October 9, 2024

Staying Off the Regulatory Radar

I just returned from a tech policy conference. It was off the record so I can’t tell you about what was said. But I can tell you that it got me thinking about what happens when a tech startup appears on policymakers’ radar screens.

Policymakers respond to what they see. Generally they don’t see startups, so startup products can do whatever makes sense from a technical and customer relations standpoint. Startups talk to lawyers, they try to avoid doing anything too risky, but they don’t spend their time trying to please policymakers.

But if a startup has enough success and attracts enough users, policymakers suddenly notice it and everything changes. To give just one example, YouTube is now on the radar screen and is facing takedown requests from national authorites in places like Thailand. (Thai authorities demanded takedown of an unflattering video about their king.) The cost of being on the policy radar screen can be high for online companies that have inherently global reach.

Some companies respond by changing their product strategy or by trying to outsource certain functions to other companies. We might even see the emergence of companies that specialize in coping with policymakers, making money by charging other tech-focused companies for managing certain parts of their technology.

Perhaps this is just another cost of scaling up a service that works well at smaller scale. But I can’t help wondering whether companies will change their behavior to try to stay off the radar screen longer. There’s an old strategy called “stealth mode” where a startup tries to avoid the attention of potential competitors by keeping secret its technology or even its very existence, to emerge in public at a strategically chosen time. I can think of several companies that wish for a new kind of stealth mode, where customers notice a company but policymakers don’t.

Spamhaus Tests U.S. Control Over Internet

In a move sure to rekindle debate over national control of the Internet, a US court may soon issue an order stripping London-based spamhaus.org of its Internet name.

Here’s the backstory. 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.

Spamhaus has ignored the injunction. As I understand it, courts have broad authority to enforce their injunctions against noncompliant parties. In this case, the court is considering (but hasn’t yet issued) an order that would revoke Spamhaus’s use of the spamhaus.org name; the order would require ICANN and the Tucows domain name registry to shut off service for the spamhaus.org name, so that anybody trying to go to spamhaus.org would get a domain-not-found error. (ICANN says it’s up to Tucows to comply with any such order.)

There are several interesting questions here. (1) Is it appropriate under U.S. law for the judge to do this? (2) If the spamhaus.org is revoked, how will spamhaus and its users respond? (3) If U.S. judges can revoke domain name registrations, what are the international implications?

I’ll leave Question 1 for the lawyers to argue.

The other two questions are actually interrelated. Question 3 is about how much extra power (if any) the US has by virtue of history and of having ICANN, the central naming authority, within its borders. The relevance of any US power depends on whether affected parties could work around any assertion of US power, which gets us back to Question 2.

Suppose that spamhaus.org gets shut down. Spamhaus could respond by registering spamhaus.uk. Would the .uk registry, which is run or chartered by the UK government, comply with a US court order to remove Spamhaus’s registration? My guess would be no. But even if the .uk registry complied and removed spamhaus.uk, that decision would not depend on any special US relationship to ICANN.

The really sticky case would be a dispute over a valuable name in .com. Suppose a US court ordered ICANN to yank a prominent .com name belonging to a non-US company. ICANN could fight but being based in the US it would probably have to comply in the end. Such a decision, if seen as unfair outside the US, could trigger a sort of constitutional crisis for the Net. The result wouldn’t be pretty. As I’ve written before, ICANN is far from perfect but the alternatives could be a lot worse.

(via Slashdot)