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ICANN Meeting Puts Off XXX Domain Again

Posted by Zonk on Thu Mar 30, 2006 04:39 PM
from the porn-still-easy-to-find dept.
Government The Internet Politics
An anonymous reader wrote to mention an International Herald story about a recent ICANN meeting on the proposed .XXX domain. Australia, the U.S., and the EU have moved to block the idea, with most commentators surmising this will prevent the concept from ever moving forward. From the article: "Some people maintain that a triple-x domain name, and the ability to enforce rules to qualify for it, would rein in an out-of-control Internet phenomenon. In registering, a company could have to abide by ratings agency standards, require proof of age for entrants, maybe even pay for Internet filtering research. The company pushing the idea, ICM Registry, also argues that dot-xxx would be good for customers of pornography sites, assuring them of certain business benchmarks, like being free of adware or computer viruses."
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[+] ICANN Finally Rejects .xxx Domain 245 comments
stalebread writes "Faced with opposition from conservative groups and some pornography Web sites, the Internet's key oversight agency voted Wednesday to reject a proposal to create a red-light district on the Internet." From the article: "In a split 9-5 board decision, the organisation acted ruthlessly, against its own previous position, in order to put an end to an increasingly difficult and controversial issue - the approval of a .xxx top-level domain. The .xxx registry application has been the focus of enormous political pressure on ICANN for the past six months and was used at one point as a political football in a wider tussle for power within the internet."
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  • free of adware or viruses? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by spacemanspiff18 (883238) on Thursday March 30 2006, @04:41PM (#15029875)
    How are they going to guarantee that? And if that's their plan, why don't they implement it for .com as well?

    • Maybe, just maybe (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jfengel (409917) on Thursday March 30 2006, @05:07PM (#15030066) Homepage Journal
      Because the .com TLD is the repository of all crud. It's open to everybody.

      If the TLD isn't .com, the registrars should guarantee that it means something. For example, the .edu domain is restricted, and the registrar (a compnay caled Educase) is responsible for guaranteeing that it doesn't get full of spammers and scammers. Some country code domains are usefully geographically limited. By contrast, the .biz domain is stupid, because there's nothing in it that wouldn't be better off in .com unless you're trying to fool somebody with your scuzzy "CapitalOne.biz" domain.

      People trust .edu domains because Educase backs them with their reputation. If the rep fails, the .edu domain owners will be pissed off, because they're paying for exclusivity.

      So maybe, just maybe, these guys will be vigilant about kicking out the registrations of people with .xxx domains who host malware. The guys keeping them honest will be the .xxx domain owners themselves, who are selling a legal but sleazy project where some degree of trust is needed. (In the real world would you trust a porn purveyor with your credit card?)

      That "guaranteed free of malware" would involve a lot of vigilance on their part, and in return the .xxx domain owners would get people less wary of visiting their sites. They'd pay through the nose for that. They can't guarantee it completely, but if they investigate reports seriously and shut down domains spewing malware they might just get some trust. I'd be willing to give them a shot. It's a valid reason to establish a new domain, unlike most of the other new TLDs, which are just pork for domain registrars.
      • (In the real world would you trust a porn purveyor with your credit card?)

        Considering they were the driving force behind secure online CC transactions and secure account information practices, sure.
      • In the real world would you trust a porn purveyor with your credit card?

        Now, I'm not some kind of porn fiend, but I dislike your implication that people who sell porn are more likely to do something unethical to your credit card. I don't see any reason to be prejudiced against "porn purveyors". Because you might personally find their business in bad taste does not make the people in the business immoral or unethical.

        Besides, there are plenty of brick-and-mortar stores that sell porn. That's where th

        • Now, I'm not some kind of porn fiend, but I dislike your implication that people who sell porn are more likely to do something unethical to your credit card.

          Well I am one, and due to the consolidation of payment processors, Porn is safer than technogadgets - you generally deal with 2 or 3 companies total for whichever sites you go to, and they have pretty decent online tools, so it's not like you'll get burned, whereas every joe blow computer shop does their own payments and the goods are easier to screw

      • (In the real world would you trust a porn purveyor with your credit card?)

        Given that I'm not liable for the cost of fraudulent transactions made against my card, and further given that I have no reason to believe that any given "porn purveyor" is any less trustworthy than any other business, yes of course I would.

