Anti-spam Group Under Attack - Via ICANN

[IPB Corporation]

jmason {http://taint.org/} writes:

Spamhaus, the UK-based non-profit that runs the SBL and XBL anti-spam
DNS blocklists, is reportedly facing serious legal trouble in the US.
A US-based spam gang has started legal action to have Spamhaus' domain
name confiscated by ICANN, and reportedly, Spamhaus may have been
advised badly by their US legal people; so there is now a danger that
they *may* indeed lose their domain, and possibly worse.

Note that Spamhaus is entirely UK-based, bar some mirrors; however,
the proposed order is aimed at ICANN, which is US-based. This is the
really tricky part; can a US company kill the domain of a non-US
group?
According to anti-spam lawyer Matthew Prince, 'there may be some time
before ICANN is formally ordered to shut down the Spamhaus domain, but
make no mistake that ICANN's lawyers will be considering their options
beginning first thing Monday, if they haven't already begun the
conference calls tonight' ... 'In the end, [ICANN's] decision is
likely to be much more about setting a general policy than the
specific details of who Spamhaus is or why they are critical for the
Internet. ICANN will desperately want to stay out of this dispute, but
they are subject to U.S. law and they will probably have attorneys who
will argue they need to follow it. All it will take for this to end
badly for Spamhaus is one lawyer at ICANN getting a little bit spooked
and Spamhaus could lose not only it's .org but potentially any other
TLD that ICANN controls.'

This is interesting -- if Spamhaus is forced to close down its domains
and US-based mirrors, that will mean that the SBL and XBL blocklists
will be down for a while, too. Typically those are used for up-front
blocking, and if my servers are any indication, they take care of 75%
of incoming spam before it hits any more CPU-intensive filtering.

Without those, there'll be a lot of sites around the net suddenly
dealing with quadrupled spam volumes hitting their MTAs."