I think you are the one trying to end a valid discussion. Shane's question is perfectly valid: Why does a working, widely accepted, "de facto" standard definition needs to stand out in court? -lem
As I pointed out it is often not actually used in practice. It works to a certain extent. it needs to stand up in court because there has been and most likely will be lawsuits when reputations and blacklists are published. If there are valid standards and procedures then there is a much less likelihood of getting sued. Often what you have now is people making stuff up as they go along and these are the ones who don't want standards. A few years back I tried to answer someone's e-mail and my reply was blocked. The abuse person told me my IP address block had issues and I was supposed to go back to my ISP and tell them to stop it. I asked what the issue was and they said they were not going to tell me ... but I was going to continue to be blocked until I somehow made this ISP stop some unknown activity that I knew nothing about. (The person contributes to this list but they always claim they don't remember it). Entities who do stuff like this are going to get sued sooner or later and without standards they will have problems.