shouting loudly

Spamhaus tests Pax ICANNa

As Professor Milton Mueller documented in his book Ruling the Root, US-based governance of internet naming is a politically touchy issue.

Internet servers communicate without centralized control, with one exception: everyone needs an address. The root server, which controls internet addresses, “is the only point of centralized control in what is otherwise a distributed and voluntaristic network of networks.”

ICANN, the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers, is a nonprofit with final authority in all domain name disputes. ICANN is based in the US, but it governs addresses for the whole world. Needless to say, many foreign governments see this as further evidence of US hegemony.

Courtesy of Freedom to Tinker, here’s where that pavement hits the road:

Spamhaus, an anti-spam organization headquartered in London, publishes ROKSO, the “Register of Known Spam Operations”. Many sites block email from ROKSO-listed sites, as an anti-spam tactic. A US company called e360 sued Spamhaus, claiming that Spamhaus had repeatedly and wrongly put e360 on the ROKSO, and asking the court to award monetary damages and issue an injunction ordering e360’s removal from ROKSO.

Spamhaus lost the case, apparently due to bad legal maneuvering. Faced with a U.S. lawsuit, Spamhaus had two choices: it could challenge the court’s jurisdiction over it, or it could accept jurisdiction and defend the case on the merits. It started to defend on the merits, but then switched strategies, declaring the court had no jurisdiction and refusing to participate in the proceedings. The court said that Spamhaus had accepted its jurisdiction, and it proceeded to issue a default judgment against Spamhaus, ordering it to pay $11.7M in damages (which it apparently can’t pay), and issuing an injunction ordering Spamhaus to (a) take e360 off ROKSO and keep it off, and (b) post a notice saying that previous listings of e360 had been erroneous.

If it doesn’t comply, the court may issue an order to revoke the Spamhaus.org domain name. Because ICANN is in the US, this gives the court the means to force ICANN’s hands.

What happens if Spamhaus goes under? Well, for starters, hundreds of millions of email users around the world will suddenly see a several-fold increase in their email traffic. Many email servers would fail. At least, that’s the bad scenario. The good scenario is that somebody else steps up and provides similar services, most administrators switch over before Spamhaus goes black, and the your inbox doesn’t explode.

Under neither of these scenarios does America’s net governance look very pretty to the rest of the world. The uneasy peace over ICANN just might collapse.