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.'"

Re:An important thing to note

[Luscious868]

I would think it's a win / win for all involved. Those who want to get to adult content would have an easier time finding it and by the same token those who want to filter it out would have time doing that as well. Where is the downside?

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

[Cerberus7]

See, that's why I think TLDs are redundant. There was a proposal some time ago to abandon TLDs, and restructure DNS. Since nobody seems to care about what a TLD means anymore, aside from perhaps the US Gov't still using .gov, why keep up with the charade? .com, .net, .org seem to have very little relevance to the content of the actual sites.

Who decides

[sskinnider]

ICANN was right to reject the .xxx TLD. If it had been implemented, we would see a rash of laws designed to utilize by classifying not only porn, but other material deemed objectionable by just about anyone. These days you cannot use medical terminology without offending someone. Congress would start mandating that all objectionable material be moved to .xxx and they would likely be the body that creates the rules by which objectionable material is classified, WebMD would soon have to be moved to .xxx because they extensively use the words vagina and penis.

Re:An important thing to note

[owlnation]

I would think it's a win / win for all involved. Those who want to get to adult content would have an easier time finding it and by the same token those who want to filter it out would have time doing that as well. Where is the downside?

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 most uptight about the adult industry) force the credit card companies not to accept payments from other domains - they already use this kind of pressure to effectively ban some types of fetish material)

2. the domain name landrush - a lot of us have spent a lot of time building up brands only to have some squatter scoop up the equivalent on the xxx domain. (Net regulators have done a truly awful job of this kind of thing in the past - the .eu one being a prime example)

3. I would be astonished if registering a .xxx domain is not going to be more expensive than a .com one.

4. Regulation of existing domains is so poor that there will be just as much mass cybersquatting and link farms and all sorts of other abuse using the new domain. This simply gives the religious right, and other killjoys, more ammunition to try to stop or further control what is for the most part an honest living for many people. Those of us in the industry are already regulated more than pretty much any other type of business.


I'd really like to see a situation where the domain system is scrapped. It has never worked as intended.

Beware this ploy

[Jerf]

In general, beware this manipulation of a democratic process; it happens on national scales, too. Take a close vote and just keep voting on it until the resolution passes. Then, once it passes, generally you don't have to vote on it again.

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. .XXX has lost. Put it away for a decent time period before trying to ram it through again.