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Neither .Kids Nor .Porn For ICANN
JeffMagnus writes: "This CNET article talks about the possibility of extending the number of non-country-code top level domains. According to the article of the 47 submissions for top level domains, ICANN is only going to take 24 seriously. Among the TLDs, ICANN doesn't like are .xxx and .kids. The article then goes on to mention a company named Economic Solutions which has filed an injunction to prevent the creation of top-level domains that resemble the Belize country code .bz." I'm surprised by the reaction to .kids a lot more than .xxx, both of which sound like great ideas to me. Will this stuff come to a Net-splitting head?
PICS, however, is self-labelling (i.e. done by the provider/vendor). If someone chooses not to use it and breaks local laws or standards, then that is a matter for the police/courts/etc.
Non-manditory use of .xxx is as well. I don't think that forced use of .xxx is advisable. I DO believe that the advantages will be enough to get many if not most to volentarily use the .xxx TLD.
Maybe ICANN has an agreement with kid-filter companies to make sure it isn't *too* easy to filter out the porn sites. Think about it. If every porn site ended with .xxx, it could possibly render CyberPatrol and other companies who have to hand-make porn site lists obsolete. Hence, no profit from selling such software.
As far as I can tell, the objection to most of the domains suggested was that it would be difficult to ensure that the content of the sites recieving, for example, .kids or .xxx, would actually have that type of content. Isn't it a little late to start trying to make people stick to the suggested uses for their domains? Honestly, most .com sites aren't companies (winehq.com), most .org sites aren't non-profit organizations (slashdot.org, although they used to be), and most .net sites aren't ISPs (freshmeat.net).
Trying to force sites to conform to their top level domain name is bad idea, if only because of the administrative nightmare that would ensue, but that doesn't mean new TLDs which might possibly be misused shouldn't be created, since such activity already goes on rampantly.
Lets not forget that Congress wouldn't have the excuse to keep up its assault on the first ammendment, either.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
From what I understood, their reasoning wasn't that the .kids/.xxx idea was bad, but that it came down to a matter of who would run them?
It's a valid point. An organization would have to then get into the biz of judging content more critically than any other. The only thing close is .mil[.us].
Would the .kids proponent be a competent registrar? Same for .xxx. Would they keep up certain offense-safe standards, either way?
[
We need a TLD for parody, vitriol, and critique. A TLD where the owner of a trademark is the only entity who is guaranteed NOT to own the corresponding domain. A place for virtual picket lines, so we aren't forced to sink to virtual graffiti. SUPPORT THE .NOT TLD
Preferential Voting: easy as 1-2-3
I DO NOT understand their logic at all. This is surely not the brightest thing for them to do, they must be trying to keep their corporate sponsors (donations, fees, etc.) happy for now.
I'm no big fan of ICANN, but there is a fairly good explanation here.
>My problem with the .porn/.xxx TLD is that it gives the US too much power to enforce it's morals and beliefs onto
>other peoples.
>Like we don't already have that power as it is.
You said it yourself. They are already trying. We can either embrace a solution that will filter LESS good things (political sites, etc.), or fight with no hope of winning.
The politicians WILL put filters in place, they have, and they continue to. BOTH candidates for president and a majority of congressmen favor them.
We have to look at it logically. They arent going to stop. Their goal is to get porn away from kids.
Like good hackers, lets embrace a solution that works for BOTH sides..
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
There is a simple solution here. .kidsporn This domain can do two things.. satisfy the needs of perverts and fight crime! Perverts can have all the nasty domains they want, meanwhile it will make the tracking of child pornography offenders REALLY EASY!
-gerbik
I think that there's another complementary danger involved with the .kids TLD. Imagine if .kids was reasonably well policed and turned out to be fairly safe for kids. That would be great, but I think we'd start to see all the net nanny-like programs including optional blocks for all sites except those ending in .kids. Before you know it, bureaucrats will be praising the new "safe" highly censored internet. In time, even high school libraries will be blocking students from accessing those pesky .com sites.
Yes, there seem to be a lot of web sites with women's ankles and faces uncovered. Obviously more restrictions are needed.
