[ppml] Abstract of proposed Internet Draft for Best Current Practice (please comment)

[Dr. Jeffrey Race]

On Wed, 19 Feb 2003 23:14:40 +1000, Keith Talent wrote:

>And what happens to all the non-spamming customers of an ISP who has their 
addresses revoked on the basis that a another customer spams? Will each of those 
innocent customers have a potential lawsuit?

Extract from <www.camblab.com/nugget/spam_03.pdf>


"Even the best ISPs (including my own, AT&T) occasionally fall afoul of 
 blocklists, but they cure the problem fast.  Indeed it is almost comical how 
 fast spamming stops when a blocklist is used, or even just threatened.  
 Consider the case of Connect, one of Australia's largest ISPs, which long 
 harbored a notorious spammer.  At 10:00 a.m. on January 3 a group of 
 concerned system administrators finally tired of politely asking Connect 
 to shape up and instead laid down their new zero-tolerance policy: blocking 
 would ensue that day unless Connect disconnected the spammers on its network.
 By 1:30 p.m. the spammers were gone, with no interruption in service.  
 Merely the threat of disconnection from the Internet caused management to 
 pull up its socks.
 
 A similar incident occurred in late September in Australia when Optus 
 defiantly refused to cut spammers loose.  Blocklist adoption by an 
 important group of victims forced Optus to change its policy two days later.
 
 In an equally dramatic incident Earthlink, an American ISP not famous for 
 cracking down on spammers, was forced to sue abusers, stating in its 
 pleading that it finally had to act because blocklists jeopardized its 
 Internet connectivity.   Before the blocklists Earthlink was content to 
 let injury accrue to the victims on other networks; after the blocklists 
 began to bite, Earthlink was motivated to put its own house in order due 
 to the magic of "actions have consequences"."
 

Reference:

<http://web.archive.org/web/20011106203918/http://biz.yahoo.com/law/010925/90405-5
.html>

Jeffrey Race





<http://web.archive.org/web/20011106203918/http://biz.yahoo.com/law/010925/90405-5
.html>