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

Re:Um, the problem was that they switched horses..

[demigod]

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.

Are you saying a P.O.'d judge might rule differently?

If that's the case then he would recuse himself.

Oh wait, nevermind, I was just thinking our justice system worked. Don't know what came over me.