The problem with .xxx and .kids, as I see it, is the problem you have with rating any content. Who is going to regulate and rate content that is appropriate for .kids on the one hand, and who is going to regulate and rate content that is outside the .xxx domain. There is first of all, the small problem of deciding that something should belong to the .xxx domain (or shouldn't belong in .kids). These are the same problems that made the CDA unconstitutional.
Then you have the problem, and I think it is a problem, that when you being pressuring websites to register as ".xxx" it facilitates censorship. As many theaters refuse to carry NC-17 rated movies, local laws prohibit kids under 17 from getting into R rated movies, and so on. Similar restrictions are being put onto video games. The fact that the movies and games are rated "voluntarily" just makes it easier for the government, businesses covering their ass, and concerned libraries and schools, to regulate it with blanket policies.
Remember that depending on how the net is implemented, it can be a place of freedom or a place of oppressive control.*
* Lessig, Lawrence. Code and other laws of cyberspace. 1999
Sure it sucks, but there will be abuse with any system that gets implemented. Some systems will just allow for a smaller amount of abuse than others; but it's stupid to blindly reject any system that gets proposed just because "it might be abused".
Of course it'll be abused. But having domains like .xxx and .kids will make it a lot easier to control, and cause a lot less confusion and abuse than the current system. I'm sure most people will stick to intended uses of the domain names; why throw out the idea just because a tiny minority of people might not? That's just plain stupid. Overall, life would most likely be much easier for everyone if we had .kids and .xxx. The small amount of abuse might actually become manageable ... I mean, a name like fuck.kids is going to stand out a lot more amongst the list of .kids domains than a name like fuckkids.com would stand out amongst the list of fuck*.com domaings.
In the first paragraph, the article says that ICANN would be all for .biz and .dot. WTF would .dot be a TLD for?
.dash and various permutations. But mama always said, "Life is like a slashdot poll. Don't complain about lack of options- You've got to pick a few when you do multiple choice. Those are the breaks."
This would be for ham radio operators and anyone interested in morse code. They thought about different variations, like
I think that the only thing wrong with .kids and .xxx are people who would abuse them (making a pron site in .kids for example). If ICANN would heavily police the domain to be sure the content was correct for the TLD then it might work.
You cannot establish a situation in which content must be labeled. It leads directly to censorship, period. Its ONLY purpose is censorship.
censorship is Baddddd, m'mkay?
Or did you miss out on that bit of history where the minority was crushed, oppressed, killed, and generally not treated very nicely by the majority?
Which bit is that? Why, its all points in time before this one.
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
What is wrong with this? ICANN should be renamed ICANT because they are so irresponsible and lazy.
I Cannot Accept Net Tyrrany. It can be the protestant arm of ICANN.
This is NUTS. The two MOST needed TLD's are .kids and .xxx/.porn..
.porn/.xxx. It would make filtering SO easy, SO universal. I would in half a heartbeat be happy to not allow porn sites on my system unless they ended in .porn/.xxx. What would consistitute porn? I would look for an existing policy, or write my own.
.porn TLD.
.kids would be.. Disney chat rooms anyone?
I DO NOT understand their logic at all. This is surely not the brightest thing for them to do, they must be trying to keep their corporate sponsors (donations, fees, etc.) happy for now.
AFTER this round of elections, the at-large elected members will finally havea say, and I would wager that things will become considerably different.
As a webhoster, I personally condemn them for not accepting
Yes, there are problems with that, but thats my choice. Dont like it, go to another hosting comapny. But I would wager to bet that PLENTY would do just about the same thing.
As it is I host multiple porn sites all happily, but that would probably change with a
Dont even get me started on how good
Yes, in all, this has got to be their WORST decision to date.
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
Obviously, people would try to get things like "www.goatse.kids" into the .kids domain all the time. It would be a constant battle, and the owners of .kids might be responsible for anything which slips through, which would make it a risky thing to own.
But the real problem isn't the clear-cut cases, it's the weird fringe ones. Should you let a site like Jessi The Kid onto the .kids domain, even though it's creepy as hell? How about Child Supermodels which seems to be another creep out site?
