It seems like what we're talking about over and over are servers located in overseas locations that are constantly providing scams (phishing, farming, etc.)
The scam servers are typically located on virus-controlled zombies that can be anywhere, as often as not right here in the US.
I wouldn't suggest that it doesn't happen in the US, but I think ISPs in the US are much more eager to shut them down.
If only. A few do, but the lack of action cleaning up zombied PCs is a global scandal. Also, if you look at Spamhaus' list of the worst problem ISPs, the worst one has for a long time been Verizon, which absorbed but did not fix the equally bad MCI.
But, what if the scammers are the ISP? I truly believe that 90% of all our problems are due to the mafia-style collusion between the crooks and ISPs in countries like China, the Balkans, and Central Africa.
Nope. There may be some of that, but that's not a major issue. The worst is ISPs like Verizon that turn a blind eye to their sleazy customers.
At some point, I think there needs to be an ICANN-level task force that can go in an repatriate IP#s that are causing serious problems
That's not how Internet routing works. There is no practical way to take IP space away from one party and give it to another if the first party isn't inclined to cooperate. It's possible to blacklist IPs so nobody can use them, but then the space is gone, and given the diminishing amount of available IPv4 address space, that's going to be a very hard sell. R's, John