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ICANN Rejects .XXX Top Level Domain, Again
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Mar 30, 2007 08:01 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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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..;)
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."
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
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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.
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So, in the end, there no
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And that's a problem because?
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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.)
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Well, it's certainly true that many if not most Christians are fine on this issue, but
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Can we say, sometimes slippery slopes are very real? GP's scenario seems not only reasonable but almost inevitable.
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Having your movie rated is optional (and obviously
hasn't caused any reduction in the production of
porn movies!): http://www.filmratings.com/questions.htm#Q6 [filmratings.com]
I'm not sure what the reference to organic foods is
about... Obviously you're not allowed to
And who classifies this stuff? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, if we did get the
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Because finding porn on the internet is currently soooo difficult.
More drama plz (Score:3, Funny)
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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)
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?
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There's no obvious solution. You could do it by lottery between the holders of the current .org/.com/.net domain, or start a new registry as a free-for-all or one of several other ways.
I think it would be worth it, but it's never going to happen.
I don'
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Yep, because everyone with a
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Speak for yourself. It's just that the American method for handing out domain names didn't have any criteria attached to it. To get a
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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
ICANN answers to no one. (Score:2, Funny)
So is this to say 9 of the 14 support porn? Or i
Romans (Score:5, Funny)
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Who decides (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah right (Score:3, Insightful)
Erecting XXX domain faces stiff opposition (Score:5, Funny)
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RFC 3675 (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3675.txt [ietf.org]
Time to stop flogging this dead horse (Score:2)
Now, do I put that comment on www.blog.bestiality, www.blog.necrophilia, or www.blog.sado-masichism? Life would perhaps be easier with www.blog.xxx
I'm for it (Score:2)
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
Why label adult content (Score:2, Redundant)
If the goal is to protect children?
Rather than argue over what is and what isn't pornography, why not just setup a .kids domain which is explicitly for children?
That way, those seeking to register a .kids domain would have the onus of proving their
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.
The interweb police (Score:2, Insightful)