And it doesn't even have to get that creepy. On yesterday's Powerpuff Girls marathon, one episode involved the Mayor being naked, and they showed his animated, nude, behind. It was clearly funny, but when some lameass parent in Butfux, Nebraska complains about it, does www.powerpuff.kids get taken out of that domain?
I'm more than willing to help with this project if anyone else is interested in joining, making a team, or humoring me :-)
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
That's kind of weird. I think .org .net and .com are the best to get anyway, though, because they are easiest to remember and most general and the only reason I've heard of others buying others were that they were cheaper. I think that this was because they had only heard of expensive places like NSI for buying them, though, because at gandi.net you can get them for only $10 or $11.
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison
None. Period.
Firstly, ANYONE can think up a billion TLD's and think of a use for them. Does that make them 'good ideas?'. No. It doesn't.
We should be REDUCING TLD's and getting back to alternative lookup services for locating web content. THe current geographic domain space is MORE than adequate to serve what we have already. THe problem is what people want to do with domains.
I ask everyone this: If we add more TLD's now, when will it end? A year or two later, the same parties will be bitching for more domains... and more money and power will be handed out with them.
You have to remember, porn sites (and most other sites) only need a DNS name for the frontpage. Once the site has you "there", you're just clicking on links. Whenever you bookmark something, it's done, you dont need to remember it.
.xxx went through, *and* (even more unlikely) the right wingers started enforcing this all-porn-in-.xxx rule, it wouldn't make any difference: all the porn would be on IP only servers, and the front door would get you to it. It wouldn't matter if people blocked .xxx or not. If the front page was in .xxx, that would be blocked, but with no porn actually on the page, it could be in .com or whatever. I guess you could even customise front pages for different domains...
Why is this relevant? Because once a user is on a porn site (or any other site), you dont need DNS, it doesn't matter if you're looking at http://www.sexytables.xxx/fetish/woody or at http://1.2.3.4/fetish/woody.
So to get to my point: porn sites only need DNS for the front page, and for indexing. They can put all the content up on something with only an ip address, and nobody will care. This means that even if
How to get round this? You ban linking. Now there's a thought...
Mike.
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
They are exceedingly long. Have you ever been to nic.us? If you want a .us domain you have to choose domainname.city.state.us. For example, if I wanted to choose a domain with them I would be choosing mathjmendl.rochester.ny.us instead of mathjmendl.org. Who would want to make their surfers type in so many letters when there is a simpler way? They would also be harder to remember. Luckily, there are currently people reviewing this policy so that it might soon changing. Plus other countries don't have to register their name with the .country TLD as well. They just choose to more often, as they often have better policies than .us does.
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison
There was the ARPANET and all was chaos. And God came down and created the USENET and the earth. And it was good. And God took the USENET and said "Let there be rigidly enforced categories." And it too, was good. On the fifth day, God created all the categories of the Earth, such as the comp.*, and the rec.*, and the alt.*. And naught a newsgroup was created which fell where it belonged not, for the categories were moderated. And many people partook of the well-nomenclatured categories, and it was good.
Then came the web, and the corporations, and they too started with categories, such as *.net, and *.com, and *.org. Yet lo, they were unmoderated, and all sense of order was lost and it descended back into chaos.
Come on God^H^H^HICANN, give us categories with meaning!
If all the porn sites move to .xxx then eventually our school's sysadmin will block the .xxx TLD to conserve bandwidth. And then what will we have left to do on Friday nights??
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Stephen C. VanDahm
"Combining both, like .kidporn"
They already ruled on that one, we've been talking about it here... I don't think that the courts would find that nearly as funny as we would...
"In a surprise move, Federal Express shipping company and soft drink bottler Seven Up merged, to form the first on request soda delivery serivce. Said to be similar to companies that deliver fresh icecream or milk, the new company will deliver the freshest soda pop in the business. The new company, 'Fed Up', will begin operations in the second quarter of the new year"
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
I partially disagree. The .xxx TLD would pretty much guarantee "nudity" (but I think you mean pr0n). As mentioned in this earlier post, it would be all-but-impossible to restrict abuse of a ".kids" domain -- a daring website could register something innocuous like "notebook.kids" and fill it with pr0n. Yes, it would probably get shut down, but after how much time? A day? A week? It might be economically feasible to run a company that kept registering domains in .kids that only lasted for a few hours|days|weeks...
