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?

Comments

Re:Insanity..

[British]

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.

Why start now?

[D_Gr8_BoB]

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.

Insanity..

[iamsure]

This is NUTS. The two MOST needed TLD's are .kids and .xxx/.porn..

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 .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.

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 .porn TLD.

Dont even get me started on how good .kids would be.. Disney chat rooms anyone?

Yes, in all, this has got to be their WORST decision to date.

Re:Insanity..

[sjames]

Why would a porn company start hosting on .xxx where it would be automatically filtered?

Why would a porn operator want to hide the fact they they serve porn? The only outcome is that those who want porn can't find them and those who don't will click away, possably in disgust, possably to find out where to report a porn operator targeting their kids.

OTOH, with a .xxx domain, there can be no question that the surfer knew what they were clicking for. "Your honor, if Ms. Johnson didn't want to see explicit photos, why did she click on girls.xxx?

Being purely pragmatic, most potential users trying to get past a filter can't afford (or just won't pay for) a subscription anyway, and will just burn up bandwidth.

Re:Insanity..

[j1mmy]

It would make filtering SO easy, SO universal.

Why would a porn company start hosting on .xxx where it would be automatically filtered? Domain names and TLDs are essentially meaningless. I could just as easily put my home page up at www.porn-free.xxx with no pornographic content whatsoever and be filtered for no other reason than my TLD happens be .xxx

Filtering on something as trivial as that is just another step in the wrong direction.

www.goatse.kids

[IvyMike]

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?

95% pure PR (with a dash of laziness)

[TheDullBlade]

Nobody who goes through the trouble to join ICANN wants bad PR for the internet.

Having an .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.

Having a .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.

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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Abuse of .kids domain name

[arcanis]

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.

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 .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.

If the people in charge aren't going to restrict use of the new domain names to on-topic sites, why name them .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?

There's a simple solution to all of this

[empesey]

Move the ICANN corporate office to Florida.

I want .violent and .nonchristian.

[bcrowell]

I want a .violent TLD. I'm much more concerned with having my kids exposed to violent U.S. popular culture than with having them exposed to the fact that people are naked under their clothing. Squirt guns, toy soldiers, web sites for martial arts academies, discussions of the Holocaust or Columbus's genocide against the Native Americans -- I want it all put in .violent so my kids won't hear about it.

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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ICANN Needs to Remember...

[edibleplastic]

...That whatever they choose needs to be on a *very* solid basis. Whatever they decide here will be how the internet is run for years into the future. I think that the majority of organizations on the web and those that are constructing the Internet don't realize that what they are implementing now is how the internet will be. There's no going back after 2 million people have registered .whatever and then they realize that it was a bad idea. There is no "oops", that wasn't smart, let's try to fix it now. At the same time, ICANN needs to take a serious look at their values and what they are emphasizing, because that will shape the direction of the internet. What gets stifled and gets promoted is directly in their hands.

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.

.xxx could be dangerous for civil rights.

[jaffray]

A .xxx TLD could be very dangerous for civil rights. How long do you think it would be before politicians would start pressing for laws requiring any "indecent" content to be in .xxx, or requiring ISPs to block .xxx unless they could prove that no kids were suscribed to their service?

To quote the ICANN report, which is in turn quoting the COPA commission:

"Privacy and First Amendment concerns may be raised by the clear identification of a 'red light district' and the stigma involved in being found there, and the concern about a 'slippery slope' toward mandatory location in the gTLD."

It goes on to conclude:

The evaluation team concluded that at this early "proof of concept" stage with a limited number of new TLDs contemplated, other proposed TLDs without the controversy of an adult TLD would better serve the goals of this initial introduction of new TLDs. If an adult TLD is to be introduced, moreover, it would be beneficial to have a diversity of proposals, with a diversity of possible approaches to the various problems, from which to choose.

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?

.bz and .biz

[IGnatius T Foobar]

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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