Slashdot Mirror
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?
According to the article by the John Marshall Law School lawyer, the problem is not that Spamhaus ignored the initial TRO. The problem is that they didn't. They appeared in state court and asked that the case be moved to Federal Court, which it was. By doing so, they implicitly agreed that the Federal Court had jurisdiction.
Then they claimed it didn't.
I can't think of anything more likely to P.O. a judge than to ask to get into his courtroom, then call him a buffoon.
In the end, as the article says, ICANN may be forced to pull 'spamhaus.org', but ISPs that use it are savvy enough to move to using 'spamhaus.or.uk' or something similar, outside the court's control. But the individuals affected by the order may be unable to set foot in the U.S. for the rest of their lives, even to change planes.