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Blogs: A spam tsunami on the way?

Posted by: Tim Pushman on 13 October 2006
[13-10-06] A recent decision by a court in Illinois could result in one of the main defences against spam being thrown off of the Internet. Or not...

In September a Federal court in Illinois, USA, ordered Spamhaus to remove e360insight from it's block list and pay damages of $11.8m. Spamhaus responded that a US court had no jurisdiction over a British registered company and the case should be filed in the UK. David Linhardt (of e360insight) had claimed in court that Spamhaus was based in Illinois, hence the ruling. Spamhaus' refusal to appear in court resulted in the judge ordering ICANN to remove the spamhaus.org domain from the Internet.

ICANN has slipped off the hook by pointing out that it is not their job to add or remove entries from the DNS system, it is the job of the registrar (TUCOWS in this case). TUCOWS is based in Canada so may not be effected by a court order in Illinois.

The case has raised a number of interesting issues. Does a notionally non-political international organisation such as ICANN have to obey a court order from Illinois, USA? Can the same court order a company in another country to pay damages? It also appears that the court ruling was obtained without the presentation of any proof or evidence.

There is also the spectre of what would happen if companies such as Spamhaus were to discontinue. In total, RBLs are probably used by ISPs that handle email for over a billion mail boxes. Suddenly opening the flood gates to blocked spam would result in overloaded servers and networks the world over as it would probably immediately double the quantity of email passing through the systems. But if common sense prevails, Spamhaus will continue in business and e360insight's case will be thrown out of court.

ICANN is the international organisation responsible for the coordination of internet names and identifiers. It is widely regarded as being too much in the control of the American government and it would be politically unwise for them to respond to an order from an American state court.

Spamhaus is one of the leading anti-spam companies and runs a RBL (Realtime Block List) that is probably the most widely used in the world. The Spamhaus RBL is used to filter the emails for an estimated 650 million mail boxes. The removal of the domain would mean an enormous increase in spam, not just for end users, but for the networks themselves. RBL's have always been a contentious issue amongst ISPs (and spammers, naturally) as many of them have been automated operations that can wrongly list an organisation and offer them no way of being removed. Spamhaus is one of the original operations and has, over the years, become widely regarded as being the most reliable and professional of the spam tracking operations.

e360 insight claims that the company does not send out spam, although amongst the anti-spam companies it is widely known that they do. Their website doesn't mention what the company does (except a vague reference to 'permission marketing') and considers The Spamhaus Project to be a secret organization.

Links:
The Spamhaus Project Ltd and case details
e360 insight LLC
ICANN and case response