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ICANN Finally Rejects .xxx Domain

Posted by Zonk on Thu May 11, 2006 09:03 AM
from the at-least-it's-over dept.
Government The Internet Politics
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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Related Stories

[+] ICANN Meeting Puts Off XXX Domain Again 157 comments
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."
[+] Plans For .xxx Domain For p0rn Scrapped 361 comments
William Robinson writes "ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has once again scrapped the plan for a new internet "domain" .xxx for pornography. Supporters of the .xxx address suffix argued that it would have helped to protect children and others from accidental exposure to internet pornography, particularly if stronger filters were used to screen out explicit material from other internet domains. Pressure from conservative Christian groups in the US, which has a veto over the internet addressing system, led the organisation last year to put off introducing a new ".xxx" domain for pornography on the internet. That drew international complaints that the US exercised too much power over the internet and added to a European-backed movement to shift control of the online medium to an international group."
[+] Nineteen Registrars Decry ICANN Arrangement 150 comments
hpcanswers writes "ICANN, the governing body for Internet domain names, recently gave VeriSign exclusive control of the top-level .com domain until 2012. Now, nineteen registrars, including GoDaddy and Network Solutions, have petitioned ICANN to reconsider on the basis that VeriSign will most likely increase registration fees. A few of the registrars have also asked the US Department of Commerce to veto the deal." From the article: "The new deal permits VeriSign to increase the price of domain name registrations by 7 per cent in four of the next six years. In the two remaining years, VeriSign will only be able to raise prices if it can show the rises are necessary for security reasons. It also gives VeriSign a presumptive right to renewal of the .com registry, on the proviso that it complies with certain aspects of the agreement."
[+] Technology: The .XXX Saga Continues in Wellington 302 comments
netrover writes "CircleID is reporting on the latest developments on the .XXX top-level domain as the related ICANN meeting is currently underway in Welligton, New Zealand. From the article: 'The .XXX TLD was widely expected to receive its final approval at the ICANN's last meeting held in Vancouver about 4 months earlier but the discussion was unexpectedly delayed as the organization and governments requested more time to review the merits of setting up such a domain.' But as it has been reported, it appears the discussions at ICANN Wellington are in limbo once again."
[+] Senators Renew Call for .XXX Domain 489 comments
An anonymous reader writes "It's an election year again, and the usual PR causes are being picked up. Senators are once again pushing for a .XXX top-level domain to 'corral pornography'." From the article: "The bill suggests, but does not require, that .xxx serve as the domain name ending. Any commercial Internet site or online service that "has as its principal or primary business the making available of material that is harmful to minors" would be required to move its site to that domain. Failure to comply with those requirements would result in civil penalties as determined by the Commerce Department. It's unclear whether the measure will go very far. First of all, it could be struck down as unconstitutional, said Marv Johnson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "
[+] Why the .XXX Domain is a Bad Idea That Won't Die 322 comments
Reader tqft tipped us to an opinion piece on the UK site The Guardian, which lays out the reasons why article writer Seth Finkelstein feels the .XXX domain is a terrible idea. You may recall that last year (being an election year and all), the concept of a triple-X ghetto was revived, considered, and then quashed all in the space of a few months. We also recently discussed the fact that the idea just won't die, as the company ICM Registry pushes ICANN to allow them to pass out the names by Summer. Finkelstein primarily argues that the new domain is a bad idea from a business point of view. Ignoring for a moment the issue that much of this content is already labeled, he sees this as primarily a means for ICM Registry to gain a monopoly on what is sure to be a hot-selling product. Speculators, pornographers, and above-board companies will all jump on the namespace in an effort to ensure that their domain is represented ... or not, as the case may be. Where do you fall on this issue? Would a .XXX domain be helpful for parents, or just a political salve/moneymaking scam?
[+] ICANN Rejects .XXX Top Level Domain, Again 134 comments
eldavojohn writes "After yet another contentious vote on the .xxx concept, ICANN has finally rejected the pornography TLD. The debate has gone on for quite some time, and the 9-5 decision was the third time a decision was reached on the subject. This is the second time the body has ruled against the idea, and is likely the last time we'll see it come up for vote any time soon. One member abstained from voting. From the article: 'Many of the board members said they were concerned about the possibility that ICANN could find itself in the content regulation business if the domain name was approved. Others criticized that, saying ICANN should not block new domains over fears like that, noting that local, state and national laws could be used to decide what is pornographic and what is not. Other board members said they believed that opposition to the domain by the adult industry, including Web masters, content providers and others, was proof that the issue was divisive and that .xxx was not a welcome domain.'"
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  • Well, done, fundies, well done. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TripMaster Monkey (862126) * on Thursday May 11 2006, @09:07AM (#15307885)

    By managing to force ICANN to kill this initiative, you've made certain smut remains where it belongs...out of sight and out of mind (your sight and your mind, anyway).

