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.'"
Do they realy think that the folks that own barelylegal.com (for example) are going to relinquish their .com domains and move to .xxx? All this does is create a money making opportunity for those who register .xxx and nothing more.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
"The Department of Commerce has received nearly 6,000 letters and e-mails from individuals expressing concern about the impact of pornography on families and children," Gallagher said in a letter that was made public on Monday.
.xxx (as well as the numerous other porn sites and link listing services such as sublimedirectory, elephantlist, and thehun). If you don't want to do that yourself, pay a third party to do it, but *do not* and I mean *do not* ask the government to do it for you because you are too lazy to keep an eye on your children's Internet viewing. The rest of us do not give a shit about your desire to not pay attention to those in your family but we do care when you step into *our* personal space.
People who are petitioning the government: Learn to use your computer and block out connections to
I realize that the current administration (and quite a few other politicians outside of the White House walls) want to have everyone come crying to them to "think of the children" but we need to remember *real* freedom first - not the created/imagined freedom the Bush Administration and fellow politicians have decided exists in 2005. This type of behavior in response to a few letters? No thanks.
We are talking about 6000 letters. There are what, ~270 million people in the USA? Sorry but ~6000 letters doesn't give equal footing for their voice, regardless of whether or not it "looks good" politically or it fits the Administration's religious agenda. I realize that "morality" is a huge buzzword in America these days but I should be able to do, see, and view whatever the fuck I want regardless of whether or not children could view the material. The Government should be representing more than just a tiny portion of the population. Just because the pro-porno people aren't stepping up to the bat (for obvious reasons) doesn't mean that their silent voice should be ignored. I'll be more likely to understand when you get something like 80 million letters.
If anything, I would think that the current administration would be thrilled with the prospect of having all the porno in one location. It's easier to track the "undesirables" and ban freedom and artistic expression. At least, much easier than the current setup allows.
ICANN, you fuck up enough, ignore these pointless requests from the Nation of the "Free" and go about your business properly.
The USA has maintained a "take our ball and go home" attitude on other international issues, and there's no reason to expect anything different here. After all, the US Commerce Department maintains that it reserves final policy control over the authoritative root server. ICANN simply cannot do its job as long as the USA controls (or claims to control) the DNS.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Think they'd object to ".cum" for all porn sites?
Ignorance is not a crime; neither should it be a way of life
Congress control $ = inmates run the asylum
How can a group called the "Bush administration" object to .XXX domains?
More insightful policymaking from the Bush administration. I know I'm going to get modded down for this, but what exactly is the point of social conservatives objecting to this? It seems if anything this would be in the social conservative's best interest, because by delegating porn to a particular TLD you can more easily shut it down.
Yes, it's unlikely to ever occur. The prominence of .com porn sites will probably never go away. But if your goal is to rid the world of pornography, or at the very least reduce it, wouldn't you want to at least move in the direction of having it all in a centralized, easily controllable place?
Creating a .xxx domain would actually be potentially more risky to free speech than to prevent it. Here's the problem. If you have a .xxx domain, then it's possible to distinguish between the part of the internet that's supposed to have objectionable material and the part that isn't.
So this would open the doorway for regulation to go after merely indecent material on non-xxx domains. They could argue in court briefs that it's not preventing them from existing. This would make it far easier for the merely indecent material to be isolated out of the mainstream Internet. Then the filters get put in place and suddenly people get a controversey free Internet.
So for once I agree with the Bush administration but probably for the exact opposite reason.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Correct me if I'm wrong, but judging by their history over the past 20 years or so I don't see Republicans really caring about the First Amendment. They pay lip service to opposing "judicial activism", but that seems to be a euphemism for "supports church/state separation." There is a large swath of people who believe their interpretation of the Bible trumps the law, and I think this is just another effort by that group.
But they aren't, so my investment in the is-teh-su.xxx domain name seems to heading down the drain...
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
I'm running a p0rn shop in North Elbonia. My government and my approved domain registrar which coincidently is run by the North Elbonian Dictator's great-nephew don't care if I use .com.
