Spamhaus domain name under threat from US court ruling

Posted 11 October 2006 10:08am by Graham Charlton with 0 comments

The Spamhaus project, a UK based website which monitors the activities of spammers, may lose its domain name due to legal action in the US.

The legal action was taken by US email marketing company e360 Insight, who were aggrieved at being blacklisted as a spammer by Spamhaus.

Spamhaus helps fight the scourge of spam by publishing a ‘blacklist’ of IP addresses used by known spamming organisations on its website. This is used by ISPs and large organisations to help filter out junk mail traffic. Spamhaus says that more then 650 million internet users are helped by this list.

The company has not contested the court case as it believes that the US courts have no jurisdiction over its activities, and also that contesting this case would set a precedent which would then encourage further action by frustrated spammers.

The US court ruling requires Spamhaus to pay $11.7m in compensation to e360 Insight, but, as they are based in the UK, they have no obligation to pay this. The same Illinois court is now considering asking ICANN to revoke its domain name.

In a statement on the Spamhaus website, Chief Executive Steve Linford believes US authorities will not allow this to happen:

“We think it can not actually happen, due to the effect it would have both on the Internet and on millions of users. We believe a government agency would have to step in before it happened. One U.S. government agency has begun working on a response. Before an event such as this could occur, we believe ICANN would fight the order, as ICANN understands both the technical effect as well as the political one”