Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I'm not justifying pornography, in fact... I find much of it is deplorable. BUT, doesn't the Constitution afford us freedom of speech/ press? It seems to me the government trying to thwart the .xxx campaign, is flirting dangerously close to being unconstitutional.
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
A porn domain won't fix that. There are a million things that aren't porn that I'm sure you don't want them to see. The only thing that will help you there is a ".kids" TLD with a central vetting authority. Of course, it would probably have to be US-only (or at least a ".us.kids", ".fr.kids", etc), as every country has their own idea about what's kid-friendly.
You really don't seem to understand why laws are hard to enforce on the internet. Even American sites would move their servers to Europe if need be (or have a European server to redirect from the .com domain).
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
So, we have to have "Parental Advisory - Explicit Lyrics" on CDs, and an MPAA which assigns ratings to movies, and basically the same thing for games - and TV shows! But having a label which everyone can recognize (and gravitate towards or away from as they chose!) is a bad thing?
.xxx would be a way of labeling yourself as "please, Congress make a law forbidding my business," but from a provider-consumer/avoider basis, this sounds almost ideal to me. It's when government interferes that things go sour, I guess. (For the record: I vote liberal/Democrat.)
I don't know if Constitutionally it makes sense, and I guess I don't know for sure if using
I mean, the internet is already chock full of graphic porn - wouldn't putting it together in one place (from a TLD point of view) be better than having it all over? For everyone?
I mean, this is kind of like clear labeling on foods of the amount of Sodium, Calories, etc... Isn't it?
Education is the silver bullet.
Isn't this exactly the head-in-the-sand mentality that seems to define most politicians. It's a good deal worse with the current administration who combine it with absurdly rosy descriptions about their progress in the war on terrorism. But it seems to amount to saying, if we don't say it exists, then it doesn't exist. So if we don't allow .xxx then there won't be any porn sights online.
This is the same sort of legislative approach that they use to try to prevent abortions through the global gag rule as if that will stop abortions. All it will stop is safe and effective abortions, and increase the number of unwanted and miserable children in the world. Damn you republicans!
Obviously, whether or not there is an .xxx domain will have no impact on the availability of porn on the internet. The Bush administration is evidently worried that by allowing this, they will look like they are somehow countenancing porn.
.xxx domain would have made it easier to protect kids from accidentally stumbling over porn (of course, nothing is going to stop kids from intentionally searching out porn).
.xxx, then there would be an immediate demand for libraries and the like to block all .xxx sites, followed by pressure on ISP's to do the same. Porn vendors would move back to .com to avoid the filters. Then there would be pressure to create laws to force them to use .xxx, which would of course fail because porn vendors would simply use international ISPs. Ultimately, we'd have a lot of bother, a lot of unnecessary regulations, and we'd be back to exactly where we are today.
If it had worked, the
But it wouldn't have worked.
If porn venders moved into
Most "reputable" pr0n sites will have a "Only click here to enter if you are over 18" splash page. Of course, it doesn't stop little kids... but it *does* make the kids aware that they're about to do something "wrong". A lot more sites require a credit card, which effectively stops kids dead in their tracks... though enough "free samples" are given out that there's plenty to see without paying for any of it. Don't think that anyone who buys a .xxx domain is going to suddenly abandon their existing .com domain, though, and don't think any kind of meaningful censorship can ever be imposed on .com by any government at this point: China can't do it, and they're supposed to be a 1984-style authoritarian nightmare state, so how are governments of "free" countries going to be able to do it?
Doing stuff like "hiding" porn in places like whitehouse.com instead of allowing it to be in whitehouse.xxx just seems wrong to me.
AFAIK, whitehouse.com was originally a print magazine called "White House". If that's the case (and I'm sure someone who knows will correct me if I'm wrong, as I can't remember the details), it made perfect sense to have a site called whitehouse.com: They were called White House, and they were commercial. The site went up many years ago, when everyone on the 'net knew the difference between .com and .gov (or at least, everyone was expected to know).
My take on the .xxx thing is that it's just a money-grab by Verisign (or whoever's pushing it): a way to sell existing businesses the same domain names they've already bought. If you own www.somepornsite.com, you do NOT want to let your competitor(s) buy up www.somepornsite.xxx; it'd be dilution of your brand.... so you're forced to pay yet again, when .xxx becomes available. 5 years later, you'll have to buy www.somepornsite.sex or whatever the "new, improved" top-level domain is by then. Verisign & co. can write their own ticket, since what they're selling costs nothing to produce, and they have a monopoly (nobody else can "invent" new TLDs). It's like printing money, except somehow it's not against the law...
"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."
.xxx domain. As easy as it is to avoid a redlight district (if your so inclined).
.com, .net, .info, etc. domains in favor of a .xxx or .adlt or some other top-level domain that allows the user to know the type of site they are visiting. That was the objective of the different top level domains after all.
I personally perfer the idea of a virtual red-light district over what we have now... adult peep-shows on every corner.
Honestly, think about how easy it would be to filter porn if it were all in the
I personally think that the Bush administration should be lobbying to require that all sites providing materials for adult only entertainment should be required to relinquish their
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
Actually, the same rules do apply already. There's already law that requires that US commercial pornography sites are required to have the user sign an electronic waver stating their date of birth under penalty of perjury.
If they are underage, committing a crime like perjury is a lot less serious.
And there is a question of whether lying to a website is perjury at all.
Do I commit perjury if I tell Firefox to tell a website it is IE? Slippery slope.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Next election, I see a critical mass of people voting for a third party.
That's what everyone said last election, but that didn't stop 9 out of 10 registered Green Party members from voting a straight Democrat ticket. Even in a "safe" state like California where Bush could not have won, most Greens voted Democrat. My respect for the Green Party plummeted to nothing in the last election, because that's when I realized that it's all just hollow words. To the American liberal, it's all just an "us versus them" battle, and they'll all join together under the "us" banner regardless of belief, ideology or conviction. Pretty shallow if you ask me.
On the other "side", the vast majority of Libertarians and Constitutionalists stayed loyal to their beliefs.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
The Supreme Court has decided that the First Amendment guarantees you a right to speak in public places. You can't make people listen, of course, but the government can't, for example, allow you to say whatever you want, so long as you're in the middle of the desert.
Which is, of course, the strategy which is being pursued. But most slashdotters are too wrapped-up trying to figure out a definition of porn to realize it.
The FCC is in the process of declaring the Internet to be private property; not a public space at all.
They've already ruled neither cable nor DSL providers are to be encumbered by common carrier regulations. That means you can no longer demand access to sites they don't want to give you access to, porn or not. They'll still grant it, perhaps for a long while, but if at some point in the future you find you can't access certain content or can't publish it, you'll have no Constitutional recourse, because the Internet is not a public space.
Of course by that point this comment will have expired, and no one will remember it anyhow, so what does it all matter?
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
There is a BIG difference between the US haveing some controlling interest as in the UN and having ALL control. Please get a reality check.
Besides, if history teaches you anything, it's that empires fall. We should be VERY worried about the current insanity in the US.
Other countries don't have nearly as much control over things as the US does. China would not get far trying to get some sort of censorship implemented in the UN for instance. In my country China has no influence over our laws. On the other hand, the US has immense influence and continually tries to bully my country into implementing US style laws and policies. To me, the US is the immediate threat to freedom.