    Never mind that by stopping the .xxx domain you've neatly made it impossible to protect minors from exposure to pornography (your ostensible goal)...after all, the style is more important than the substance, and 'heroically making a stand against the legitimization of pornography on the Internet' sounds quite stylish, doesn't it?.

    Never mind that porn is as old as the human species, and will continue to be present on the Internet just as it has been present in every other media in human history.

    Never mind that your rejection of an accepted place for it to be located just insures that it will remain in unacceptable places.

    Nope...it's much more important (not to mention easier) to address the hot-button issue of the legitimization of adult content, while conveniently ignoring the reality: that porn isn't going anywhere, no matter how much the fundies shout..

    So porn on the Internet will remain where it belongs...all-pervasive and impossible to effectively block...but at least you made your 'stand'. Well done.

    • Re:Well, done, fundies, well done. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 11 2006, @09:10AM (#15307915)
      Or, ICANN protected free speech by refusing to restrict so-called obscene content to certain, easily-blocked, corners of the internet.
      • Yes, everyone seems to forget that people across the political spectrum were against this. Seen from the right, is was a tool for propogating porn. Seen from the left, it was a tool for censorship. Seen from the middle, who cares one way or the other?
    • Never mind that by stopping the .xxx domain you've neatly made it impossible to protect minors from exposure to pornography

      Allowing a .xxx domain would've done nothing to protect minors from exposure to pornography.

      I can't imagine why you think it possibly would. The .xxx domain was just another way to make money from a TLD domain rush (quite a good one I suspect, looking at how much sex.com ended up being worth).
      • "I can't imagine why you think it possibly would."

        Naïveté, really. Do-gooders that really have no conceptual skills to realize the logistics of compliance and how badly these initiatives failed in the past.

      • Think "legitimate" porn. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by khasim (1285) <brandioch.conner@gmail.com> on Thursday May 11 2006, @10:24AM (#15308640)
        Allowing a .xxx domain would've done nothing to protect minors from exposure to pornography.
        That's not 100% accurate.

        With a .xxx TLD, the legitimate porn vendors would have a TLD that could be 100% blocked by schools and "nanny" programs. That means that anything they put there would be as "safe" as possible from innocent children accessing it. Any time a kid at school got to a .xxx site, it would be the fault of the vendor making the "nanny" app or the school for not securing its system correctly.

        Now, this would not do anything to "protect" the children from a .com site run in some other country. But partial "protection" is better than no "protection" at all.

        "Protection" is in quotes because this is about filtering and legal liability, not "protecting" children.

        That being said, I don't think another TLD is scalable. Instead, a .xxx.us domain would be better. And so on for each country that wants to do so.
        The .xxx domain was just another way to make money from a TLD domain rush (quite a good one I suspect, looking at how much sex.com ended up being worth).
        Yeah, there would be a rush. But that's just evidence that the TLD system is busted. There wouldn't be as big a rush if it was .xxx.us.
        • This is all very well and good, but it relies on porn sites having 100% compliance with the .xxx TLD -- that is, they have to agree to be in the porn ghetto themselves.

          I don't see that happening. Oh sure, maybe in the US, in the current political climate, we'd see a rush of laws to require "adult" sites to be in .xxx, but I don't think you'd get that in other countries. And in case you haven't trolled around the internet recently, there's a lot of porn out there that doesn't call the Estados Unidos home.

          I'd wager once you had all of the good, wholesome, American style big-boobies-and-sultry-lips porn locked up behind nanny filters, instead you'd just have kids seeing what kind of new and different Japanese tentacle porn they could turn up. Or German schiesse porn -- now that's what I want to see at my local library.

          So what do you do about all the porn from the foreign countries that don't have .xxx laws? Build a giant National Internet Filter? I'm sure Cisco could get right on that, but then I think you've created a solution that's a thousand times worse than the problem. (Which I'm not convinced is that severe anyway -- I saw my share of porn growing up, and some of it was really filthy shit, and I didn't turn into some sort of maniacal sex pervert as a result. Just one sample, but I'm unconvinced of the "danger" of pure porn. Anyway...)

