[mynameisvlad]

They are a private corporation who is able to choose who to do business with, including blacklisting a full nation.

They also have what sounds like a sizeable workforce in Ukraine itself, so it should be pretty obvious why they chose to blacklist the entire nation invading their direct coworkers'.

[hozmoz]

If their customers are US persons it's not that simple, because national origin is a protected status.

Some US citizens with Russian heritage could have Russian addresses listed like 10 years ago.

Would be funny to see this case in court.

[kube-system]

It doesn't work that way. Discrimination doesn't follow the transitive property. To discriminate illegally you have to discriminate for an illegal reason. Discriminating for a legal reason while that person also belongs to a protected class is not illegal.

[kieloo]

What’s the legal reason here though? That’s a genuine question, I don’t know much about US law.

[kube-system]

Given the context of this thread and the current war, I think it's pretty clear Namecheap is turning away customers in Russia's jurisdiction because they don't want to support the Russian regime through taxes. The fact that the people who live under that regime are mostly Russians is tangential.

It's just like how Walmart.com doesn't ship to China. That's legal. And if I'm in the US, and I put a Chinese address on my Walmart.com account, and they don't ship me a package, that's not discrimination, that's just a mistake.

Now, if Namecheap starts intentionally going after people of Russian origin outside of Russia, that's a different story, but it doesn't look like that's what's happening here.

[friedturkey]

It seems like they're banning people who simply have a background in that country.

There are a few words for that philosophy, and legality of that business practice becomes questionable.