What's the USA going to do, cut off all domains registered by my registrar, or worse, start a war?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I think that I'll register www.MoonShine.xxx and sell stills, big glass jugs, copper tubing and straw hats. Maybe even coveralls!
I won't bother discussing how stupid yet another batch of useless TLDs is - much less one specifically for "adult" content (whatever THAT is).
.XXX TLD is because it would be condoning something that the moral majority (the guys who would like Bush to have a third term) finds reprehensible.
.... we're going to support setting up districts in every city where it can be done legally by adults".
However, it's damned obvious that the reason they don't support the
If you oppose pornography and adult content, you can't very well go and support having a special area for it. These people don't care about the constitution or freedom of expression or speech or allowing adults to do what they wish. They don't want this material, PERIOD. It's the same reason they oppose medical marijuana. Not because it may not have medical benefits. Not because it can't be used responsibly. Not because it's seriously harmful or will destroy the fabric of marriage between a man and a woman yadda yadda yadda. Simply because it's "not right" and you can't support such things AT ALL or your constituency will eat you alive.
It would be a lot like the Bush administration saying "prostitution is horrid and evil and wrong and
So I have to say, I'm stuck on this one. Yet another stupid TLD is retarded. Squeezing all adult content into one place is retarded (by the way, because one or two pages of my site might have adult content, does that mean my friends and family can't access my site AT ALL from work or a hotel or a library?). On the other hand, the reason Bush opposes it is retarded, too. In this case, both "enemies" are enemies of my enemy. Heh.
Internet porn is here to stay. Every technological advance ever made by mankind has been used to facilitate the spread of sexual thought. The telephone, mobile phone, ascii art, copy machine, Bluetooth, two-way pager, fax machine, pen and paper, stone tablet, gun, knife, club, airplane, automobile, cart, domestication of the horse, television, VCR, home video camera, IM, DVD player, the computer, and finally the Internet have all been used to disseminate (pardon the pun) sexual thoughts, facilitate the personal connections necessary for sexual intercourse, or make one potential mate more attractive than the others.
It doesn't matter what the rules are, or what the government says. Everything people do, in one way or another relates back to reproduction. It's in our genes at the most basic level. We're going to have sex no matter what. We are programmed to seek sexual pleasure in whatever form is available. We'd all prefer to have that pleasure be shared with a warm-bodied partner, but we will also seek the pleasure alone, or through the stimulation of one or more of our senses.
How many activities do we engage in which use all five of our senses? There are two of them. Eating and fucking. But if we have a head-cold and can't taste or smell food, we will still eat based on sight, sounds, and texture. If we can't touch the object of our sexual interest, we still become stimulated by the sight or sound of that person. Porn is just a variation on a theme. And it's going to remain popular until something better (like the Holo-deck) comes along and steals porn's thunder the way VHS porn did to printed porn.
Now get that banana out of your ear, and get back to work.
This space for rent.
What are you talking about? This has nothing to do with what you can say, or which pictures you can post. This is about whether or not to create a special .xxx domain.
Obviously anyone can see, there is plenty of pr0n on the internet. No one thinks this will change. But does it make sense to try and force all content of a certain type into a certain domain extension?
Why don't you stick to the issue?
The real question the Bush Admin seems to be missing isn't between an internet with a red light district and a clean interent- it's between an internet with a red light district and an internet where every third .com that pops up on a search for breast cancer on yahoo is a pornographic site.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
But I already found some porn on the internet, even though they haven't added the xxx domain yet. weird.
- and we can let the alcoholics have the .xxxx TLD, (remember the xxxx rotgut from the Bugs Bunny - Yosemite Sam cartoons>).
And illiterates can have the .x TLD (they don't have to sign for anything, just make their mark).
So that leaves the double-x TLD. Isn't 2x the size of some fat people's clothes?
So, the assignments are as follows:
So this would open the doorway for regulation to go after merely indecent material on non-xxx domains. They could argue in court briefs that it's not preventing them from existing. This would make it far easier for the merely indecent material to be isolated out of the mainstream Internet. Then the filters get put in place and suddenly people get a controversey free Internet.
