruled like the article said, we'd be in deep shit, and second, I'll document my understand of the TRO
The main difference is that your cell phone company can't lose your cell phone number without a major cause. ARIN can decide to remove any number at its wish, meaning that someone could go to court, trying to block an ARIN reassignment from Provider ISP, even if they are the CAUSE of that reassignment. Say if client is not using 80% of its space, and ARIN, who granted that space(ARIN may grant space in many forms, but most ISPs prefer contiguous blocks, for routing reasons.), then when the Provider notifies the client that they messed up, asking for too large a block from them, the client could try to sue, thereby interfering with the priorly business-as-usual motions of ARIN-Provider-Client.
IP addresses are assigned to your provider by ARIN/RIPE/APNIC and may be taken away from them at a moment's notice. They are also organized in network topologies, meaning that if the ruling stands, the entire routing of the Internet has to be re-thought.
Well ok, just migrating everyone to IPv6, and using v6-to-v4 tunnels might do the trick, Provided the judge doesn't make the claim you own your v4 address too, which with dynamic addresses, would get messy even faster.
Also, for that matter, what about static dhcp addresses, addresses that are assigned by a dynamic method, but keep up coming to the same value for a specific client, does the ruling say the client own them? If they do, I can imagine a whole bunch of dsl providers going "no we don't offer static ips anymore".
And that's because the ISP, which is responsible for routing, and for making sure the routing is coherent, and router-friendly, and that their own AS is reachable, is no longer involved in the assignment of those ips.
The only people who actually use ip addresses, and who have trouble with numbers, are people who operate nameservers, since their job is to offer address to name translation, so having their address be static is a requirement of the job, so they can be found. Now some of those are assigned in
Ruling that they own that ip address, considering the contracts between Arin and suppliers, means all those contracts have been invalidated. If I was ARIN, I'd be very very afraid right now. If you can own a block, what will you do if ARIN takes a block back for lack of use? Sue them of course, it's what the court just indicated by rendering your lease of those ips unenforceable, by virtue of saying you could own your ip numbers.
Now, I'm not sure why, but the article makes no mention that the the court issued a temporary restraining order, until migration is complete.
That means NAC has to offer ip forwarding for a limited time, to help migration, especially since the client applied to own ips at ARIN directly already.
The restraining order also looks(But IANAL) written in such as way as to prevent guerilla action on the part of NAC against the client, more than anything.
I do find it interesting that (I've done a lot of moves for my clients in similar situations, although perhaps smaller than this particular client) the client preferred to go to court, instead of putting pressure on NAC to renew at current prices, while preparing it's migration. 45 days is certainly not a lot of time for a truly large network, but just how many days did they win by going to court, including the TRO and the remand to higher court?
Although, maybe they just wanted some insurance, considering the penalties that NAC would incur if the client was down without "due cause". The amount in dollars for an 8-hour or more outage would certainly help with migra
Well, if you read the court documents, you'll see that the guy suing the ISP is in a bad position; he's selling webhosting to people who sell webhosting to others on servers coloed at the ISP. He's a useless middleman in the deal & has refused attempts at being bought out by the ISP already.
The basis of his case is that he is completely dependant upon the ISP to do his business & they're rasing his rates to a point where he can't keep his business going, possibly in order to force him to sell. I'm not going to say that the ISP is being nice, but they're not entirely out of line.
Even with the network being temporarily re-routed, this guy is fucked; he has a single supplier for what he's selling & his supplier wants to start selling directly to his customers. If he was smart, he'd have set up his own datacenter by now.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Of all the posts in this thread, only about 5 have a clue what's going on here, the rest have been hysterical rants about how this is going to break the internet, screw over the defendant and other such nonsense.
The defendant was agressively trying to steal this guys business which he's actively trying to relocate, but the defendant is jerking him around and generally acting like an ass.
The TRO was both justified and reasonable. Temporary routings are typical when a large netblock user moves to a new provider.
This guy was more then willing to continue paying them for the redirect service and had negotiated several times with them on contract terms which the defendant agreed to, then completely rewrote when they penned the agreement.
Complete jerk is what I'd call the defendant.