What is the legal basis for terminating contracts with Russian residents? This question is not about politics, it's purely about law. Recently, a number of companies announced that they will be terminating contracts with anyone who has Russian registration. One example is IONOS web and domain hosting: Ukraine Conflict – Cancellation of Your Account Dear XXX, As you may already be aware from IONOS's public statements, IONOS has made the difficult decision to no longer provide services to Russian and Belarusian customers. While we understand that you may not personally support the war in Ukraine or the policies which led up to the war, it's important that IONOS make clear our support for the people and country of Ukraine. With that in mind, your account will be terminated effective 16/03/22, so please transfer all of your data, domain names, and any related email addresses to another provider no later than the termination date. After the termination date, any domains which are not transferred will resolve to an error page until the domain expiry date, and any data associated with your account will be deleted. If you believe your website provides information services that are critical to the defense of Ukraine or which assist in ensuring the safety and well-being of the Ukrainian people, please reach out to us directly and an IONOS representative will review your site as a possible exception to the company's general policy on terminations. Please note that IONOS will make any such determination in its sole and unfettered discretion, without any obligation to you. In case you need support, please contact our Customer Service team at: 1-484-254-5555. We stand with Ukraine! Here's what seems to be their Terms&amp;Conditions: https://www.ionos.com/terms-gtc/general-terms-and-conditions/ I read through it, and I find these clauses remotely relevant: IONOS may terminate this Agreement at any time for any reason, with or without cause, upon thirty days' written notice In my understanding, this doesn't apply, because they're giving only 8 days of prior notice. You represent and warrant that you are not a national or resident of Burma/Myanmar, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Serbia, Sudan, and Syria or any other country subject to U.S. Treasury Department embargo restrictions To my knowledge, Russia is not embargoed. In the event of &quot;force majeure&quot; (as defined below), IONOS may terminate this Agreement without liability to you. For purposes of the Agreement, &quot;force majeure&quot; shall mean circumstances or occurrences beyond IONOS’s reasonable control, whether or not foreseeable at the time of entering into the Agreement, in consequence of which IONOS cannot reasonably be required to perform its obligations hereunder or otherwise perform its obligations under the Agreement. IONOS is an internet service, which to my knowledge is rendered outside of Russian soil. Therefore I don't see a way to declare that IONOS is &quot;cannot reasonably be required to perform its obligations&quot; in such situation. Also, by the time of their decision, there is no war on Russian soil.
The &quot;letter&quot; you quote says more than what Ionos says publicly, the latter not mentioning any date. The most obvious possibility is Treasury Department sanctions against Russia: while the sanctions don't necessarily prohibit servicing and any all Russian nationals or residents, Russia is subject to sanctions and that's what the TOS says. A problem is that the TOS refers to a &quot;country subject to U.S. Treasury Department embargo restrictions&quot;, which is not legally defined. Here is the Treasury Department's explanation of that point (which is that there are very many types of restrictions: there is no legal category of &quot;embargo restrictions&quot;). One could then argue, in one's breach of contract arbitration hearing, that the clause cannot reasonably be interpreted the way the company (possibly) intends it to be. The force majeure clause does not seem relevant unless they see some way in which the invasion of Ukraine makes it impossible for the company to fulfill the contract with Russians.
Don't do it. It is of course breach of contract when you signed a contract with no intention to fulfil it. However, you are talking about Germany. German employers take a very dim view of this. While a UK employer would say "good riddance" and do nothing, many German employers would see that as a personal insult. It's something that you just don't do in Germany. There's a good chance that they will do what they can to make you miserable if you do this. For example, inform authorities that you just cancelled your contract which may get a visa cancelled. Or tell the company that you want to start with, which will also take a very dim view of this. Or sue you for damages, not because they want to get the money, but to make you miserable. On the other hand, if they send you a contract, and you sign it, you have a contract.
