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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?
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...
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.
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.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
A reckless decision by this judge to crap on the internet over an uncontested U.S. based trial will be a huge motivation to wrest DNS control from U.S. control/jurisdiction.
.us domain to play with and left the rest to people who understand how serious this stuff really is.
If U.S. judges think they have carte blanche to impose their laws on foreign entities using domain listing as a weapon then we absolutely MUST get DNS control the heck out of U.S. control, i don't care what DARPA thinks they invented decades ago. The status quo currently is bad enough as it is, but if one person in a robe is going to single handedly eliminate the backbone of the international anti-spam war when the service is based in a foreign country, run by non-U.S. citizens and it's a voluntary subscription service then something drastic needs to be done.
The notion that the U.S. can 'summon' foreigners to defend themselves in U.S. domestic courts is deeply flawed to begin with. It's just amazing that anyone can mock the Chinese for their 'great firewall' when the U.S. is prepared to yank a site from the ENTIRE WORLD, and think they can just because it's domain name is published on a U.S. machine when that is mandated by an historical quirk.
Is it time we gave the United States their little