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ICANN Rejects .XXX Top Level Domain, Again
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Mar 30, 2007 09:01 AM
from the third-time-is-the-charm dept.
from the third-time-is-the-charm dept.
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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[+]
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."
[+]
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?
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Technology: New Vote on .xxx Internet Address Nears 214 comments
Billosaur writes "ICANN is once more set to vote on the creation of the .xxx Internet address. Though the proposal has been voted down by ICANN's board twice before the group behind those previous proposals resubmitted after they 'agreed to hire independent organizations to monitor porn sites' compliance with the new rules, which would be developed by a separate body called the International Foundation for Online Responsibility.' Once more the proposal has led to pornographers and religious groups finding themselves on the same side of an issue, the porn industry worried that the domain would lead to government controls, the religious groups worried it would make access too easy and allow porn to expand even further onto the Internet."
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Good news for porn companies (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Good news for porn companies (Score:5, Funny)
Fixed that for ya..;)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
An important thing to note (Score:5, Insightful)
Not quite... (Score:4, Insightful)
It sounds like not everyone in the adult industry was happy about the domain.
Actually, it sounds like, this time around, there were more people against it than for it, but the people against it didn't really find a consensus on why they opposed it, only that they did. Which is interesting. At least this time around it doesn't look like a case of "the Republicans told us to reject this."
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
There's nothing preventing you (or any industry / company / entity) from using
If you, as a content provider, wish to allow people access to a TLD that doesn't exist, you need only write a simple application that points to a different set of root servers. Your new list would likely include the "standard" root servers *after* your set of root servers had been checked.
It's not like thi
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I would think they wouldn't like the TLD themselves (the content providers) because it would make them just that little bit easier to pick out.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:An important thing to note (Score:5, Insightful)
Regulation and control. If there was an .xxx domain, it wouldn't be long for the Christian* Firewall Network (CFN?) to spring up trying to block it everywhere, and there would be demands to block it at ISPs, etc. It wouldn't be long before legislation was passed requiring all adult content to be "moved" to this domain. (Of course, we're just thinking of the children.)
The mis-perception is that all porn would somehow magically be labeled .xxx, and people would naively think like you did: it's easy to find and easy to block.
Meanwhile, the technological reality is that such blocking would do nothing to stop porn originating from domains outside of the U.S. It also would not stop dotted decimal addresses from working. But because there would be this new "law" requiring porn to be hosted in the .xxx domain, the CFN idiots would be confused as to why their teenaged sons could still access porn even though it was supposed to be blocked, and would demand more regulations to stop this "illegal porn".
Voluntary industry classifications have almost always turned into regulations (movie and video game ratings, light truck emissions, organic foods, etc.) It's just that on the internet, that idea doesn't work worth a damn, so why encourage it?
(*Feel free to replace 'Christian' with the intolerant fundamental religious idiots of your choice.)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And who classifies this stuff? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, if we did get the
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As someone in the adult industry, I do agree that those are upsides to the .xxx domain. The downsides that concern me would be:
1. whether we would be in some way coerced to use this domain exclusively (actually quite easy to do if the US and UK governments (being the mo
More drama plz (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The horses have left, who cares about the barn.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Having a
ISP's and government authorities will NEVER be able to move porn off of
All of the
Re:The horses have left, who cares about the barn. (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Not all TLDs are redundant (Score:5, Insightful)
The "generic" top level TLDs however (.com,
Personally, I think the answer is not to *abolish* TLDs, but to make them *optional*, and abolish only
But how would you implement it - how do you reconcile those domains if different people own them, who gets the new TLD when they are amalgamated?
Parent
Between a rock and a hard place (Score:4, Insightful)
We have international treaties on things like trade and maritime law but something on pornography is unlikely because it's a moral issue. What is viewed as harmless erotica in one country will get you executed in another. Anyone trying to get the
Romans (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah right (Score:3, Insightful)
Erecting XXX domain faces stiff opposition (Score:5, Funny)
RFC 3675 (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3675.txt [ietf.org]
The inverse always seemed more likely to work (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's put it this way, if you were starting a club, would you A) make the club undesirable for people to come to and then try to force them into it, or B) make the club a place where people wanted to be and then only allow in the people you wanted.
Well,
But a
Of course, the companies pushing
And the moral crusaders prefer
Now, that "gatekeeper who monitors" bit about
(If you're really going to pursue porn filtering at the network infrastructure level, that is. Personally I think the whole idea is stupid. I'm just saying that if you're going to do it, isn't
Beware this ploy (Score:3, Interesting)
Due to the nature of random processes, even the exact same population that has the exact same opinions will have different voting outcomes on each vote. Now, if you take just one vote on an issue, it works out in the end; some things get overvoted, some things get undervoted, some things are enacted that "shouldn't" be and some things aren't enacted that "should" be. (Also, it's really hard to know which is which, so resist the temptation to point to your favorite close election and hold it up as an example; you can't prove that the election was 51% instead of 49%, it may well have been 51% instead of 54%.)
By holding votes over and over again, and taking it if it passes even once, you secretly lower the pass threshold. Add in some simple, traditional games for keeping certain groups out (like polling times or other things) and you can muck with another couple of percentage points, and you can keep trying until you get it right.
Unfortunately, there's no real way to prevent this; people simply need to be aware on some level that this is cheating.