ICANN speaks up on Spamhaus litigation
ICANN, the current overseer of the Internet DNS infrastructure, has posted an announcement on their site about the ongoing court battle between a U.S. spammer and real-time blocklist provider Spamhaus.org. ICANN is claiming they cannot suspend the spamhaus domain name if the court orders it because it "does not have either the ability or the authority to do so".
If you haven’t been following this case, it’s yet another attempt by a hardcore spammer to use the legal system against an anti-spam organization. Spamhaus provides popular anti-spam real-time blocklists that mail administrators can use to automatically block messages from IP addresses known to send spam. Just about everyone running an Internet mail server use the spamhaus blocklists, among others, to reduce the flood of junk e-mail… blocklists are controversial for some people, but for most mail administrators they are a necessary first layer of defense.
One spammer in Illinois managed to get a court to order Spamhaus to remove the IP addresses he uses to send spam. Spamhaus, based in the UK, is outside the jurisdiction of the court and so ignored the order (their view of events is here). Now the court is apparently considering an order to ICANN to remove the DNS records of Spamhaus. If that happened, mail servers around the world would be inundated with billions of messages from every spammer worldwide.
It would be like using a guillotine to cure dandruff. Internet users world-wide would be affected… not just those in this one court’s jurisdiction. It also would only have a short term effect… a few hours at most until replacement blocklists using other domains were made available. Each individual mail administrator is also free to block IP addresses at their firewalls… it would be fun to see the spammer try to sue each of the resulting hundreds of thousands of organizations around the world who individually blocked his IP addresses.
Anyway, it looks like it won’t happen. ICANN is claiming they don’t have the technical ability to block individual DNS records. The domain is registered through Tucows, who is the only entity able to change the DNS records. Fortunately Tucows is located in Canada and not subject to the orders of a foreign court.
Part of the reason ICANN issued a statement on this issue is because it understands how precarious it’s authority is. Though based in the U.S. ICANN is an international organization created to serve the needs of the global Internet. If they had to start monkeying with DNS based on orders from local courts or local politicians, they’d find themselves replaced very quickly. There is no technical reason preventing administrators around the world from using other root DNS servers. During it’s short existence ICANN has generated enough ill-will around the world that many organizations would actually enjoy dumping them. An event like this proposed court order could be the catalyst for just such a revolt.
By the way, Spamhaus is not blameless in this affair. Apparently they originally participated in the case then ignored it when the case was actually heard… Securiteam has an interesting write-up about the legal aspects here.
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