  • don't see the downside.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by abigsmurf (919188) on Thursday March 30 2006, @04:43PM (#15029888)
    porn sites garenteed to be safe and malware free? I'm sure most male (and probably most female too) would love the prospect of the ability to get porn *legally* without the risk of infecting their PC. Vetting the domains could stop underage people both visiting and appearing in .xxx sites too. Of course no politition wants to actively promote porn so they'll stamp on it to promote 'christian values'
    • It won't actively promote porn, it will provide an easily-filterable place to keep it all.
    • If I see your name on the Slashdot stories that put the XXX domain in an unfavorable light (where posters were saying that it's right-wing Christian nonsense to try to limit otherwise legal Internet activity, and how the US government was promoting censorship) I'm going not going to be able to concentrate on the outrageously distasteful pornography I'm looking at, I'll be laughing so hard.
    • OK, I'll tell you the downside then.

      porn sites garenteed to be safe and malware free? I'm sure most male (and probably most female too) would love the prospect of the ability to get porn *legally* without the risk of infecting their PC.

      Not really feasible. They can't enforce that for .coms now can they? Besides, even if it is free of adware/malware, it may still not be legal, who knows if they actually have the distribution rights to whatever random piece of porn they are distributing.

      Vetting the domains
    • I'm sure most male (and probably most female too) would love the prospect of the ability to get porn *legally* without the risk of infecting their PC.

      I surf to Sublime Directory's Big Board [sublimedirectory.com], and using Firefox, have no problems... As much "free" porn as your plate can hold...

  • the real reason.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tepshen (851674) on Thursday March 30 2006, @04:44PM (#15029902)
    That they keep putting this off is because of the embarassment it would cause when .xxx sites outnumber all .com .net .biz and .org sites put together.
    • That they keep putting this off is because of the embarassment it would cause when .xxx sites outnumber all .com .net .biz and .org sites put together.

      That might not be true because unless they make it madatory that all adult websites shift to xxx domain, none would shift. They have well established presence in the com world, and the capturing of xxx would be just another domain buying where xxx page would eventually redirect to the .com site.

      If they did make it a rule to send adult business to .xxx, it

  • It seems like all these extra rules and details are just going to get in the way of the point of having a .xxx TLD, namely that "pron goes here".

  • The invisible foot of Government (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Toby The Economist (811138) on Thursday March 30 2006, @04:45PM (#15029908)
    "The company pushing the idea, ICM Registry, also argues that dot-xxx would be good for customers of pornography sites, assuring them of certain business benchmarks, like being free of adware or computer viruses."

    The fact is, laws passed for the "common good" invariably end up harming those they were notionally intended to help and in fact end up greatly benefiting a very small group of people.

    In this case, the average punter will see his prices rise, to pay for all the regulation the porn sites would bear, the number and variety of porn sites would decrease because of their extra costs and ICM Registry would do very well out of it *indeed*.

  • Tagging (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I have tagged this story with the tag "boobies" and I hope you do too.
  • "...maybe even pay for Internet filtering research."

    Since when does porn have to be regulated like the tobacco industry? It's not like these sites are ruining lives by giving people cancer.

    And what's to stop me from making amazingsexvideos.COM and not paying fo the fees? I doubt that not having a .xxx TLD will decrease the amount of traffic I see...

    • Porn IS regulated just as much as the tobacco industry right now. You have to be a certain age to be in porn films or photos, you have to be a certain age to go into adult bookstores, you can't view porn in a public place where other people can see what you're looking at, etc.

      The issue isn't that pornography will ruin the lives of those people that look at it; it's that the Internet allows minors to access porn very easily.

      I think this is actually a good idea, but determining rules for what should belong i
    • ...It's not like these sites are ruining lives by giving people cancer.
      No, but my Mom keeps telling me that I'll go blind.
    • what's to stop me from making amazingsexvideos.COM

      This is. [whois.sc] Apart from that, nothing. More importantly, there's nothing stopping you from making amazingkiddiesexvideos.com. It's an opt-in business standards label, but they're trying to market it as a measure against child porn, for the sake of the save-the-puppies angle in the news.

      This has nothing to do with morality or filtering technology or anything. "Some people" means ICM Registry, who aside from pushing the idea itself, plan to be the ones in charg

  • Why is it that slashdot is so obsessed with this issue (I'd track down the links, but I see a post on this topic at least every 2 weeks so its not like you have to look far to find them).

