By John Leyden for The Register.
This story has been reproduced with permission.
An Illinois court last week proposed pulling Spamhaus.org in
response to a lawsuit brought against the anti-spam organisation by
a company it accuses of spamming.
The threat of domain loss came after the anti-spam organisation
refused to comply with a September
ruling by a US court requiring it to pay $11.7m in compensation
to e360 Insight, pull the organisation's listing, and post a notice
stating that it was wrong to say e360 Insight was involved in
sending junk mail.
In the proposed
court order, published last week, Judge Charles Kocoras of the
US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois calls on
either ICANN or Tucows, the Spamhaus.org registrar, to pull or
suspend the domain in response to Spamhaus's non-compliance with
the court's original ruling.
Spamhaus chief executive Steve Linford said that suspension of
its domain could create an "enormous amount of damage on the
internet".
ICANN's stance
of declining authority on the affair passes the onus onto Tucows,
the Spamhaus.org registrar. Since Tucows is based in Canada, and
not the US, it's in a much better position to decline to apply the
court's request. So the threat of the loss of Spamhaus's domain
appears to have receded, at least for now.
UK-based Spamhaus Project declined to defend itself in the case,
arguing that the US courts lack jurisdiction. The voluntary
organisation ignored the
Illinois court on principle amid concern that fielding a defence
might open it up to a barrage of nuisance lawsuits by spammers.
The loss of the Spamhaus domain would, at minimum, reduce the
effectiveness of its services. Spamhaus maintains a blacklist of IP
addresses used by spammers that's widely used by ISPs and
organisations as a "first-level defence" in weeding out junk mail
traffic. According to Spamhaus, its list help block 50bn spams per
day.
Suspending its services could potentially
result in a huge increase of unwanted junk hitting mail server
queues all over the world. ISPs and end-users commonly use other
spam-filtering techniques independent of Spamhaus so all these
extra spam messages would not necessarily hit users inboxes.
Removal of Spamhaus's services would still, however, put an
additional unwarranted burden on computing infrastructures.
In technical terms, Spamhaus could move onto a separate domain
not under US control, but such an action might leave it at risk of
being held in criminal contempt by US judges.
© The Register
2006