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. I'm all out of bubblegum." MSE USC APX AIA CSI CASp
I know what you all think, but ICANN are right to reject domains such as .kids and .xxx
IMHO the domains we have at the moment are enough. Introducing many more will encourage people to be wasteful.
By using these TLDs as categories, too many could confuse the browsing public. EG. Now where is slashdot? is it .org because its non-commercial, is it .techie or is it .info or .dev ??? Information would be easier to find WITHOUT hundreds of TLDs
DEW YEW KEEP A TROSHIN
If I have a business that has already registered a .com domain, as soon as the new TLDs are available I'm going to rush out and buy the same name as a .biz and .web and .whatever to protect my name.
This doesn't open up new possibilities. The only thing adding TLDs like this does is make the domain registrars richer.
- Encourages disturbed individuals to easily target a youth market for their own purposes leading to violations of privacy, security, and sanctity.
- Encourages breakdown of federal law: http://www.ftc.gov/opa/1999/9910/childfinal.htm
- How many articles must be covered out there until parents realize that the freedom of the internet is not safe for subteenage children and the security blankets of their homes because of (even a handful of) deranged individuals?
- Playful hackers could disrupt the family nucleus and do more harm than good by redirecting timothythe.kid to tims.porn.
Bottom line here is thatSoulStriker
SoulStriker
Am I wrong? Prove it.
But is this really a problem? No. The solution is to eliminate ICANN and WIPO, and any other organization that controls anything on the internet. Sure, it might be a little chaotic at first, but after a while, I'm sure there would be some agreed upon standard.
or, they could just make a million top level domains. they could use something like .aaa .aab .aac .aad ... etc. It wouldnt be pretty, but I wouldn't mind.
bottom line is, the whole TLD thing was fucked up from the start. so just leave it how it is. It's fine. there is pretty much an infinite combination of domain names you can produce with .com, .org, .net, etc.
Another solution would be just to disable DNS altogether. All we need is the IP address. This would get rid of corporate domain name lawsuits completely, and free up the courts for something productive. Whenever you see an AOL commercial, they would advertise their website as their IP address. This would be great. Everyone would run their own "dns", so they would just type in the IP address and save it as "aol" or something, so next time they opened their browser all they gotta type is "aol". How could it get any easier? Of course, Microsoft would ship windows with some predefined dns entries.
Ok, an even better solution.. From now on, at birth, everyone gets assigned their own serialized IP address. When they get older, they get to take a test, and if they pass it, they can get a domain name. Ok bad idea.
Ok here it is. Get rid of .com, .org, etc. and have like, name.{person}{business}.city.state.country.planet. solarsystem.galaxy. for example. Microsoft's home page would be: http://microsoft.business.redmond.wa.us.earth.sun. milkyway
seems pretty good, huh? that is the only solution.
Well im gonna go now, I think mozilla is finished compiling ;-)
This is NOT free speech, it is a CRIME.
You've proven my point perfectly. Censorship is a very dangerous game, and people who play with it are often confused when it bites them. If, as you say, the NAMBLA site described how to have sex with children without legal reprecussions, then it is describing what the laws are, and which of the actions these pervs enjoy that are not criminal. If you want to prevent people from discussing what is legal, and what is not legal, then you are asking for a very, very ugly world. You're asking for a world that most of us would not appreciate. Before we go around allowing other peole to decide what is right, and what is wrong, we should think long about who exactly is going to do the deciding.
Also, I should mention that the NAMBLA website is gone. It's been gone for as long as I can remember -- the only evidence I've ever seen of it is from people complaining of its existance. But if you went there long ago, and read it that close, and remember it that well, I honestly have to question your motives for doing so. I sure as hell wouldn't let you near any of my kids. I'm not kidding about that, either.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
We were talking about it, and he said they'd never get it because it was "too controversal." ... just think of all the inapprorpriate domains possible: molest.kids , naked.kids , mcdonalds.kids :)
Basically no one wants to take the blame for creating domain thats supposed to be entirely santized for young eyes
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
Play more violent networked games!!! :^)
I vote for BZFlag...a game which, by the way, is open source, multi-platform, and is badly in need of developers, since the current ones don't seem to have a lot of time on their hands. Check out the bzflag site on sourceforge: http://bzflag.sourceforge.net/
ICANN, instead of sorting and generalizing content by generic TLDs, is trying to come up with TLDs to please the site owners and domain registrars. Those of course prefer the trendy cool names, like .ebiz.
