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Perspectives on Spamhaus's Dilemma
The Illinois court that told Spamhaus to stop blocking the spammer filing suit against them — an order which Spamhaus ignored — is now considering ordering ICANN to pull Spamhaus's domain records. While Gadi Evron, whose blog posting is linked above, urges everyone to beat the judge with a clue stick, a guest writer on his blog counsels much greater restraint. Anti-spam lawyer Matthew Prince explains how Spamhaus got into its current pickle — apparently by following conflicting legal advice at two points in the process — and what they might have to do to get out. One spamfighter of my acquaintance says that Spamhaus's SBL and XBL blocklists knock out 75% of the spam at his servers before it hits and requires more CPU-intensive filtering. If ICANN is ordered to unplug Spamhaus from the DNS, and does so, is the Net prepared to deal with a 4-fold increase in spam hitting MTAs overnight?
of course the tubes will get clogged with all the internets being allowed now that weren't before! And it will probably take at least a day to get the new internets that are let through. /sarcasm
Lemme just start by saying that I love what Spamhaus does. I don't like spam (of the electronic variety), and I'm glad that I receive very little. Now to get flamed...
However, we, in the US, have this little thing called the first amendment. The right to free speech. What Spamhaus (or rather, the email server admin) does is interfere with end users ability to receive free speech. They are inhibiting other peoples ability to practice free speech. Granted, ICANN shouldn't be able to stop Spamhaus from doing their thing for the rest of the world...they should take some sort of action here in the states.
This, in theory, should be up to the end user to OK. Just like you have to enroll in the "no call list" (ie, sending opt out emails), or getting a telezapper type device (ie, a Spamhaus filter). You should be able to opt-in, (or out) of any spam. Granted this is extremely difficult to control due to the nature of the Internet, it should still be there, based on previous precedents set in the telemarketing world. Your phone company doesn't look at lists of telemarketing companies and block them out for all users, so why should your service provider? How many end users know that they aren't receiving all the email intended for them? People need to be made aware of what is sent to them, and be allowed to have control over that information. People can then make an informed decision to completely opt out of emails through the Spamhaus service (ie, buying a telezapper).
So to answer your question, the court is essentially assuring free speech can take place, which the government promised us over 200 years ago. I would recommend taking a gander at the EFFs page on spam for more infos: http://www.eff.org/spam/
Is they keep thinking they're legally untouchable.
Any time they feel the need to defend their service, they use pedantic arguments based on redefining what they're doing, and actually tend tyo get away with it because most of the people they're blocking are clearly spammers and acting in a borderline legal way.
Then they get surprised when the court doesn't go exactly the way they expect.
This is what brought down MAPS. Spamhaus may fare a little better, but it looks like they were caught with their trousers down.