Why the .XXX Domain is a Bad Idea That Won't Die 322
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?
Heh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, it's labeled all right. About the time you see a writhing vulva on your screen, and a mega-penis thrusting repeatedly into it using the latest in animated gif technology, you may notice a small blurb of text that says "Please proceed only if you are 18 years of age or older".
No more tlds please... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's starting to get very complicated to rely on URLs and the amount of money you have to spend to keep your companys name in your hands is ridiculous.
bad idea (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm for it. I think. (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess I just argued for both sides of the equation. I think I'm getting fence splinters.
Lets just get this straight (Score:1, Insightful)
You've got two errors in the headline alone. 1. Porn is never a bad idea. 2. Porn will never die.
I think I represent the majority (Score:4, Insightful)
This seems to be rooted solely in politics and the money thereof. Let's leave this one to the politicians, knowing when everything is said and done, more is said than done.
Just my $.02
sexual repression (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just do it already (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's face it. www.whitehouse.com was one of the all-time great name squatting done. For the longest time, that was a porn site. How many kids and unsuspecting adults stumbled onto that one in the early days?
I'm no screaming conservative by any stretch of the imagination. I lean a lot further towards liberalism than I ever though I would, mostly because I am tired of religion affecting our laws so much, and personal freedoms being stripped from us left and right.
But I don't see any harm in setting these websites up in a much easier to control/block segment of the websphere. And many of these webmasters would love it if it was that much easier to block content by parents. Just think of all the credit card charges to crap companies that supposedly verify age because a person has a CC #? Sheesh, I had one at 16!
At the very least, I could see killing 50% of the pop-ups I run into, simply by blocking all
Besides, think of all the business that it would stir up for a while. All those porn banners having to be redone! hehehe
Re:Why not? (Score:2, Insightful)
Damn the puritans (Score:5, Insightful)
The Internet is not a playground for children. It's not a fun Christian diversion. It's a network for anyone and everyone to connect to one another electronically. Let's not turn it into Disneyland or Utah. The last thing society needs is FCC-like regulations on everything they do online. Besides, the responsibility in raising children shouldn't fall into the hands of people than don't have any. Parents need to police this issue, not parents AND single individuals.
The "save the children" argument is just a cheap way to achieve the anti-porn agenda. Don't be fooled. It has nothing to do with kids. Trust me, they'll have pre-marital sex and get each other pregnant without online porn. It's been happening for 1,000's of years and will happen for a thousand more. Humans will do what they're biologically designed to do. Legislation can't stop that.
It CAN, however, open the door for more censorship-inspired legislation. How long until the FCC steps in and begins to fine people that use profanity online? I don't think I'm exaggerating my fears. It's already ridiculous that you can't say "Shit" on the radio. After all, how many kids listen to Larry King Live?
Censorship of any kind is fascism. It doesn't matter what cause it's attached to. Today it's porn. Tomorrow it's anti-Americanism. Just because you may not agree with porn, doesn't mean that laws should be passed to control it. Look away. Install commercially available filtering products. Don't let your kids surf unsupervised. For that matter, don't leave your kids unsupervised near ANYTHING you don't want them around. Just don't ask big brother to watch over you. That fucks us all.
Re:Helpful in the long run (Score:3, Insightful)
The breasts are for feeding children. Somehow, everyone has forgotten that they are just food dispensers. The anti-porn movement has begun to influence common sensibilities. "Moral values" groups would rather have mothers feed their child formula (much less healthy), than risk exposing a nipple in public. This has got to stop.
Porn will eventually broaden to include anything "unpopular," the future definition of obscenity. When people begin to cover naked statues, it's gone too far. When they become hysterical over a breast, it's gone too far. Anyone who believes online porn is the biggest world problem worth tackling, should be shot for their irrational beliefs. If you hate your body, kill yourself.
Re:Per the proposal they are _required_ to move (Score:5, Insightful)
The Europeans will be saying breasts, even full-frontal nakedness, isn't necessarily porn,
The Americans can't tell the difference between even partial nakedness and sex, so will force half of .eu to be under .xxx instead
The Muslims will continue to he shocked at all the women not wearing Burkhas.
Re:Why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
RTFA. Or were you just gunning to get first post?
No one wants .xxx except the registrars, who would sell .xxx domains, speculators would would buy them to resell to companies defensively. Big companies would be forced to buy the .xxx rather than let one of the scumbags set up a site on yahoo.xxx, etc. Companies already buy .info, .biz, .net, .org and usually just park or redirect from them. There won't be any less porn on .com. It's just a complete scam.