The constitution gives you a right to freedom of speech. It does not give your a right to have people want to hear what you have to say, nor does it give you a right to force people to listen to you.
Forcing porn site operators to operate on a .XXX TLD would be no different from forcing them to be rated X and thus not accessable to minors. it is not unconstitutional at all so long as it is available to those looking for it ( if the government forced Google to not index .XXX for example, *that* would be crossing the line ).
I would have thought conservatives would have approved of the .XXX domain as well, easier to block. Hell, I'd have thought they would have made it mandatory (did I mention, easier to block). So I'm REALLY confused why either side thinks this is a bad thing.
.XXX domain we can remove porn from the net". In which case, someone swallowed the wrong color pill ...
.XXX makes it a 'too easy to find' issue. Sheesh, ever hear of google/yahoo/msn/'your favorite search engine'.
The ONLY conclusion I can see is: "maybe if we do not allow the
Time to take the correct color pill and see this in the light of reality, porn is NOT going to disappear. At some point, when reality sets in, people have to learn to deal with it, one way or the other. So whether it is 'free speech', 'protect the kids', 'ban porn' or '1st amendment rules!', I would think people would back this.
I fact if I thought ANY crowd would be against it, it would be the Liberals not the Conseratives. The Liberals MIGHT complain that segregating it to a different domain makes it too easy to block.
I don't know, is this a
-- sign me confused
Or to take the real world analogy farther: The decision is between an internet with a red light district and an internet where adult shops are randomly opened between supermarkets and toy shops.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The .xxx domain will never achieve the goal of segregating "pornography" from the rest of the internet. It's a level of bureaucracy that may generate more money for registrars and filtering companies, but will not stop sex-related content from "poisoning minds".
.com domains be given up by porn sites for .xxx? How about hustler.com, or playboy.com? At what point is nudity considered art and not pornography? Or maybe it's both. Would a Mapplethorpe exhibit have to be under .xxx? He made a lot of art that doesn't involve penises or bondage. Does Karen Finley's work go under the .xxx domain? How about Vanessa Beecroft or Spencer Tunick?
.kids domain should show that segregating content isn't likely to succeed. Whatever guidelines or rules or enforcement is put into place will be circumvented. It's how the internet works. The bottom line is the entire DNS system can be ignored and some other name service put into place.
As is pointed out elsewhere, why will
The failed
I seem to remember an article about the US not relenquishing control of the root DNS servers to an international body of some sort.
I seem to remember a large number of US citizens saying things like, "the US has never abused it's power (over domain names)", "the US would not impose its views on other countries by interferring with the domain names", and so on.
Some of us who posted that we didn't want the US to have controll over the domain names because we didn't trust the US administration got flamed to a crisp.
Well. This is exactly the kind of tampering that we didn't want. Top level domains should be controlled by an international group that does not let one country impose its views on the rest. I hope people now see why some of us want this.
If you support freedom, free speech and the constitution, yes.
.XXX universally? In Australia, it's not a big deal to show naked people on television (at least after a certain hour). I've heard the word "shit" on British television. In America, you can't even say "nuts" if you're clearly referring to testicles.
.XXX? I've seen film clips of chicks making out, Dr. Ruth and a news woman talking about vaginal dryness. Car chases. Discussion about beheadings. Half naked strippers sitting around and giggling with Donut Boy (Neil Cavuto). Not to mention stuff on the actual Fox Network. Or even the big three broadcasters.
.XXX because I have a couple pages mentioning a wild party with some hot chicks I was at? Or because I have a webcam and my girlfriend happens to walk by it without a shirt one day? If some middle eastern country finds that showing a woman's face is pornographic and offensive, does that mean that any website anywhere in the world where a woman isn't clad in a burka belongs in the .XXX TLD?
.XXX? Does a medical website with photos of genitalia have to be a .XXX?
.COM site that someone in the US finds offensive are they going to seek to have me extradited to face charges in the United States?
.XXX TLD?
