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?

Comments

what pisses me off...

[cavtroop]

what pisses me off about this whole situation is that using the Spamhaus RBL is OPTIONAL, and initiated by the receiving servers. Nobody said you HAVE to use Spamhaus, people CHOOSE to.

Damn, judges really should be expected to have a clue when sitting in on a case...

Re:Hopefully ICANN is rational

[maxwell demon]

Moreover, given that there are ambitions to get control away from ICANN to an internationally controlled entity, for ICANN it would essencially be suicide to follow such an order. Because it would deliver the perfect argument: A real world case causing huge damage to everyone, which would not have been possible if it were under international control.