          Everything about the .xxx TLD was stupid. Just dumb. It was a regulation being promulgated by politicians and pundits and a whole lot of other people who either don't know or choose to ignore the complexities of the Internet, and never wanted to think about the enforcement aspects of such a rule.

          Partial protection is NOT better than no protection at all. That's where I fundamentally disagree with you. Any level of protection is just going to cause parents to get lazier, and feel that they can send their kids down to the library to use the internet in lieu of daycare or a babysitter (or actually spending time with them), because someone on TV told them the internet was now "safer." A false sense of security is worse than no security at all.

          • This is all very well and good, but it relies on porn sites having 100% compliance with the .xxx TLD -- that is, they have to agree to be in the porn ghetto themselves.

            No, it doesn't. Reread the post you responded to.

            Solutions don't have to be perfect to be useful.

    • Never mind that by stopping the .xxx domain you've neatly made it impossible to protect minors from exposure to pornography (your ostensible goal)...

      I normally agree with you, but I think you're completely off-base here. I was against .xxx because it was a bad idea. There were two main possibilities: 1) usage was voluntary, or 2) usage was compulsory. The former was silly; I don't recall anyone ever saying that they actually looked forward to using .xxx. The latter was scary; who decides what goes in there? What countries are affected? What's the penalty for deciding to publish a nude photo under .com and being ratted out by an over-zealous watchdog group?

      No, I can't think of a single change from this proposal (other than compelling 90% of the population to add .xxx to a TLD blacklist in their browser - if you don't want to look at porn, you won't mind blacklisting it, ja?). No one wanted it, it couldn't have worked, and it would have caused more problems than it ever could have solved.

      • Re:Well, done, fundies, well done. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by TripMaster Monkey (862126) * on Thursday May 11 2006, @09:24AM (#15308071)

        I think you're misinterpreting me here...I myself am in no way in favor of the .xxx domain proposal, but I'm just pointing out that by opposing it for their own myopic reasons, the fundies shot themselves in the foot.

        I'm actually very grateful the initiative is dead, because of the slippery-slope argument. Sure, we can all agree that the hardcore stuff can be legitimately classified as 'porn', but what about the nude photo you mentioned above? What about nudes in art? What about nudes in medical texts?

        No, the .xxx domain is better off dead, but the reasons against it I cited are not the reasons it was killed. It was killed because the fundies were upset that its creation would legitimize smut, seemingly not aware that it was the killing of said initiative that really did the legitimization.
        • I know it's fun and easy to blame so many things on "the fundies", but would you mind referencing ANY influential Christian group that was lobbying ICANN over the .xxx TLD? And just because The Register says so, that doesn't make it true.
      • Well, it seems that there is no solid ground for most arguments for or against. Actually, what we should do here is not look at the domain ending itself, instead we should consider the implications of conservaties being able to make it into contreversial issue.

        Porn (except the kind that is involuntary on the part of the participants) should not be a controversial issue. The fact that it has been made into one I think is worrisome and tells of the power of the conservative movement in the US to meddle in the

    • Wrong solution to the right problem (Score:5, Interesting)

      by KlaymenDK (713149) on Thursday May 11 2006, @09:20AM (#15308024) Journal
      Tripmaster, I often agree with you, but not this time. I would, but for this one thing:

      Creating a 'red light district' would be a fine idea IF that could limit the 'red light' business to that district. But of course it doesn't -- Joe Boobmaster will have one more domain to register, but will keep right on doing business in the existing TLDs -- so this can't be used to protect minors from exposure (one might even argue an extra (obvious) domain would INCREASE exposure).

      If you can come up with a way to effectively force 'red light business' to stay within their designated TLD, I'd be all for it. Really.

      • If you can come up with a way to effectively force 'red light business' to stay within their designated TLD, I'd be all for it. Really.

        Really? And who would decide what exactly constitutes a 'red light business'? Who would do the effective forcing?

    • How do you want to block a top level domain? At the end, you'll find out that those sites will be accessed via the IP address.
      • >What's so unacceptable about pornographic sites residing in .com, .org, .net , etc domains?

        I often ask myself a similar question. What's wrong with raw sewage flowing down the middle of my street? Defecation is a normal and natural part of everyone's life, why shouldn't it be put on display in public areas? In vast quantities. If someone wants to take a simple stroll without having to deal with the visuals and the smell, well, just screw them.

        Your response is fairly angry and, ironically, makes the

  • 1) establish .xxx domain
    2) pass law forcing all questionable content to use .xxx domains only
    3) block all .xxx domains.

