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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?
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.
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
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.
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?
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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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
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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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.
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"?
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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