Stopping name server abuse

Dave Warren dw at thedave.ca
Tue Jun 26 18:18:23 UTC 2018


On Tue, Jun 26, 2018, at 01:28, Matus UHLAR - fantomas wrote:
> On 25.06.18 09:06, Dave Warren wrote:
> >Absent a situation where the customer has agreed to purchase this service,
> > the only result sending an invoice would have is that you have increased
> > your loss by adding wasted time, toner, paper, an envelope and the cost of
> > postage.
> >
> >You might flag the customer's attention, but since "Unfortunately asking
> > him nicely didn't work." it seems unlikely that repeatedly annoying the
> > individual repeatedly will be productive.
> 
> I believe this can eb the same situation as putting images owned by getty to
> your website. They will send you invoice with higher price than if you had a
> contract...

Assuming the user ignores the invoice (from you or Getty), your remedy would be the same as Getty: Take the user to court.

But Getty has copyright law behind them and therefore has a relatively easy win with well understood penalties. A DNS server operator could try small claims could, but would probably need to show actual damages to get a judgement. 

Getty also has lawyers on payroll who do this stuff all day, every day, and therefore have minimal overhead due to the copy/paste nature of their filings. A random DNS server operator likely does not have a lawyer who can copy/paste this type of claim, the cost of research and filing would probably exceed the (mostly non-existent) cost of just ignoring the unwanted traffic. My money says that win or lose, you've already lost by using the legal system even assuming you manage to collect on a judgement.

At the end of the day, I doubt there is much you can do legally, the only real solutions are technical by returning answers that will discourage resolvers from asking as frequently (probably meaning responses carrying a high TTL).



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