A U.S. judge has denied an order that would have suspended the domain name for The Spamhaus Project Ltd., averting a potential
quagmire over how U.S. legal rulings apply across the global Internet.
Spamhaus, a group of computer security experts based in London, creates a database used by security vendors to block unsolicited bulk e-mail, known as spam.
Last month, an e-mail marketing company, e360 Insight LLC, won an $11.7 million judgment against Spamhaus in U.S. District
Court, Northern District of Illinois. The ruling also called for Spamhaus to remove e360 from its blacklists.
Spamhaus, which has been sued in the United States several times, typically ignores the rulings. It says U.S. courts do not
have jurisdiction over it since the group is based in the U.K. Spamhaus maintains that e360's e-mail constitutes spam and
violates U.K. law.
The U.S. lawsuits against Spamhaus typically end there, but earlier this month e360 raised the stakes. On Oct. 6 it asked
the U.S. court to force the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and Spamhaus's domain registrar, Tucows,
to suspend its domain name.
The request sparked speculation that ICANN, which is subject to U.S. law, would be required to enforce that law internationally
by, for example, shutting down a foreign Web site. ICANN said later that even if a court did order it to shut down a domain,
it couldn't do that since that power lies with individual registrars.
For the time being, it appears the tussle is moot. Judge Charles P. Kocoras wrote in his denial of e360's request that cutting
off all of Spamhaus's activities would "not correspond to the gravity of the offending conduct."
The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.
