CircleID

For accuracy, Gadi, what you are looking at is not a court order binding on ICANN, and in fact is not a court order at all.

The document you are looking at is a proposed order that has been submitted to the court by the plaintiff.  The proposed order is to require the registrar to suspend the domain name because of an alleged violation of an injunction entered earlier in the case.

The proposed order is defective for several reasons, not the least of which is that it is directed at an entity which has not been a party to the litigation.

Thanks for that clarification, John.
Further, Matthew Prince who is a lawyer in Illinois and quite spam savvy wrote a blog post on this subject, covering it from head to toe. Very interesting.

I'm curious - why ICANN?

Surely the response from ICANN's lawyers will be if this is a matter pertaining to the operation of the ".ORG" domain, please demonstrate you have exhausted avenues via the ".org" registry.

Which would throw the matter to the PIR.

More basic still I don't see how the domain is relevant here, he might as well sue the ISPs who route data to Spamhaus DNS servers.

If a credit rating agency gives you a bad rating, you don't sue their telephone company to complain that they give them service.

I assume US law has some discretion for judges to say "this is the wrong person".

I assume US law has some discretion for judges to say “this is the wrong person”.

The court has discretion to do whatever it pleases.  Here, the court is being asked to issue an order upon Tucows, which was never before this court.  The answer to any question premised upon "Can a judge...?" is yes.

Looking at the electronic docket of the case, it seems that Spamhaus was represented initially by CircleID member Evan Brown, who withdrew from the case and there was no subsequent participation in the proceeding by Spamhaus.  Odd that Spamhaus would seek removal from state court to federal court and subsequently claim lack of personal jurisdiction.

ICANN's response - as expected
http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-10oct06.htm

[...]

Please note that ICANN is not a party to this action and no order has been issued in this matter requiring any action by ICANN. Additionally, ICANN cannot comply with any order requiring it to suspend Spamhaus.org or any specific domain name because ICANN does not have either the ability or the authority to do so.

[...]

It looks to me from what I see here and what I know about how ICANN and the law in general work that the headline this story is being sent around with is false. For example in your weekly email wrap.

I'm pretty sure it is simply not the case that:

ICANN has been Ordered by Illinois Court to Suspend Spamhaus.org

This error was first pointed out on 7 October, the very day the piece was posted.

If they switch to a .uk domain, it should more sensibly be under .org.uk rather than .co.uk.

technically they are taking www.spamhaus.org to court when the effective domain name is spamhaus.org so they are not quite right.