Re:Why not? (Score:3, Insightful)
All Top-level Domains are a Bad Idea (Score:3, Insightful)
This might be controversial but I think top-level domains - .com, .edu, .gov, .org, .net - are all a bad idea. It's a bad user interface. I understand the technical reasons why they exist but technology shouldn't be an excuse for a broken interface. Here are several reasons why top-levels suck.
1. They are a limited number of categories that will never satisfy everybody. The basic ones seem obvious - .org, .com, .gov, .edu, .net - but really that's not enough. In Australia we also have .asn.au and .id.au. Even that's not enough. The .xxx top-level is an attempt to corral all pornographic domains into a single top-level domain. Why stop there? Who not create .religion and .news as well? I'll tell you why not; it's a slippery slope and it'll never end. Top-level domains are attempting to use taxonomy to attach metadata to the URL and it's doomed to failure because there will never be sufficient variety.
2. It leads to cross-domain squatting. The classic example was whitehouse.com - a porn site - which caught unwary travellers who were looking for whitehouse.gov. The converse example is a company like Ebay who needs .ebay.com but what about .ebay.org? It isn't registered and Ebay is never going to be given .ebay.org, so it's stupid for the DNS to permit it as an option.
3. The geographical breakdown is equally useless. Lots of Australia companies register .com domains because it's "cooler" which means the geographical taxonomy is immediately broken. It also means an international company has to register several dozen (160+) second-level domains (.com, .co.uk, .com.au, .co.jp, .com.ca, etc). It would make much more sense to browse http://ebay/au/ [ebay] because then Ebay has an international presence. Apple has the right idea here because that's exactly what they do; all their geographical top-levels redirect to http://apple.com/xy/ [apple.com].
4. The user shouldn't need to care. Why should a newbie to the Internet be required to type .com after the name for companies, .edu after the name for universities, etc? How would they even know? Especially given point #2 that typically there isn't going to be any variation; only one of the combinations will be valid. In fact, most browsers automatically append .com because they know the user is going to type "ebay" rather than "ebay.com". But that's fricking useless for everybody who isn't in the USA (ie, most of us).
5. Some companies straddle the line and don't fit neatly into either category. An example in Australia is Telstra - are they .com.au or .net.au? Are they .net.au when they provide network services but .com.au when they provide non-network services? In fact the distinction is as clear as mud: Telstra has both .net.au and .com.au and they mush them together as they feel like. It makes a mess of the browser security because you can be on telstra.com.au one minute and the next link will take you to telstra.net.au. User. Interface. Disaster.
Now you can disagree with some or all of those points. Hell, Slashdot seems to be full of nitpickers who delight in pointing out grammatical mistakes, so I wouldn't be surprised if somebody said "but without TLD our CEO will be OMG WTF, LOL". But ignore the technical details - they're just problems to solve - and look at the big picture: top-level domains are a broken user interface and no amount of patching will fix it. It was OK as the prototype but because it's the prototyp
Nope (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem isn't filtering content. The problem is that domain names are a terrible way to do it (see RFC 3675 [faqs.org]), and there are better ways of doing it (see PICS [w3.org]).
As for a voluntary .xxx, the public and legislators will misunderstand its limitations. It's practically begging for bad law. It's better not to set it up in the first place.
Simple reason (Score:5, Insightful)
Bad argument (Score:3, Insightful)
Explain me with the advent of search engine, how is it difficult for any kids to :
* type in www.google.com
* enter free porn image (or free porn video)
* clicks on "I am 18 and want to see the preview video"
I am sorry, but that argument do not hold any shred of water. Unless you are speaking of mentally disabled children, if they want to search for porn, they will find it whether it is a
Now for the rest of your argument, I agree you can't force the rest of the world onto it. You could try to force sales of subscription in the US for porn to only comes from
Re:Why not? (Score:3, Insightful)
There are plenty of porn sites that are at the
Yet, if a
If I Had a Hammer... (Score:3, Insightful)
That's perhaps a nice wish. However, assuming it will go away is another thing.
Government is not simply a world marketplace that offers ideas and if no one buys, it restocks the shelves with other ideas. We give government the special power of force that we do not give shopkeepers wherein if people disagree with the ideas it is offering, it can take action. The more vague that action, the more subject to the individual whim of an individual attempting to enforce or, just as likely, to exploit such powers.