    Although it would have been fun to own goatse.xxx..
    • What makes .xxx a farce is that you would never be able to enforce step 2, and the meaning of 'questionable' is highly subjective. I think ICANN is right to reject the idea of the .xxx TLD, it is a ludicrous idea.

      • Absolutely right. After all, the .xxx domain is all about DNS and IP address lookup, isn't it? There is no mechanism to stop you having pron.com and pron.xxx pointing at the same web server. And, crucially, there's no way of forcing out the pr0n-based services out of the .com or .co.uk domains.

        Why don't we propose a .arg domain for sites depicting violence?

        Or .bom for terrorists?

      • Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)

        by dreamt (14798) on Thursday May 11 2006, @09:39AM (#15308208) Homepage
        My question is this. Why wouldn't a company who knowingly agrees that they are selling adult content NOT want to store their adult content in a .xxx domain. Have some sort of front end-page at their current site, then have that link to .xxx (which parental filtering software would trivially block)?

        As it is, their sites have an enterance page which asks if you are 18 or older, so they acknowledge that they have adult content. This way, it would be easier to filter out the people that they want filtered out. I would imagine that their lives would be easier if they didn't have to worry as much about filtering, just for easier credit-card processing and less worry about people complaining about their children making purchases which they should not have made.

  • United at last! (Score:5, Funny)

    by OpenSourced (323149) on Thursday May 11 2006, @09:08AM (#15307899) Journal
    Faced with opposition from conservative groups and some pornography Web sites

    I guess that if those two can be united against a measure, it's probably a really iditotic measure.

  • Oh no! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Where else will I find porn on the internet now?

  • Utter stupidity... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by drakaan (688386) on Thursday May 11 2006, @09:09AM (#15307907) Homepage Journal
    Well, I suppose that if you ignore the reality that internet porn will continue to exist, then it's a good thing to not have it segregated to a particular TLD.

    I really don't get why "conservative" groups would *not* want it...it would make filtering (for sites following the rules) so trivial it'd be ridiculous.

    For that matter, why are some of the porn outfits against the idea? Aside from worrying about a squatter getting your domain name, what's the downside? It's not like a .xxx domain is going to have some stigma that customers would avoid.

    I just don't get it.

    • I'm guessing their fear is that entire cities or coutries may block .xxx
    • it would make filtering (for sites following the rules) so trivial it'd be ridiculous.

      For that matter, why are some of the porn outfits against the idea?

      Asked and answered.

    • One of the reasons that many conservative groups opposed the TLD was the thought that giving the adult industry a place to do their... sinful business also gave them some measure of... legitimacy. Instead of being able to be firm in saying "we disapprove of what you are doing so please stop" they are forced into an alternative position of position of "we disapprove of what you are doing and if you won't stop... at least do it over there."

      Then again this is in many ways similar to the hold up in the release

      • But we know the .xxx forces porn sites to live there

        Do we? I've seen a lot of people kneejerk against this, saying "what if the government forces this?", but I haven't seen anybody actually propose it. It just seems to be a straw man people are getting hysterical about.

        I'm sure there is a minority that would like this to happen, of course, but there's a world of difference between a minority wanting something to be banned and it actually being banned, especially when there are no concrete plans o

      • Hmm...interesting questions.

        We already have pictures of naked people that aren't sex, and (other than pictures for anatomical purposes), they're typically classified as pornography. Pictures of naked people for people to look at just because they're naked are porn...seems a fair definition.

        I suppose that there would be some edge cases that would cause a lot of discussion classification-wise, but I don't see the definition being too terribly difficult to come to some broad concensus on.

        I imagine that mos

      • That's it in a nutshell. If I post some renaissance artwork featuring ancient european boobies, tell a dick joke on my blog, or say "fuck" in a podcast, how easy would it be to force me to move my entire site to .xxx to "protect the children?" For that matter, would they have to move Slashdot to .xxx because I did this -> (.)(.)?

  • Not to worry (Score:5, Funny)

    by Toreo asesino (951231) on Thursday May 11 2006, @09:15AM (#15307972) Journal
    This can only be good news for the Cook Islands - for all your pr0n domain-name needs, just get a .co.ck [google.co.ck] site instead!

    http://www.big.co.ck/ [big.co.ck] is still available I believe; let the auctioning commence!

  • Who are they kidding? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Billosaur (927319) * <wgrotherNO@SPAMoptonline.net> on Thursday May 11 2006, @09:15AM (#15307977) Journal

    A huge campaign against .xxx has seen ICANN's public comment board for the registry flooded in recent days by hundreds of posters with little or no understanding of the .xxx bid, but all stating their opposition to its approval. The same campaign has been raging for months, with one ICANN Board member sent threatening letters due to an assumed bias for the registry.