.KIDS TLD into which only completely kid-friendly content can be placed? When regulating free speech, they've typically ruled that you must choose the solution that will least impact the freedoms and rights of the majority. Rather than sanitizing the entire internet for the sake of toddlers, it would be easier to sanitize a single TLD for them.
But they don't care about that. Remember, Bush has the support of the type of people that form organizations who then go and send a 250,000 complaints to the FCC about ridiculous things on television from three or four individual people claiming to represent the entire country. He has the support of people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson who think 9/11 was God's way of telling us that lesbians are evil. He has the support of people who think that a flash of a boob with a pin-covered nipple for one second on television is going to harm people.
These are groups that want all "inappropriate" material to be done away with. It isn't a matter of "only adults should have this". It's a matter of "this is filthy and we should burn it". Politically, his most staunch supporters would see any step to set aside an area just for porn as condoning it.
Oh, and using the ESRB to suggest that this is just "a way of rating content" is silly. How are you going to rate content that belongs in
Would the web-equivalent of what you see on Fox News Channel be considered
Should I have to register my entire domain as a
Since Netflix rents rated R movies, does that make them an adult site? Do they have to become a
Is a website about boxing or professional wrestling acceptable, even though it "promotes violence" but a site about swimsuit models isn't? Is ICANN going to become the arbiter of what is is "adult" the world-over? Or is some American agency going to be responsible for that? If I'm Korean and I have a
What about Amazon.com? What about your local library's card catalogue? Both link to and provide adult content (everything from Fanny Hill to "art" books of lesbians in latex whipping each other and sex manuals). Do they both have to move into the
And, more importantly, if we MUST do something stupid like this, doesn't it follow more with the Supreme Courts previous rulings to have a
Anyway, in my entire life I've never accidentally come across mass quantities of adult material. Or any quantities really. You have to go looking for the content. If you're coming across hard core facial sites or something, it's because you're looking specifically for them or you're clicking on links at illegal warez sites. Either way, your eight year old is not going to "accidentally
http://www.walken2008.com/
(Yeah, I know it's a hoax)
Find coupons in Greeley
Ok. Someone *PLEASE* explain to me why the HELL people get all worked up over a nude body. Is it somehow "shameful" to see a naked body? Do you censor your own mirror in the bathroom, for fear you'll see your own nipples? The only shame from a human body comes from those people who are either a.) ashamed of their own -or- b.) whose religon tells them it's a bad bad thing.
I just don't understand what the big friggin' deal is. Children run around either semi- or completely naked a lot of the time, but usually nobody associates anything "dirty" with that.
I really wish people would decide for *themselves* and not peek over everyone else's shoulder and tell them their opinion is sooo wrong we need to make a law so that EVERYONE follows their morality.
A.A
Your mind is like a parachute. It works best when it's been opened.
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.
Require all pornography sites to operative via name-based hosting, where the default server (read: the server that matches the IP address) does NOT contain porn or any information that can be used to reach porn.
Even Google contains "information that can be used to reach porn" as it is a search engine. So does this post, since it mentions you can go to Google. So does Slashdot because it has this post. You need to lose that last phrase there - it is WAY too encompassing.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
OK, I am NOT all that upset by my children seeing a picture of a naked body as such, but I AM upset by my children seeing one or more naked bodies engaged in activities that most parents (in most but certainly not all societies) agree they are simply not ready to see.
To make it really simple:
Naked body: no big deal
Naked body with farm animals and medical implements (and possible violent acts): NOT OK
Let's be honest; 'net porn is NOT just some pictures of naked bodies.
I really don't care what other adults do, but I would appreciate some mechanism by which I could *reliably* choose what my children have access to. Games, movies and TV have ratings that I can use. It would be nice if the 'net had something similar.
I have long favored the ideas of either a "red light district" with a .xxx designation (or even better .x .xx and .xxx -- maybe even a .xxx!) or a .kids. Either way I would have at least SOME semblance of a chance of choosing what my children can see.
When they become adults it will be their resposibility to choose what they want to see. Until then it is my responsibility. I just want better tools than the ones that have thus far emerged.