FTC persuades court to shutter rogue ISP

I feel the recent action of the FTC against a rogue ISP, documented in this article, marks a shift in the tides in the war against spam.

It seems much of the junk email originates from ISPs that refuse to follow the rules, allowing anonymous spammers to register domains with false information.

As a user of Knujon for some time, I've been eagerly reading about their recent successes working with ICANN for stricter enforcement of rules, resulting in many rogue ISPs being shut down.

As of this writing, Knujon has shut down over 200 thousand junk email sites according to their website. I've already written about Knujon, but it seems the momentum is building.

Shutting down rogue ISPs can be successful in making the cost/benefit equation less favorable for spammers and criminals by making domains harder and more expensive to obtain. If so, perhaps we will start to see a noticeable decline in spam around the world. Maybe it has already started? Or maybe not.

The problem is giant, so I suspect it will still be some years away, but I think we are seeing the signs that this approach will work.

The article above also mentions that other criminal activity was curtailed by shutting down this rogue ISP. Cool.

Sometimes non-technical solutions really are the answer.