Top Level .xxx Domain Concept Under Scrutiny

An anonymous reader writes "The Bush administration is objecting to the creation of a .xxx domain, saying it has concerns about a virtual red-light district reserved exclusively for Internet pornography. This is despite the the .xxx domain being approved in June and New.net selling domain names using the .xxx suffix for many months before the approval." From the ZDNet article: " The sudden high-level interest in what has historically been an obscure process has placed the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in an uncomfortable position. ICANN approved the concept of an .xxx domain in June and approval of ICM Registry's contract to run the suffix was expected this week Other governments also have been applying pressure to ICANN in a last-minute bid to head off .xxx. A letter from ICANN's government advisory group sent Friday asks for a halt to 'allow time for additional governmental and public policy concerns to be expressed before reaching a final decision.'"

Comments

Re:Which is not unconstitutional at all.

[Ex Machina]

I have two problems with your post.

1) X has be superceded by NC-17 in the United States.

2) The MPAA movie rating system is a *VOLUNTARY* rating system that most movies are given as many theatres will not run "unrated" films. This is very different from a government (or even a quasi-governing body like ICANN) administering a .XXX designation.

I'll leave the "slippery slope" arguments to others and stick to the nit-picking for now.

Re:You can't filter based on a TLD...

[ciggieposeur]

What he's saying is that kids can easily type "http://1.2.3.4" and reach the same place as "http://hugeyams.com". The only way to prevent that is to see if there is a DNS record linking 1.2.3.4 to hugeyams.com and putting up a denial messagebox if so.

But this breaks for four main reasons:

1) DNS names can map to one or many IP addresses. "hugeyams.com" might be a server farm, or a mapping that changes every night. The mapping isn't 1-to-1, it isn't constant, and you can't rely on your information being current with broken caching servers out there.

2) "1.2.3.4" could be a single server hosting thousands of "separate sites" including hugeyams.com and aclu.org. Block one and seriously violate the constitutionally-protected speech of the other (political speech trumps all other speech).

3) A huge number of IP addresses do not have the right DNS name mappings (PTR to CNAME records in the in-addr.arpa domain), or they may have no PTR record at all. ('Net history: at one time the only incentive at all to fix this was to get access to the download site for the 128-bit encryption version of Netscape.) Getting 100% of the 'Net admins to maintain PTR records is practically impossible.

4) Even if a PTR record exists, the web site owner has no control of it, the ISP of their hosting company does. What you (as a porn operator) pay $50/year to call "hugeyams.com" they might call "39876fb-box55-eth1.sf.us.bigassisp.net" .

So even if ".xxx" is adopted as a TLD it can be trivially bypassed by disregarding DNS, and forcing everyone to use DNS is practically impossible and could break lots of other low-level things too.

Technically, a bad idea. Socially, a stupid one.

Re:Or not...

[creysoft]

Any content created solely for the entertainment of adult audiences and including nudity or sexually explicit imagery must be placed [...] on a .xxx domain.

That's slightly better. Now, what is nudity? What about this?

( . ) ( . )

Obviously a pair of ASCII breasts. Now what about this?

http://www.asciipr0n.com/pr0n/morepr0n/pr0n22.txt

Is that illegal? What's the difference? What about drawings? 3D renderings? Sculpture? None of which show any *actual* nudity, since they're all fantasy creations. So we'd need to change your wording to "photographs or works of art depicting nudity or sexual content." Now what about movies or stories which contain adult content? Some of the darker web comics are created "solely for the entertainment of adult audiences" and may include nudity or sexually explicit imagery, even if they're not about porn. But I doubt their authors would appreciate having their work shuffled off to a .XXX domain and censored. Now we could sit and argue about this all day, but my point is that you can't ever just reduce something down to "clear verbiage," and maintain any connection to reality.

Whatever happens, it will be complicated, it will be ugly, and it will more than likely be unfair to a large number of people. With that in mind, why should we mess with a system that already (for the most part) works?