Comment by throwawaythekey
5 years ago
> A private corporation is able to choose who to do business with, for any reason they want. They are not beholden to anyone but themselves and their shareholders.
Regardless of their motivations they are also beholden to the law. I don't have a lot of experience in this area but I would hope they would be in breach of contract for suspending legal/paying customers without notice.
Namecheap probably have a generic clause in their TOS that theoretically covers situations like this but these are not always enforceable.
Seems pretty clear to me. Not sure how exactly you could find this unenforceable; it's pretty much boilerplate:
> Namecheap expressly reserves the right to deny, cancel, terminate, suspend, lock, or modify access to (or control of) any account or any Services (including the right to cancel or transfer any domain name registration) for any reason (as determined by Namecheap in its sole and absolute discretion)
Additionally, covering unenforceability specifically:
> In the event that any provision of this Agreement shall be unenforceable or invalid under any applicable law or be so held by applicable court decision, such unenforceability or invalidity shall not render this Agreement unenforceable or invalid as a whole. We will amend or replace such provision with one that is valid and enforceable and which achieves, to the extent possible, our original objectives and intent as reflected in the original provision.
IANAL but as far as I know the existence of verbiage is not on it's own enough to make something binding. There is probably a lot of wiggle room here by jurisdiction as well.
Either way though, it seems like a very strange building block to base your business on. I assume if it were actually binding then many businesses would be hesitant to use namecheap.
I mean, as I said, that's ToS boilerplate. Go look at practically any service you subscribe to or even thought of subscribing to. There will be very similar verbiage there.
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