[I'm not so well-versed on US and Russian law, thus I will limit my answer to EU law.] Your specific use of a user identifier, as I understood from your question, can be classified as personal data, so in your case, the GDPR seems to apply. This means that you need to have a) legitimate purposes to process that personal data (e.g. crash reporting) and b) a legal justification for each purpose of processing: it could be based on consent or another legitimate purpose (inc. your own legitimate interests). Consent might not be the best option for you, but it's up to you to decide. In any case, you need to assess the risks to the data subjects (your users) before you decide. How likely is it that you will get breached, and what potential harm will that cause to your users? These are some guidelines; my recommendation is that you read the law and the guidelines by the Article 29 Working Group and European Data Protection Board, or hire some good experts on this. There is no easy answer, or one size fits all solution. The GDPR isn't so hard to understand or implement, but it does require some change in mindset. With the new law, processing personal data carries a higher risk of penalties, so you should do it only when it's absolutely necessary, and with respect to the rights of your users.
Given a large database of email addresses that you can't prove have given consent to receive email, the only legal thing to do with it, is to (securely) delete it. (I am going to switch your question about a larger company to a bank: in the UK, big pharma is forbidden from advertising to individuals.) In principle the rules are the same for a huge bank and everything down to a self-employed plumber. In practice the plumber will be told "don't do that again" rather than fined. This case was treated under the Data Protection Act, which has a maximum fine of £500,000&nbsp;&ndash; so a big bank would probably have been fined more, but not necessarily much more. Under GDPR, fines are related to turnover, so the fine would be a lot bigger for a large bank. The incident is a year old now. Details here.
Much of your ability to sue the email company for damages depends on local and Estonian laws, but the most important aspect is the TOS and user agreement you agreed to when you originally signed up for the service. Read it (though if the portal is now off-line, it may not be accessible). You may have agreed to hold the company not liable for any damages from loss or stolen data, and you may have also agreed to arbitration and to not pursue them in court. It all depends on what is (was) in that agreement, so find a copy of it; though it's possible that some local or Estonian laws may supersede any contractual agreement with the company. And FYI, the email you received concerning the video and demanding payment in Bitcoin is a common scam right now, and the threat may indeed be meaningless.
does the email chain above set out a legally binding contract, would it stand up to the test in a court Generally speaking, yes, unless you signed a "more formal" contract thereafter. The more formal contract would supersede the email chain. Furthermore, the subsequent conduct by both parties evidences the existence of a contract. The fact that you have been provided with the service and that you have been charged for these ~12 months evidences the formation and existence of a contract. is the breach of contract sufficient to give us grounds to terminate the contract? Yes. To substantiate a claim of breach of contract, you will need to provide evidence that the "24/7/365 support line" is missing or unacceptably subpar in that it has caused you losses (such as downtime and consequent impact on your operations), or that such pattern of service disruptions would subject your company to imminent risk of losses if you were forced to stay in the contract for the remaining ~24 months (obviously, you will need to establish that this item or feature is not just incidental to the contract).
...due to the international registration of multiple domains to generate ad revenue by recycling stories across sock puppet networks, giving the impression of multiple, independent companies. None of that is illegal on its face. Internet domains are freely registerable by anyone, anywhere (with the exception of some laws in some nations that restrict such Internet-related activity), and registered privately or publicly, and websites can be hosted anywhere. Writing articles and "spinning" and copying articles (even if that writing is sales gibberish in broken English) among the same copyright owner is legal, and using the same design and layout for a network of sites is legal. The formation of multiple, related companies and shell companies to give the impression that companies are separate and independent is legal (again, with the exception of some business and corporate laws in some nations that restrict such activity). These are all common business practices. Some business practices may appear to be unethical - trying to fool customers in order to make money and get clicks and sell ads. And what you may be feeling is that such activity is unethical. And that's OK. But feeling that they are unethical doesn't make the practices illegal. Many common activities that are considered to be unethical are illegal; but not all. Buyer beware. One way some of that activity may be illegal is if those articles are factually incorrect and promote quack medical treatments, are financial scams requiring payments, are gambling sites or promote other clearly illegal things. But then you get into the complexity of exactly how they are illegal, which jurisdictions are involved, and on and on.
This is an interesting hypothetical. In this scenario, Country Z does not have jurisdiction to enforce such a law on foreign nationals, unless Country Z has an extradition treaty with Country A. Generally, however, these types of laws would never be enforced as they are egregious abuses of government, and could possibly be elevated to the International Court of Justice if Country Z actually charges any individuals with such a crime. In these instances, however, war is a very unlikely scenario, since this would often be expensive and any escalation would most likely be small skirmishes that would lead to an eventual ceasefire, with the encouragement of the international community, without the involvement of UN Peacekeeping troops.