Slashdot Mirror
ICANN Grants Temporary Reprieve to Spamhaus
daringone writes "ICANN released a statement that says they "...cannot comply with any order requiring it to suspend or place a client hold on Spamhaus.org or any specific domain name" They do, however leave the door open for the registrar that registered the domain name to then be forced to turn the lights off for Spamhaus."
Judges aren't required to know how technology works, they just make rulings that affect it.
Basically, ICANN is saying, "It's not our job to suspend domain registrations; it's the registrar's job. We just coordinate registrars."
Basically, ICANN says that they've not been ordered to act and suspend the spamhaus.org domain, and even if they had they couldn't do it "because ICANN does not have either the ability or the authority to do so".
They also state that ICANN is not party in the lawsuit and is not involved in it.
They end their posting by stating that only spamhaus.org's registrar or the Internet Registry have the ability and authority to suspend an individual domain name.
They close their posting by stating that this comment was made in response of the community's interest (in the ICANN's position on the matter).
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
(If you haven't been following the 360 Insight vs Spamhaus thing then you'll have no idea what's going on here!)
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
Which while annoying briefly, might be a Good Thing(tm). Face it, those who use services like Spamhaus probably don't realize *how much* spam there is. If your government official gets 1 spam in 20, well, they thing "just hit delete" works fine if their total spam load is 1,000 emails a day (50 spams get through). If, on the other hand, they suddenly are hit with the full brunt of it, there may be changes. Imagine Grandma who gets 5 or 6 spams a week after her ISP's filters (which probably are quite effective). And then suddenly getting 600 a day. It may open up the eyes of those who don't believe it to be a problem because they're sitting behind a wall protecting them. It's just we've all been sitting "behind the wall" to see true increases. When the amount of mail that makes it past the filters doubles, total traffic may have increased 10 times or more.
This might encourage development of a new email infrastructure that gets rapidly adopted by the Internet, suddenly faced with the realities of how much spam there really is in the world.
I for one, would love to see the end of poorly-configured MTAs who send me bounce emails that are improperly formatted. Of all things an MTA should do, is to generate proper emails! Otherwise they're contributing to the spam problem (I've got hundreds all addressed as "Mailer Daemon " and even more from antivirus/antispam systems, and nevermind whitelist systems. They all seem to contribute to the spam problem by generating even more email in response to email.)
The judge is just following the law, and, indeed, the constitution. This has nothing to do with "freedom of speech". Spamhaus asked for a civil suit to be moved to Federal Court, and then failed to defend themselves. Wham. Default judgement.
It doesn't matter whether Spamhaus is being sued for describing Ted Kaczynski or "Spamford" Wallace as a spammer. It doesn't matter if this is Spamhaus or SPEWS. It doesn't matter if spam is a nuisance or welcomed by millions of people across the world. They failed to turn up. They're subject to a default judgement and legal sanctions to prevent them from continuing the offense.
That's what the law and constitution says is the correct response, and therefore, while it might be unpopular, this is the correct thing for the judge to do. For all the criticisms of judges "legislating from the bench", it seems that the majority of people would rather they do that than follow the law. (Witness SCOTUS's response to the Connecticut eminent-domain thing. For some reason, everyone decided it was SCOTUS at fault. The real problem was a vague phrase in the constitution, an out of control local government, and state and Federal legislatures who'd failed to impose legal limits. But everyone blamed the judges.)
The judge needs to follow the law, even when it's unpopular. The legislature needs to be told to deal with this fiasco. And Spamhaus needs to be more careful and less stupid and contradictory in their ways of dealing with courts.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
So in layman's english ICAAN is simply saying ICAAN'T.
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
While it's technically true that they could get around it, legally, it's not a great idea.
I think the likely choices are either Tucows (as the registrar) or the Public Interest Registry, who is the actual maintainance organization for the .org TLD.
I'm not sure how PIR is structured and how responsive they would be to a U.S. court order -- a lot of their board of directors seem to be European, although their mailing address is in Reston, VA, and I'm not sure where they're officially incorporated -- but Tucows is probably in a position where they have a lot to lose if they ignored it.
Still, can a registrar really "pull" a domain? It's the PIR that maintains the root DNS servers for the TLD, so if they decide to just not delete spamhaus's DNS entry, then the domain stays active. Tucows basically sends requests to the PIR to add new DNS records when someone registers a new domain, but they don't (at least, I don't think they do) actually operate the servers themselves. What is Tucows supposed to actually do?
It would be interesting if PIR just said "no" to the order, once it goes to them from Tucows, and refused to do it. There could be some very interesting precedent as a result of this: should a U.S. court have the authority to pull a domain belonging to a non-U.S. corporation or citizen? Should a German court be able to order a domain for a U.S. corporation or citizen pulled? How about a Saudi Arabian court?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
12 Second History
4
Spamhaus listed E360 as spammers
E360 sued Spamhaus in an Illinois court, saying that they weren't spammers.
Spamhaus said Illinois court has no jurisdiction, take it to Federal courts.
E360 sued Spamhaus in a Federal court, saying that they weren't spammers.
Spamhaus doesn't show up to Federal court, despite having accepted their jurisdiction.
E360 won a default judgement because Spamhaus didn't show up.
Spamhaus still said the court had no authority and ignored the judgement.
E360 filed for an injunction, asking the court to order either ICANN or the domain registrar to block the Spamhaus domain because Spamhaus ignored the judgement.
Check out this Illinois lawyer's take on the matter for the full(er) explanation:
http://blogs.securiteam.com/index.php/archives/66
--
"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
"Spamhaus may have waived personal jurisdiction as a defense early on in the case when they not only appeared, but then asked for the case to be removed from state court (where it was originally filed) and moved to federal district court (where it is today). Arguably, and this makes sense intuitively even if you don't understand the finer points of U.S. civil procedure, doing so inherently acknowledged the jurisdiction of the federal court."
Here's an idea if Spamhaus ends up deciding to comply with removing e360 from their spammer list.
Create a "People Who Sued Us" list. Make this list functionally similar to the normal ROSKO list, allowing IT admins to choose to use the PWSU list for e-mail filtering purposes. Chances are that anyone on the PWSU list is a known spammer, since only a known spammer would have to resort to shady legal practices to get removed from ROSKO. However, the PWSU list is based only on the easily provable fact of someone suing Spamhaus, meaning that nobody on that list could complain that they were being treated unjustly.