.sex? Or .xxx? What about sites which contain violence or any other sort of "entertainment" suitable only for adults? Why not make it a generic ".adult" or ".adu"?
Why the E? Because 'electronic' is the buzzword today? It's on the web, so it's already electronic. And why "biZ"? Why using a buzzword term, instead of a short for the real word "business"?
Why
As to ".bz", the threat must be ignored. Country TLDs were given for a reason - to represent a country. Bending the rules by having enough money and tricking the system is a bad thing to be accepted. I think ICANN should make a reverse claim, that people might confuse people into thinking ".bz" sites represent Belizze (since it's the official meaning of the TLD), while in fact those are from a bought out legacy TLD.
If the goal is to have '.cool', '.sucks', '.notsucks', '.gnu' etc., why not drop the whole thing and have just the domain names? (ala Compuserve's GO MICROSOFT)
Pity there won't be a .kids.
Internet would be much more secure just by blocking enverything from script.kids.
__
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Inspired. They pay the Belize government so they can own a cool name, that sounds a bit like 'biz'. It would obviously confuse people to have a real .biz TLD. Duh!
What next, the Tongan government trying to claim exclusive use of the To: header?
My problem with the .porn/.xxx TLD is that it gives the US too much power to enforce it's morals and beliefs onto other peoples. Like we don't already have that power as it is.
Who, exactly, would be forcing these other countries to filter out the porn TLD? This is just labelling that makes it easier for individuals to self-censor. If you (or another nation) don't feel that it's necessary, you don't have to do anything. The Internet will still work the same way it always did. The only people left out would be the people who don't want to see the stuff anyway.
--
"But the real problem isn't the clear-cut cases, it's the weird fringe ones. Should you let a site like Jessi The Kid onto the .kids domain, even though it's creepy as hell?"
That site is scary... When it first loaded I thought 'CooK' on one of the picture links said something similar but not quite so nice...
I wonder sometimes what happens when kids are subjected to the attention that this girl is getting... When I was that age (being male) I was playing with model rockets and Hot Wheels cars and Legos and Computers, not being a 'pre-teen lifestyle' person with a tatoo on my lower abdomen in a sexually suggestive spot... That is really sick (IMHO)
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
"It was felt that having seperate .xxx and .kids TLDs would cause confusion due to an arbitrary division of overlapping interest areas."
.net be used for bondage pages."
.kids TLD, such as the evil brainwashing of the Disney Corporation and various churches..."
.xxx domain was a concern ... we felt that it was highly likely to be used for bikini shots, beauty nudes, and soft-core pornography that doesn't even show penetration ... the distinction between X-rated and XXX is not likely to be respected, and even mere R-rated material may be included..."
"...kids like porn as much as anybody..."
"...we recommend that
"We were very worried about misuse of the
"Misuse of the
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Nobody who goes through the trouble to join ICANN wants bad PR for the internet.
.xxx domain is implicit approval of pornography as a normal and major part of the internet. Mucho bad PR. It's one thing to support freedom and say people can put whatever they want on a .com site, then you have culpable deniability "Sure, I hate what they're doing, but I support freedom of expression!", but officially recognizing and aiding the porn industry makes you part of it (in many eyes). Just imagine if the FCC designated a certain amount of radio bandwidth specifically for the broadcast of pornography; the public at large can't see much difference.
.kids domain implies that the rest of the internet is inappropriate for children. Furthermore, when the .kids domain is abused (and it would be inevitable) it would make the internet look even worse.
Having an
Having a
Either way, it would mean bad PR and more calls for government interference.
The other problem is that all these places that have their great domain names as one of their biggest assets would have to move to the more appropriate TLDs and maybe take their chances on whether they can get a good name again.
