[NLNOG] Don't terminate anyone's internet connections

[Job Snijders]

Dear all,

A plea - do NOT terminate anyone's internet or hosting service for silly
pre-corona reasons such as 'we want money'. Right now we are facing a
pandemic of proportions nobody alive has ever seen. Act responsibily and
accordingly: do not shut anything down. Please! :-)

To illustrate, in the Netherlands we have been put on lockdown because
of the C19 biohazard - you are expected to *only* leave your house if it
is absolutely critical to leave your house, such as to pick up food from
the food distribution centers, get meds, go work in a hospital, etc.

At the same time... we have no idea where everyone is and who is using
what Interconnect to do what vital work. Maybe I'm fixing some important
BGP thingy via my neighbor's wifi? Maybe she didn't pay her bills?
Should she be cut off?  Maybe next to her someone was freeloading on
that same wifi to look up medical data? Why risk the collatoral damage
of cutting anyone off?

The *safest* thing to do right now is to not terminate anyone's access
to information (be it connectivity, storage, compute, whatever).

We'll mop up society's collective bills at a later point in time, after
we deal with the immediate urgency at hand. And during this crisis we
have to keep this Internet thing running and available to anyone who may
need it.

Kind regards,

Job

ps. please remove rate limiters / data caps where possible. Now is not a
time to say 'you only paid for 1 megabit, you only get one megabit'.
Make it so that where possible, the access pipes be utilised to the
fullest extend. Don't throttle anyone, you never know whose lives were
depending on fast access.

In short: we need more thinking in this direction than the opposite:
https://www.bit.nl/news/2644/88/BIT-verdubbelt-kosteloos-de-bandbreedte-voor-klanten