The Debian Project has been a user of Spamhaus for a number of years and will be impacted greatly should the service be shut down.

"We use the Spamhaus SBL+XBL list to block over 120,000 spam emails a day to our bug track server, and 10,000 spam emails a day to our list server," said Debian Project member Pascal Hakim. "It's one of the few blacklists we are able to use without complaints from users."

This amount of spam is a big number for Debian. "You would notice 130,000 spam messages in your inbox," he said.

Despite the court order, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), said in a statement it does not have the ability or authority to enforce the court order to suspend the Internet service of Spamhaus.

Both ICANN, the nonprofit organization set up to manage the domain name system of the Internet, and Toronto-based Tucows Inc, the Spamhaus.org registrar, are named in the order.