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We're not talking about human beings, we're talking about ad men (cough spit wash yer mouth out) and spammers, it's the old 'if I don't do it someone else will'. There would be extra-young.kids, all-you-can-eat.kids. lots of great ideas in the world (communism would be one) but they don't work. ppl suck.
~ppppppppö
Domains are first come first serve. So whether it is a test or whatever registar, if you need a domain, you gotta register it first the moment the system becomes avail. So this situation is totally predictable, and it was done totally on purpose.
What is amazing is not only were the registars' servers overloaded, so was the main registration system...
And I am sure people know by now that this thing is all about making $$$. Cybersquating is encouraged. It is obvious. Who the hell would use 30 domains at once? ISPs registering for their clients? Ya right.
No wonder the web is going no where ever since the businessmen got involved.
I have a bucket next to my desk because everytime there is something to do with domains it makes me puke!!!!
Combining both, like .kidporn
Inflation is everywhere.
There is one advantage of the .kids TLD in this situation. I for one wouldn't mind to have an aggressive filter system on that.
.kids make sure you can go through whatever censorware people will want. If you want to target kids, make sure it is appropriate.
.kids could be useful.
Say you only allow those domains for your kids. Then put an filter that'll remove any traces of sexual content or whatever. A 10 years old doesn't necessarily need to be able to get to site about abortion.
So if you put your site on
That's at least one way why
At least in the US anyone viewing porn at work can expect to be fired. Maybe they get one warning, but that would be it. Sexual harrassment laws pretty much require a company to block it. Besides, the internet connection at work is for buisness use, not personal. I could make an arguement that /. is buisness (Hey, I'm in technology and it is a technology site. I'd probably lose, but it could be made, I can see an arguement for porn at work.
While it is true that buisness would be lost from the few that are looking at porn where they shouldn't be, but I think most porn providors would go for this. Any movie director can slap a X rating on his own film, and most porn directors do this automaticly to get the buisness of people looking for a porn film. to these directors it is better to be rated X, then to be rated R (NC-17? I'm not up on these ratings) with terribal reviews. People going to movies rated less then X generally care a little about a quality film, while some folks going to rated X movies only care about sex. (In general of course)
It is fairly easy to write (get) a script that sends you to a random .xxx website. Again, this is good for all porn operators.
If someone registered ibm.xxx, would that constitute cybersquatting or whatever? Since everyone knows that the company that owns ibm.net ibm.com ibm.shop ibm.banc etc doesn't sell porn, there should be no ambiguity here. But if guinesssux.com can be confused with guiness.com, then would the kid of an ibm employee be allowed to host their personal webpage on ibm.kid?
.biz is a cool sounding TLD or whether it'll just teach your kids how NOT to spell correctly? Does it take long to imagine what geocities will do to the people that buy .geo domains? What does .geo mean anyway? TLDs for geostationary satellite companies? What on earth is .web for? Sites what only host http? Cuz I guess ftp isn't really the web eh?
.support and .download domains too?
Why does it take so long to consider new TLDs? Send me your shortlist of 24 TLDs and I'll give you my decision in 2min. Do you really need to have a business lunch to discuss whether
What would ibm.info contain? Info on the company IBM's credit worthiness, or does ibm put info for their products there? Since many companies also have support.mycompany.com and download.mycompany.com, maybe we should sell them
I hope that when I establish my own country I won't have to wait so long to get a country TLD.
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I can see a good reason to avoid a .kids domain name: Namely that it's, in my opinion, highly unlikely to be used for its intended purpose. I can envision a world filled with www.theworldssexiest.kids and similar domain names, and if the .kids domain is marketed as being a place for "safe" domain names (www.education.kids), then it may lead to things like filtering software overlooking the porn sites that are sure to move in.
.kids (or .xxx, even), if they get filled up with sites that don't have anything to do with the tld? The state that our current tlds are in, i.e., filled up and abused, is due to the notion that anyone can register anything.
.kids, .xxx, .business, .whatever, and instead just go for generic names (.one, .two, .three, or what have you) that better represent the eventual content of those domains?