    Honestly, NO ONE seems to think this is a good idea. Governments don't want it because they think it'll somehow legitimize it. The XXX industry doesn't want it because they think they'll get pushed off into some dark corner of the web and shunned easily by ISPs. HOW and WHY does this issue keep coming up--none of the tru
    • Honestly, NO ONE seems to think this is a good idea.

      No one but us, unfortunately. As a programmer, I've tried to do some improvised web filters, and it's a ROYAL PAIN IN THE BACK. Blocking .xxx sites would be a walk in the park compared with all that content-based filtering madness.

  • old .com names? (Score:5, Funny)

    by theStig (960440) on Thursday March 30 2006, @05:02PM (#15030029) Homepage
    Does that mean I can then secure whitehouse.com to peddle my lucrative house painting business?

  • What they should do: (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Quaoar (614366) on Thursday March 30 2006, @05:05PM (#15030051)
    Is not FORCE people to use .xxx. Just make it a choice. Then whoever is offended by porn can simply block out .xxx, and they can at least block out a good portion of the porn sites out there. The reputable sites (Playboy, etc) will probably switch, so you'll at least clean up the internet a LITTLE bit. I think doing this would be better than nothing.
    • > Is not FORCE people to use .xxx.

      No these scam artists won't have to force people into .xxx, the lawyers will do that part for them free of charge. That is why .xxx is a terrible idea, once it exists porn outside of it will find itself liable for every kiddie who wanders in 'by accident' and every backwoods community who finds its 'community standards' violated. Then once all of the porn is safely contained in .xxx every company will block it and every ISP will offer to block it. Then a few years lat
    • It's my impression that the very countries who are trying to block the .xxx TLD are precisely the same people as the ones who would prefer it to be compulsory. This is obviously unrealistic, which is why I have very little sympathy for the delayers.

      The ones who think the .xxx TLD is a good idea, however, seem to me to be doing so because there's a market for it -- and that line of reasoning doesn't have very much to do with compulsion.
    • I'm going to quote a previous post [slashdot.org] of mine regarding why .xxx isn't a great idea:

      It's a bad idea.

      If you want to rate pages, there are already standard mechanisms [icra.org] for plugging content metadata into pages. Just for a start, this is a technically-superior system -- there is absolutely no reason to need to purchase an entirely separate TLD just because you have a few pages that contain adult content. The domain name registrars would have loved this -- heck, they'd love people to have to buy a new TLD for *every

  • wont really solve anything (Score:5, Insightful)

    by spazoidspam (708589) on Thursday March 30 2006, @05:05PM (#15030058)
    adding a XXX domain wont solve anything. Its like having a town where everyone HAS to carry a gun. It doesnt address the problem of guns being everywhere else in the world.

    a better solution is to create a domain that only has child-friendly material on it. Like creating a town with NO guns allowed.

    Parents could choose to only allow their kids to visit this domain and be assured they wont stumble across pictures that they might not want them to see.


    I don't think I would have my children live in censorland, but at least the parents afraid of letting their children see the real world would have a place to hide it from them.

  • From the mouths of babes (Score:4, Insightful)

    by EzInKy (115248) on Thursday March 30 2006, @05:09PM (#15030089)
    When asked, my 6-year-old daughter strongly endorsed the idea of a separate space on the Internet for pornography.

    Of course, that's not quite how I put it to her. I said some people wanted a place on the Web where only adults could go.

    "And a place where only kids could go, like pbskids.org?" she asked, leaping to a conclusion I hadn't considered. "That's a great idea."


    My question is why are there so many people who refuse to consider the much more logical course of creating ".safe" domains? It just makes much more sense then trying to force or coerce objectionable material into a single domain and would be much more effective for those who want to censor.
    • My question is why are there so many people who refuse to consider the much more logical course of creating ".safe" domains?

      Because a ".safe" domain is about controlling one's own behavior. A ".xxx" domain is about controlling other people's behavior.

