I asked this question on Twitter yesterday and got a wider range of responses than I expected, although from a limited number of people. So I wondered what others would think.

Say you sell virtual machines and a customer says:

My service allows journalists and others inside repressive regimes to get their stories out. My IP address is being blocked by one of these repressive regimes. Can you switch it for another one?

Would you grant that request?

Assume you have never heard of their service or anyone that uses it, have no independent verification of what whether they are saying is true, and haven’t yet looked for any.

Responses so far could roughly be grouped as:

• 2x “Yes; it’s a reasonable request and other networks’ policies are their own business”
• 2x “Yes; once, but check it’s not some global spam blacklisting issue”
• 3x “Yes; but charge them for your time each time they ask for this”
• 2x “No; you’ll end up with all your IPs blocked, which may affect other customers”
• 1x “No; tell them to use a cloud with a constantly-changing IP address” (involves me losing the customer)

What would you do?