I don't think many of these targeted domain names are going to meet with much success unless some agency (ICANN, perhaps) manages to come up with a way to restrict the registerable domain names to on-topic sites. What's the good of having
If the people in charge aren't going to restrict use of the new domain names to on-topic sites, why name them
I could shoot myself for missing the voting for that... I think .xxx and .kids makes a lot of sense, and .biz makes no sense. There's already a place for business, it's called .com.
.kids a place you'd be guaranteed to not see nudity. It would certainly help the whole library filtering schmozzle. It's a lot easier to reliably filter out the TLD than actual content.
.kids though.
.xxx would be a place where you'd be guaranteed (!) to see nudity, and
I can see their point about determining content in
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Move the ICANN corporate office to Florida.
I also think we should have .nonchristian, so that Christian
fundamentalists can websurf without being exposed to
Buddhism, animism, shintoism, Hinduism, Mormonism, Judaism,
and Catholicism. (You knew the Pope was the antichrist, right?)
I propose Pat Buchanan as TLD registrar for this one.
Oh yeah, you know the people who were proposing .kids referred
to it as a "quality-assured" TLD. You know what would really be
great? A quality-assured .porn TLD! Not that I would know myself,
but I've heard that a lot of porn on the internet is really not
very sexy. It's like, "oh, I have a zoom lens, let's get a real
close-up picture of the female genitals." So I want a quality-
assured .porn that would censor out all the porn that doesn't
turn me on personally. I'll volunteer to administer it.
While we're at it, let's have .islamicfundamentalistporn.
You see, in the same way that I find "Endoscopic Vulva Voyage"
unsexy, a lot of men in Afghanistan probably would find even U.S.
soft porn really nonerotic. So .islamicfundamentalistporn
would have pictures of women with their elbows or
hair exposed, but not much else. I think the Taliban would
make an excellent TLD registrar for this one.
Oh, one final suggestion. As an American, I fear and loathe any political viewpoint that doesn't fit within the nice, narrow, comfy confines of the Republican-Democrat part of the spectrum. Could we have .notrepublicanordeomcrat,
so I can make sure not to be exposed to anything from the
Greens or Libertarians?
The great thing about this kind of stuff is that it would let ISPs and webhosts avoid all those troublesome complaints from people who are offended by content. And by making it administered by private, unaccountable groups, we avoid the inconvenient possibility that anyone would try to weaken the system with dissent. Heck, people wouldn't even know they should dissent, because all the content would have been censored without their knowledge!
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when we gonna see the .zip, .tar, .gz or even .exe?
.soon
And get the MPAA out of the rating business. Conflicts of interest, and they don't exactly support free speech (see the DeCSS fiasco). Get an independent group.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
I'm dissapointed that .kids wasn't allowed while things like .biz are. The Internet is becoming more and more solely a place for businesses to do business with each other, to the exclusion of all else on the web. It is okay when it is happening from the bottom up (web sites on their own are more and more business oriented) but when a mandate like this comes down from heaven, it is very hard to encourage growth in other sectors. ICANN needs to realize that there is more to the web than business, that other things should be allowed to flourish. And I don't buy the claim that they couldn't patrol the .kids domain well enough.... put in guidelines for them if you need to, but don't shut it down.
On another note, this is complete BS:
According to a letter posted on ICANN's Web site, Economic Solutions is seeking a restraining order from a Missouri federal court prohibiting ICANN from establishing a ".biz" or ".ebiz" domain address or any other combination that is similar to the country code of Belize, ".bz."
Lawyers for Economic Solutions say the company entered into a marketing agreement with Belize to use the Internet address and therefore owns the intellectual property rights to the name. .
I'd love to see them even try to win this case.
How about Child Supermodels which seems to be another creep out site?
Okay, I have to say that I've seen disturbing stuff on the net.
Some of it is just downright vile.
But this Child Supermodels site is just flat-out creepy. I swear to god, you can replace all of the pictures of little girls with clothes with adult(?) women without clothes and you've got yet another porn site.
Look at some of these banners!
And the comments?
"Working with young girls is both a pleasure and a privilege for me." I'll bet it is, ya sick freak!