    Sounds like a typical day on Slashdot... but seriously, everyone's so concerned about the problem of pornography and had to limit access to it, and yet here is an attractive solution, with very little downside, and of course the fanatics are opposed. They want porn banned entirely, and aren't willing to even see a half-measure put in place to curb and control it. THey want to throw the baby out with the bath water, all because their "morality" is somehow superior to mine. Well, last time I checked, the Constitution of the United States gives me the right to decide for myself what I want to look at and see, and also allows me the right to do it without fear of persecution by the Government or my fellow citizens.

    Not everyone believes what the fanatics believe and every individual is entitled to his/her own opinion. And while your opinion might be different than mine, I don't get to foist mine off on you and visa versa. So the fundamentalist s need to go home and play with their toys in private and leave me alone.

    What happened behind the scenes was that the US administration told ICANN chairman Vint Cerf and head Paul Twomey that it did not approve of the domain, but due to the difficult political position that it would put both ICANN and the US government in were it to be seen to be directing internet policy (against its publicly stated "hands off" policy), there has been a carefully co-ordinated effort to kill the registry through delay.

    Ok, who sees this for the FUD it is? Of course the US Government is directing things at ICANN; they've been basically getting ICANN to thumb its nose at the rest of the world's concerns for years. Why should now be any different? They undoubtedly made it clear that this wasn't going to happen, and Cerf and Twomey then had to find some way to kill the thing gracefully, rather than coming out and saying "the US made us do it" and face the wrath of Congress. And so the slow, lingering death.

    ICANN gets less relevant every month it seems.


    • Sounds like a typical day on Slashdot... but seriously, everyone's so concerned about the problem of pornography and had to limit access to it, and yet here is an attractive solution, with very little downside, and of course the fanatics are opposed.


      Actually there are many of us who are more concerned about free speech and access to information than the "problem" of pornography who are opposed to the idea.
      • Let's try a little experiment: replace ".xxx" with ".abortion". A majority of Americans are against abortion, so it seems like a good idea to segregate information about it from the rest of the Internet. Now, who is more likely to be anti-.abortion - fundamentalists or pro-free-speech groups? Doesn't the second group have at least as much legitimate complaint against the idea as the first?

        Ok, take the analogy to the next step: .whitesupremacy. I don't think a great majority of the planet likes the idea an

  • Conservatives vs. liberals? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jopet (538074) on Thursday May 11 2006, @09:22AM (#15308045) Journal
    In many discussions it seems that this is getting turned into a "conservatives vs. liberals" discussion or similar. I do not really see why.

    It seems there are both good sides and bad sides to having a XXX domain, but many of them do not have to do anything with the question of whether one hates or not pornographic web sites.

    My main reason for not finding the .xxx tld domain a good idea after all is that I cannot see how one would ever be able to come up with rules about what should or should not belong there, in a world with such diverse opinions about what is sexual/inappropriate/pronographic/etc and in a world with such diverse laws about pornography.

    So remind me: what *good* was this TLD supposed to be again?
    • In many discussions it seems that this is getting turned into a "conservatives vs. liberals" discussion or similar. I do not really see why.

      Why? Because the whole issue only exists because of a division in US Republican Party internal politics. And since the Republicans control the US Congress and White House, they have a certain amount of influance over ICANN and were pushing this issue one way or the other.
  • ...in zoning regulations, and accidentally allowing them to pop up anywhere without restriction.

  • Damn! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rob T Firefly (844560) on Thursday May 11 2006, @09:24AM (#15308075) Homepage Journal
    I was all excited about buying an xxx domain and putting no porn on it, thereby breaking the system.

  • In many ways the .xxx doman was bs (Score:3, Insightful)

    by zappepcs (820751) on Thursday May 11 2006, @09:28AM (#15308108) Journal
    As stated, it is a foothold for censorship... of the worst kind, and that is because it will be totally ineffectual, cannot be enforced any better than any other pornography law. Worse, it would make some groups feel they are getting something done, and soon there would be other domains where this or that is supposed to be neatly filed away.

    The ONLY real answer is sensible sex industry cooperation and self censorship. I don't mean they should take their websites down, but they should open their site with a uniform warning page allowing the site to be filtered thereafter, or other such methods. By following rules that make them nice netizens, they will effectively allow the law enforcement agencies to track those that are not playing nice... and it IS the ones that don't play nice that we all want hammered into dust. Pop-ups, spam, pop-unders, hijacking... all these things need to go away, and if legitimate porn sites played nice, it would soon become apparent how to attack the problem from a legal standpoint.

