ICANN Rejects .XXX Top Level Domain, Again

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.'"

An important thing to note

[jimstapleton]

Is that classification does not equal regulation. It can be used to assist regulation, but usually classification serves a lot of good purposes outside of regulation. That being said, I don't know that .xxx would be the only place the target material could be put (if it were, then it would be regulation), but honestly, unlike a '.adv' (advertisement), I would think they would like the TLD themselves (the content providers) because it would make them just that little bit easier to pick out.

The horses have left, who cares about the barn....

[ip_freely_2000]

...door?

Having a .XXX domain would make a simplistic filters only effective for simple people. I doubt a porn domain owner is going to drop chickswithhorses.com and move everything over to chickswithhorses.xxx. He'll just use redirection and have two front doors to his domain.

ISP's and government authorities will NEVER be able to move porn off of .com. There's simply too may jurisdictions out there in our wonderful world.

All of the .XXX media attention and effort seems pointless to me.

Between a rock and a hard place

[Anonymous Coward]

In the absence of an international treaty governing pornography, any decision to create a .xxx domain would probably violate the laws in one country and the civil rights in another. Avoiding the problem was a wise choice.

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 .xxx domain is just trying to get someone else to do their dirty work for them. Sorry dudes.

Not quite...

[brennanw]

From the article:

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.

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:An important thing to note

[mwvdlee]

Correcting a typo:

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.

Yeah right

[bytesex]

Because having .com .net .org and .museum means you're _not_ in the content regulation business.

Not all TLDs are redundant

[brunes69]

Country-level TLDs are significant. For example, I KNOW that http://www.toyota.ca/ [toyota.ca] takes me to Toyota Canada's page, while http://www.toyota.com/ [toyota.com] takes me to the US page. Using country-level TLDs for this purpose is correct and should be encouraged - it is a lot better than the alternatives like having a stupid URL like http://www.hyundaicanada.com/ [hyundaicanada.com], or forcefully re-directing people based on their geographic location (what if I am using a proxy? Or what if I want information on the American prices for comparison?).

The "generic" top level TLDs however (.com, .net, and .org), are indeed irrelevant.

Personally, I think the answer is not to *abolish* TLDs, but to make them *optional*, and abolish only .com / .net / .org. Then a company doesn't have to register 3 domains, and they only have to register country-level domains in contries where they actually have a presence.

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?

Re:An important thing to note

[plover]

Where is the downside?

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.)

Re:Erecting XXX domain faces stiff opposition

[Anonymous Coward]

C'mon, at least cite your source [arstechnica.com].

Re:An important thing to note

[XxtraLarGe]

(*Feel free to replace 'Christian' with the intolerant fundamental religious idiots of your choice.)

I hope you realize the irony of your comments. You could have easily made the same point WITHOUT insulting anybody, and your argument would have been that much stronger. As it is now, when I look at your post the most striking thing is intolerance on your part...

The interweb police

[Grashnak]

Um, so who gets to decide what should be age restricted? What age should it be? Why should I submit my content to the demands of your arbitrary rules? Who exactly is going to US banks not to do business with a website that refuses to participate in this scheme? And of course, who gets to decide what kind of content should be age restricted? I, for example, think that no one under the age of 95 should be exposed to websites promoting crackpot extremist christian views like intelligent design. Can we add that to your list? Enquiring minds wanna know.

Re:An important thing to note

[SquareVoid]

The Slippery Slope Fallacy stops being a fallacy when the person arguing the point provides evidence that there is a slippery slope. In his argument, he stated that movies/video games/emmissions/organic food all started off as voluntary labels and ended up regulated. I don't know how true this is (I always thought movie/game ratings were voluntary) but it is left as an exercise to the reader to prove that the slippery slopes given were in fact false. If they end up as true, then he has a valid point.

And who classifies this stuff?

[Rob T Firefly]

The other, and I feel even more important, issue is.. who gets to decide what "porn" is? The definition of what is and isn't acceptable changes from year to year, country to country, state to state, and household to household. People have been arguing over what's acceptable for (literally) ages, and it's definitely not going to be solved anytime soon.

So, if we did get the .xxx domain, what has to be moved there? One person's obscenity is another person's fine art, medical diagram, or even religious iconography. Everything from Gray's Anatomy to cultural studies to the contents of any art museum could end up sequestered to .xxx because someone somewhere doesn't want the kiddies to accidentally see naughty bits.

The inverse always seemed more likely to work

[billtom]

The inverse (a domain exclusively for child appropriate sites) always seemed much more practical and effective to me. Let's call it .kids.

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, .xxx is that undesirable club that you have to force people in to. The pornographers don't want to be in it because they know that it will get filtered out at a lot of places. So it cuts into their business.

But a .kids domain, is the place where everyone who produces child appropriate material will want to be because they know that a lot of parents will filter out everything but .kids. So you set up .kids and put in place a gatekeeper who monitors to make sure that only the material you want is in it.

Of course, the companies pushing .xxx want to run .xxx and not .kids because running .kids will be a lot more work (with the content monitoring and all) so they won't make as much profit.

And the moral crusaders prefer .xxx to .kids because their ultimate goal isn't just to prevent children from seeing pornography. Their goal is to prevent you from having any access to pornography. And that will be easier if it is all in one place.

Now, that "gatekeeper who monitors" bit about .kids will admittedly be challenging (I would suggest putting librarians in charge of that, they have experience with classifying material and setting up child-appropriate sections). But it won't be that challenging because companies would have a very strong incentive to follow the rules. So isn't .kids a much better idea?

(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 .kids better.)

Re:Not quite...

[tverbeek]

The reason there's no consensus about why it was rejected is because there are so many different reasons, coming from entirely different perspectives. People in the porn industry didn't like it because using it would require submitting to regulation from the registry administrators, and because not using it might open them up to criminalization. Social conservatives didn't like it because they felt it would legitimize porn. Porn consumers didn't like it because they wouldn't be able to get their fix at work. Free speech advocates didn't like it because it could lead to laws putting a chilling effect on non-porn expression in the other TLDs. And pragmatists didn't like it because it was such an obviously unworkable proposal that would have no practical benefit. Granted, there are people in each of these populations who feel differently, but with a deal-killing reason for just about any ideological perspective, it doesn't surprise me that this keeps getting turned down.