To pick an obvious and somewhat overused example, the bad ideas of the Nazi movement were indeed rejected by the people, but it's a stretch to say "therefore one should not worry about governments getting an occasional wrong idea because these things tend to work out". It took time to notice the problem in that case, and very bad things happened in the interim. By the time a problem was noticed, it took was not easy to fix. One cannot simply fast forward to the outcome without seeing the time in between and say "it was a bad idea and eventually no one bought it".
McCarthyism in the US played out with somewhat similar shape, although fortunately far less cost in human lives. But by similar shape, I mean that it was a kind of insidious idea from the start, and it crept like a cancer with people not seeing what a bad idea it was until it was widespread and it started to impact so many people that it simply could not be ignored.
The notion that the government should be able to push things "harmful to minors" into this ghetto is like giving a big gun to anyone who has government authority to act but not telling them who to aim it at. Harmful to minors is not a statement like "boils at 100 degrees" that can be objectively tested. What protections does it offer to people who have no intent to harm minors and are simply operating in an area that raises questions.
Some things that have been classified by at least some people as harmful to minors within our lifetime include sex education, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth [imdb.com], and the teaching of evolution. Will we expect to find the teaching of safe sex practices only in the .xxx domain? What about climatechange.xxx or darwin.xxx?
And that's only in the US,
the supposed model of freedom. How will such a domain be construed in countries around the
world that have more conservative points of view. Will we see tjmaxx.xxx? barnesandnoble.xxx?
mit.edu.xxx?
The problem with "parental" government is that people often naively assume that it it has a brain at all, and also that the brain will be applied uniformly. In fact, what is more likely is the kind of thing you see on cop shows all the time where cops come to a restaurant owner who won't give them the info they want and they say "I'm sure you wouldn't want the health inspector in here all over you." So the guy caves and gives up the information. The public isn't served by the health code law because in the end, the law is more useful (to those TV cops, at least) or some undisclosed purpose than it is for actually making sure things get cooked right.
And the problem is that the undisclosed purpose is flexible and varying. The whole war on terror is going the same way. If the government can make "being a person" (or at least, all of its aspects) sufficiently illegal, then there's always at least some club handy for threatening to arrest a person if he gets out of hand, whatever the enforcer thinks is out of hand. And at that point, there's no freedom left. That's an analogy that Slashdotters should understand: It's like software patents. Overly broad. Overly vague. Applied inconsistently. Difficult to defend. And offering no really safe avenue of behavior. And that means no one can safely develop anything. They can just hope they aren't singled out for enforcement.
Right, and .net is free? (Score:3, Insightful)
As far as I know, only
So, basically, registering a
There have been technical arguments against
So skip the regulations. (Score:3, Insightful)
And you aren't exaggerating your fears, really, but you are having a knee-jerk reaction to one immediate assumption. It's true, this article makes that assumption, but you can still stop frothing at the mouth and try to look at this sanely. You are not required to be a corporation, or participate in any kind of commerce (other than your registration fees) to own a
The only one I know of that's actually enforced is
Re:Simple reason (Score:3, Insightful)
So you already know the exact domain of every link on every page you look at, and you know the address of every linked image, and you always check the domain of every link before you click on it, and you've never been redirected or had a popup?
You must be unique.
Re:I'm for it. I think. (Score:5, Insightful)
If they come across a porn site "by accident" amid their travel, I considering it part of a process called "growing up". Anyone with anecdotal evidence of some random teenager's life being "consumed" by porn is hearby and forever adviced to move to Saudi Arabia. They love you there.
Re:Why not? --- Precedent (Score:3, Insightful)
I fear that once we start going down that path, then other forms of partitioning will become more palatable. One can construct an argument that political speech should be in a seperate TLD so that domain registrants can register as potential lobbyists. To make it more attractive you make the domain registration free for "non-lobbyists" (however that gets defined) and a sliding fee scale for "lobbyists."
I think the whole expansion of the DNS TLD's was a bad idea.
Re:I'm for it. I think. (Score:3, Insightful)
.XXX is better than .COM (Score:3, Insightful)
Adding
The 'net was raped when corporations were allowed to turn it into a vast wasteland of advertising, marketing, and surveillance.
Adding a designated porn area is just the natural progression of things.
Who would decide. (Score:3, Insightful)