"Thousends of pictures all exclusive teen models. click and find out why we are the best!" Sounds like a pull quote off of any of a thousand porn sites.
*shudder* I agree with the other poster; I don't care how cute my kids end up being, there is no way in hell that I would ever inflict this kind of life or publicity upon them.
Jay (=
(You can even vote for your favorite "kid model" site! I swear, this is just some kind of crypto-anarchist pedophile ring site or something... ick ick ick...)
Do they have any idea what .dot is going to do to phone based tech support?
tech: That's slashdot.dot
customer: /...
tech: No, slashdot.dot, all spelled out
customer: Oh... slashdotdotdot.com
tech: No, slashdot is spelled out, then there is the period character, then "dot" is spelled out. There is no dot com.
customer: Who is this dot character?
...and so on and so forth, for several more minutes. Really, if it isn't .com, .org, or .net, who cares anyway? It takes a long time for a TLD to become "fashionable". Recently, .de seems to be more recognizeable to a lot of non Germans. Otherwise, unless you are interested in a particular country the "big three" are where it's at.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Why would a porn company start hosting on .xxx where it would be automatically filtered?
Because it's profitable. Successful porn companies *want* to be filtered. You see, in the porn business, you don't want to show your stuff to just anybody -- just people who will pay for it. By and large, the under 18 crowd, and the people who use public libraries for an ISP, don't have much money. The "screening" is good for business -- it focusing your traffic on paying customers.
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
What is the point? Do you realy see microsoft renouncing .com in favour of .monoploy?
.us you saw? .uk is slightly better but the majority of whater.co.uk sites are exactly the same as whatever.com.
.com now. .com should mean international company, but in my "42% of statistics are made up" mode I'd gues half of .com sites arent companies, and 70% of the rest arent international.
.com and .org, has both TLD's covered.
.com will always be the most desirable.
.com, .org, .net and any other TLD now, and replace them with much more specific names, like .food, .gnu and .computers
Thers a lot of country domains now, yet when was the last
Even your local ma and par shop is a
Even if there were enough TLD's so that major companies couldnt register, do you realy think a site could exist at www.aol.dj?? Nope, AOL would sue their butts because of those 3 letters.
New TLD's wont increase the number of TLD's available. People get confused ofer apache.com and apache.org, imagine another 20 apache.* sites! Even the great slashdot, home of the geek, who should know the difference between
The general public want to type one word in and
Whatever happens with the new TLD's,
The only way of changing the system would be to delete all
Just my ramblings.
To quote the ICANN report, which is in turn quoting the COPA commission:
It goes on to conclude: While there are many legitimate gripes with ICANN, I think they got this one right.Incidentally, wouldn't this discussion have been a lot more useful if Timothy had taken the two minutes necessary to find and include a link to the ICANN report, or maybe even the ten minutes necessary to read the relevant section and add a couple of comments?
It is interesting to see attempts to block TLD's that could be confused with Belize (.bz). Could it be that perhaps Belize is gearing up to position .bz as "The Business TLD" and sell it to American registrants -- similar to the way Tuvalu took advantage of its .tv domain?
I remain convinced that the only solution is to implement a very large number of TLD's, enough to de-value them and stop the two biggest problems: cybersquatting, and people registering in every possible TLD.
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Who died and made ICANN nanny? Anybody with the word International in their name has absolutely no legal justification for this kind of morals enforcement. There is no coherent body of international law that supports the exclusion of .xxx, .kids, etc. In fact, the arbitrary actions of ICANN amount to monopoly style behavior, as they control the commodity of Internet names.
ICANN, as well as all the other stakeholders like the CONSUMERS, should lobby int'l standards setting bodies to create some kind of rules for morals as applied to the internet. Until that point it is absolutely wrong for a bunch of Western digerati to screw up the economic opportunities of everyone else in order to promote a moral agenda. Who says a poor country wouldn't want to make money hosting these questionable sites? Debate must happen before action is taken.
Nobody can predict the future and what opportunities it holds, especially ICANN. These people are supposed to be facilitating a prosperous global Internet. What gives them the right to impose any morals on us?
Goat sex free since 2001