An anti-spam boycott disrupted credit-card transactions for as many as 16,000 Internet businesses for a four-day period last week.
From 28 May to 1 June, the Net activists who run the Realtime Blackhole List -- a powerful boycott tool supported by volunteer system administrators the world over -- blocked out the Internet address blocks assigned to ibill.
See also: Is RealNetworks a RealSpammer?- - - - - -
The move left the company unable to process credit-card transactions for thousands of clients' e-commerce Web sites, including "adult" site Bondage.com.
"The infuriating thing is that target of the campaign isn't even the spammer -- it's a third party, and all of us who use the service get screwed in the process," said Mark Pace, chief technical officer with Bondage.com.
Ibill declined to discuss its alleged spamming activities, and has brought the matter straight to the antitrust division of the Department of Justice.
The group of volunteers at the Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS), which runs the blackhole list, said that they only use it as a last resort after a company refuses repeated requests to make its systems less vulnerable to abuse by spammers.
"It has the potential to be my worst nightmare," said Bondage.com president Brooks Talley.
"My competitors could just decide to wipe me out by sending a bunch of spams from my site, and then MAPS would shut me down," added Talley, who said his company has never sent spam.
The bondage.com site is hosted by San Jose, California's AboveNet, which outsources ibill's services.
In a statement on its Web site, AboveNet promises that its clients will be "immune from natural disasters, power interruptions, and unauthorized access." The company could not be reached for comment.
MAPS spokesman Nick Nicholas said he had never heard of a blackhole target affecting so many downstream Web sites.
"We make a lot of very important, deliberate judgment calls over a length of time to avoid that," he said.
"We went after ibill because we saw them as the center of the issue, as the one who was allowing the spammer to profit," Nicholas said, adding that about 20,000 ISPs support the blackhole system worldwide.