      And some people simply can't live with not being able to control other people's behavior.
  • adware or computer viruses
    ...or even (heaven forfend!) clothing!
  • It won't stop at .xxx. Then they'll want .sex and .cum. With four letter like .info then they could ask for .fuck, .anal, .oral, .shit, .dvda, and probably .wank. But let's not stop there with just four letters why not .boobies, .masturbation, .cunnilingus, .blow-job, .fisting, .hot-karl, or even .filthy-sanchez. Yes, the possibilities are endless.
  • I am for the regulation of pornography because I don't want kids to be able to access it. There need to be reasonable regulations in place to allow only adults to have straight forward access to it, and the .xxx domain would represent a critical move in the direction of protecting the average kid from easy access to porn. From a libertarian POV, porn must be regulated because children are not part of the equation as they are not "consenting adults." If they want to become adults, then they need to become em

  • Everyone, repeat after me! (Score:3, Informative)

    by Schraegstrichpunkt (931443) on Thursday March 30 2006, @06:19PM (#15030588) Homepage
    RFC 3675 [ietf.org]
    • Because the thought of even having an .XXX domain somehow causes them to think they're enabling it, so they try to sweep it under the rug. The initial shock of "XXX" freaks them out too much for them to cause them to think rationally about it.

      Unfortunately, this is one of those things that requires maturity, something porn-hating people don't have.

      • Unfortunately, this is one of those things that requires maturity, something porn-hating people don't have.



        s/hating/fearing/;
        I've found plenty of people who are anti-porn that are rational about it. It's the one's who are afraid of it that are not rational in their arguments.
        -nB

    • Re:why? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AuMatar (183847) on Thursday March 30 2006, @05:02PM (#15030030)
      I'm personally glad its being blocked. Once its created, its a short step from being able to register a .xxx to being forced to use .xxx for "obscene speech". Once you have that, you have an issue with free speech rights being trampled as the government tries to regulate what it obscene or not.
      • to being forced to use .xxx for "obscene speech"

        Oh puh-leeze. You sound just like the left-wing extremists in my country, who are scared at anything that MIGHT POSSIBLY ONE DAY be used in conjunction with the REMOTE POSSIBILITY of an ADDITIONAL LAW to MAYBE (if we roll 3d20) sell the whole country (I'm talking about allowing private investment in energy generation). Those people and their doomsaying are what keeps my country (Mexico) in the stone age.

        • Re:why? (Score:3, Insightful)

          by AuMatar (183847)
          Seeing as we have right wing religious zealots controlling Congress and the White House, I don't think its a stretch at all. Look at the laws that have already been struck down by the Supremes this past decade, such CIPA. Look at the other restrictions to freedom passed by Bush. Its not a remote possibility, its a damn near certainty that it *would* be passed, in some form (how onerous a form would get passed would be the question- the republicans might push a weak test version out first to test the wat
      • Once you have that, you have an issue with free speech rights being trampled as the government tries to regulate what it obscene or not.

        Clearly, Obscenity is a statue of a naked women giving birth [nme.com].

    • Re:why? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Aspirator (862748)
      The whole issue has been considered, filed, reconsidered, trashed,
      untrashed, contemplated and cogitated for some while.

      There is a relevant RFC with very cogent arguments as to why it is a bad idea.

      http://www.rfc-archive.org/getrfc.php?rfc=3675 [rfc-archive.org]

    • "I cannot believe that America is so pro-porn. All the research shows how it leads to violence against women."
      Links to all this research, please?

      "Americans are all sick degenerate perverts."
      Also, making a generalization about roughly 300 million people is not very nice. It's like saying that all Chinese (or Indian) people wear funny shoes. There are people in every group that wear funny shoes, just as there are "sick degenerate perverts" everywhere, but that doesn't make everyone one of them.
    • What about sites like the Online Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition [cnn.com] or the Online Victoria's Secret Catalogue [victoriassecret.com] go? They're not porn, but they're definately in that grey area. Most people would consider them fine for a regular .com, but you gotta figure that there'll be a vocal minority of people who'll be like "All boobies must be XXX, won't somebody PLEASE think of the children? I'm old and stodgy, get off my lawn, blah blah blah" .XXX is something that is a good idea, but there's definately some areas t
      • What about sites like the Online Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition or the Online Victoria's Secret Catalogue go? They're not porn, but they're definately in that grey area.

        The creation of a .xxx TLD is a good idea, but not because of censorship.

        If we tried to force all pornographic sites to move to .xxx names, then we would by necessity need to define "porn" to decide who has to move, and that is a difficult task at best, and it wouldn't guarantee that suddenly .com is free of porn.

        However, internet porn

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