Engineering problems, not legal problems [was: Amazon AWS cloudfront WAF block]

[patrick via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>]

I think this has really blown off course. Someone simply wants to find a knowledgable person inside a very large 
organization so their relatively small org can follow whatever rules are necessary to get off a list. The point of 
demand letters & lawsuits are, IMHO, either someone’s frustration showing or hyperbole or perhaps engineers not 
understanding how the law works.

The “root cause” here is, at its simplest, an attempt to connect two clueful engineers in two separate organizations to 
solve an engineering problem. Seems like a perfectly reasonable request to me. Also seems like something that is hard 
to get a “hyperscaler” to pay attention to. Who here has never had a problem finding the right person at another 
company over the years?

So let’s help them solve the underlying problem and connect the right people. If not for the good of the Internet, then 
to lower the lawyers’ billable hours - something I hope everyone can support!

-- 
TTFN,
patrick


P.S. I Am Not A Lawyer. (Hell, I am not even an ISP. :) But then, neither are Bill or Andrew AFAIK.

That said, who can resist a bit of NOT LEGAL ADVICE for aspiring engineers-playing-lawyers-on-TV?

1) SLAPP laws do not exist in every state in the US. In some states where they do exist, they suck. Outside the US it 
gets even weirder. And in states where they do exist and are considered good by lawyers, they are still not a 
get-out-of-court-for-zero-dollars card. Which is a long-winded way of saying you should not depend on them as an 
iron-clad protection. (Ken White is well respected and has an easy to understand primer on Anti-SLAPP suits: 
https://www.popehat.com/p/what-is-an-anti-slapp-anyway-a-lawsplainer.)

2) Good faith is not, AIUI, what you say below Bill. Just ‘cause I am blocking you after you told me “I do not want you 
to block me” does not mean, as a matter of law, that I am operating in bad faith. Nor is my blocking your IP address 
guaranteed to be tortious interference, even if my customer asks me to stop blocking it. There is way more to it than 
that. Again, not a lawyer, etc., etc., but I have been doing this a while and have run into similar situations where 
actual lawyers told me things I (perhaps incorrectly) believe are relevant here.

3) Even real lawyers with decades of experience would not be as certain in their statements as the 
engineers-pretending-to-be-lawyers on this list are. (Not just the people in this thread, but in general.) I urge 
everyone to take a page out of their playbook. When you ask a lawyer a question, the answer is always “it depends”. 
Doesn’t matter what the question is. “What did you have to breakfast?”, “It depends, do you mean this morning or before 
11 AM or ….” Sure, they might follow up with a “likely to prevail” comment sometimes, but do you want to risk massive 
legal bills - perhaps your entire corporation - on “likely”? I urge you all to be a bit more conservative & humble.


> On May 29, 2025, at 14:52, William Herrin via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, May 29, 2025 at 10:57 AM Andrew Kirch <trelane () trelane net> wrote:
> > (A)any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to
> > or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be
> > obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing,
> > or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is
> > constitutionally protected
>
> Hi Andrew,
>
> The key phrase here is "taken in good faith." After I've notified you
> of an error, your action stops being good faith. You've either
> investigated my complaint and determined your action is reasonable and
> correct, investigated my complaint and fixed your error, or failed to
> investigate my complaint. Whichever way you go, it's no longer a "good
> faith" matter and this section of the statute no longer applies. Your
> following action has to stand the test of reasonability without it.
>
> In the Spamhaus case, their defense was: "We merely published a
> summary of our observations about the plaintiff's behavior." That's an
> objectively reasonable thing to do.
>
>
> > I don't have to accept your traffic.  Amazon doesn't have to accept
> > your traffic.  No one has to accept your traffic.  I can deny your
> > traffic for any lawful reason even if that traffic might be otherwise
> > constitutionally protected.
>
> "We reserve the right to refuse service," is a very common sign but it
> has no force of law. If you refuse service without a reasoned and
> articulable cause, you run afoul of a thousand statutes and precedents
> which bound the lawful causes for doing so. Tortious interference is
> one of those precedents. It says that if you knowingly prevent third
> parties from completing a reasonable and lawful contract with each
> other, you're liable for the damage that interference causes.
>
> There are, of course, many more lawful reasons for refusing service
> than unlawful ones. But you can't be arbitrary or capricious about it;
> you have to be able to articulate a cause for that specific refusal
> that a reasonable person would find sensible.
>
> Section 230 doesn't undo the tortious interference precedents. It just
> reminds the judge that _knowingly_ is a part of the claim the
> plaintiff must prove with specificity. That your interference was
> unintentional is a winning affirmative defense.
>
> tl;dr: you claim that section 230 means ISPs can legally do whatever
> they want blocking network traffic no matter how reckless. That's
> simply not the case. It protects ISPs behaving _reasonably_.
>
> Regards,
> Bill Herrin
>
>
> -- 
> William Herrin
> bill () herrin us
> https://bill.herrin.us/
> _______________________________________________
> NANOG mailing list 
> https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/nanog () lists nanog org/message/GFCQVZFR3N5ZIBHO447XRMM34H7FAOCV/

_______________________________________________
NANOG mailing list 
https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/nanog () lists nanog org/message/Q4CJMJF2DM3FKELBHTFASHBYQB3TN76W/