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ICANN Finally Rejects .xxx Domain
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu May 11, 2006 10:03 AM
from the at-least-it's-over dept.
from the at-least-it's-over dept.
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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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 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
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)
Parent
Re:Well, done, fundies, well done. (Score:5, Insightful)
Allowing a
I can't imagine why you think it possibly would. The
Parent
Think "legitimate" porn. (Score:4, Insightful)
With a
Now, this would not do anything to "protect" the children from a
"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
Parent
Re:Think "legitimate" porn. (Score:4, Insightful)
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
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
Everything about the
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.
Parent
Re:Well, done, fundies, well done. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Well, done, fundies, well done. (Score:5, Interesting)
I think you're misinterpreting me here...I myself am in no way in favor of the
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
Parent
Wrong solution to the right problem (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Good (Score:5, Funny)
2) pass law forcing all questionable content to use
3) block all
Although it would have been fun to own goatse.xxx..
Re:Good (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:Good (Score:4, Informative)
1. Pass a law...
Internet != United States of America
Problem != Solved
Parent
United at last! (Score:5, Funny)
I guess that if those two can be united against a measure, it's probably a really iditotic measure.
Utter stupidity... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Not to worry (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.big.co.ck/ [big.co.ck] is still available I believe; let the auctioning commence!
Who are they kidding? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Conservatives vs. liberals? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
So remind me: what *good* was this TLD supposed to be again?
Re:Conservatives vs. liberals? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Damn! (Score:5, Funny)
In many ways the .xxx doman was bs (Score:3, Insightful)
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
I'm a fundie and a social conservative (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Let's see.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Is there ANYBODY who actually has a good reason for this to exist?
ICANN adopts more specific .FUK and .SUK (Score:4, Funny)
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)
Understandable but still wrong (Score:4, Insightful)