    Not having the .xxx domain is the right thing to do as it would only allow the same result as above, and not achieve anything but allow ICAAN or others to make more money off of the porn industry... sigh

  • I'm a fundie and a social conservative (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MikeRT (947531) on Thursday May 11 2006, @09:33AM (#15308149) Homepage

    And I sure as hell support this domain [blindmindseye.com]. Why? It's the only way to let us conservative Christians block porn that won't get struck down by the courts.

    I'm tired of the pornographers whining about the "ghettoization of their free speech." Why don't we just let them sell their goods in the kids' section of a book store? Pornography is not sexual speech. Should it be outlawed? No, each adult has to work on their own morality and forcing them won't make the right moral changes to fix society.

    Let's call a spade a spade. Pornography is only art if you consider a picture of the virgin Mary painted in elephant dung to be art. I consider Playboy's photos to be low class art. A typical porn site is not even remotely art or expressive except in the lowest, most attavistic sense. There are two good reasons for not banning porn: we don't want judges and legislators legally defining what is and isn't art and it's a private moral issue that cannot be stopped by the stroke of a pen.

    • No, each adult has to work on their own morality and forcing them won't make the right moral changes to fix society.

      That says it all. The hallmark of liberalism isn't that we lack moral values, it's that we just don't feel right about shoving them down everyone's throat.
    • "Pornography is only art if you consider a picture of the virgin Mary painted in elephant dung to be art."

      In Africa, there are many tribes whose livelihood depended on elephant dung. They would build their houses with it, and it moved into the realm of a holy substance. The concept behind the virgin Mary painted in elephant dung is the merging of two religious icons that clash horribly. It could be a commentary on missionary work. It's conceptual art, so the idea behind it is a very large part of the ex

  • Let's see.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Churla (936633) on Thursday May 11 2006, @09:38AM (#15308198)
    The conservatives don't want an easy to access way to find lots of porn. They want to keep it tucked out of sight.

    The porn industry doesn't want to be partially forced into one little cubbyhole where they can be easily targeted and persecuted for the services and products they provide. They want to stay out of the limelight of persecution.

    The geeks know that this is useless as it will be impossible to enforce (just like ONLY non profits being .org or only net based businesses being .net or only businesses in a certain country using that countries extension (i.e. .us and .uk for example))

    Is there ANYBODY who actually has a good reason for this to exist?
  • There's already a dedicated top level domain for porn: .com The ICANN should put a stop to all those wise asses trying to make legitimate, non-porn related .com sites that have popped up throughout the sea of quality sex media.

  • ICANN adopts more specific .FUK and .SUK (Score:4, Funny)

    by SlappyBastard (961143) on Thursday May 11 2006, @09:40AM (#15308222)
    ICANN today announced the introduction of two new TLDs: .FUK and .SUK.

    The announcement coincides with ICANN's move to dismiss the introduction of .XXX.

    An ICANN spokesman commented off the record, "In truth, we should be more honest. XXX indicates we're hiding something."

    He added, "That can't be on the open and transparent internet. We feel that Dot-FUK and Dot-SUK represent what everone is looking for, just like all Dot-ORGs are not-for-profit groups, right? Know what I mean? Say no more."

    ICANN also expressed interest in adding .GAY so "straight dudes and closet dudes needn't worry."

    ICANN's next step coming in June is a decision on .PERV, whose supporters hope can be used to herd all the child molesters into one spot.

    The move is opposed by the producers of Dateline: NBC, who say it could destroy their growing cottage industry of filming pedophiles being confronted.

    ICANN is believed to be leaning toward adopting .PERV, as all things on the internet belong in nifty containers marked accurately.

  • Hmmm (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Sv-Manowar (772313) on Thursday May 11 2006, @09:47AM (#15308278) Homepage Journal
    It's a shame that some of the biggest influences who were lobbying against it from inside the adult industry were domain owners who did not want to lose their most valuable .com assets. That's the problem with business being done over the internet, it seems as if there is no real loyalty to others in the same business as you, more of a dog-eat-dog and selfish attitude, which one day may well contribute to the downfall of the current widespread availability of porn on the net which makes so many people money.
  • The problem is this. If you create a top-level domain specifically for porn, you are admitting that porn exists. And unfortunately, there are too many people who have a problem with that.

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