According to the president of the Cyber Entertainment Network (CEN) and a document drafted by a CEN attorney, UUNET, the global Internet Service Provider and subsidiary of MCI WorldCom, has, since January 28 been blocking all CEN Internet traffic that utilizes its network backbone. UUNET (www.us.uu.net) controls approximately 30-35% of the Internet backbone market, making it a potentially deadly enemy to have if it decides to block traffic to or from your site. CEN (www.cyberentertainment.net) alleges this action has cost them millions of dollars.
This particular dispute began with spam perpetrated by a disgruntled former CEN client, according to CEN president John Bennett. "In this particular case we had a Web master who we had terminated from the program for violating our Acceptable Use Policy, and he got a little upset about being terminated, so he decided to go spam the newsgroups. We found out about it pretty rapidly and contacted the provider where that mail was coming from. In the meantime he's getting out all this mail.
"At 6:15 p.m. on Thursday January 27, UUNET calls me and tells me that I need to get Private Gold, our biggest site, off their network by 7:00 p.m. because of this spam issue. So we moved to another provider at that point in time. Then, and this is my understanding, it looked like they got upset and decided that they were going to start blocking all of our sites from using their backbone at that point, and they've continued to do that on every single carrier that we've gone to.
"Their basic response to me was, unless you move back with us exclusively, we're going to continue to follow you around. I think what happened was, and this is all conjecture, once they [the UUNET security division] told us to get off, then the [UUNET] sales people got involved and said, wait a second, this is a pretty big customer, we want to get him back. But if they could call me up and throw me off in 45 minutes without hearing any of the facts or circumstances, then my basic feeling was that this could happen to me at any time."
According to a February 15 missive faxed by CEN attorney Gary Rosen to Clint Smith, Deputy General Counsel for UUNET, "UUNET clearly revealed the pretext behind its action in a February 3, 2000 letter written by Stuart Wilkens, [UUNET's] Regional Account Manager to John Bennett, CEN's President, by stating that CEN's continued relationship with UUNET depended upon 'exclusively signing and implementing UUNET contracts for Colocation, Web Hosting and Band Width needs.'"
Mara Radis, UUNET's chief media spokesperson, told AVN Online today that the company is not ready to comment on the story at this time.
