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Comment by krn | Hacker News Reader

A private operator can choose to stop providing any service to any customer at any time. Especially, if it finds it to be economically unsustainable for their business.

For instance, OVH has previously terminated accounts of paying customers simply because it didn't want to do any business with people from an occupied territory[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29680251

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But what does that have to do with anything? Why can't operators just not lie to their customers?

Just don't call the plan "unlimited". Have well-defined limits. They don't have to be hard limits, they can be a gradual speed reduction after some amount of data per month. Just don't lie. I don't understand why you think this is a difficult concept.

Again, the limits are not fixed, and therefore cannot be clearly defined. If a customer is spending $5K / month on dedicated servers, Hetzner might earn enough from renting hardware to cover truly unlimited usage of bandwidth. If a customer is spending only $50 / month, that's a completely different case. Such a customer might simply be not valuable enough to keep.

That case possibly looks like obeying sanctions, although they have failed to explain why they think this customer is in Crimea. For example, OVH may have discovered that the Russian ISP involved was putting fake data into geoip, and if you're aware you can't just pretend you don't know.

BTW, if it was just "we don't want to do business with you any more", that depends on what your contract says. Most consumer ISP contracts allow an ISP to drop a customer for any reason without explanation.

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