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.xxx Domain Remains in Limbo

datemenatalie writes "CNN.com reports that the Inernet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is still awaiting the decision of an advisory committee regarding .xxx domains. According to the article, "ICANN announced in June it would move ahead with plans to evaluate establishing a sex-site domain, but the proposal hit a snag in August when the U.S. Commerce Department asked for more time to hear objections." ICANN's president Paul Tworney was unable to say when a formal decision might be announced."

38 of 375 comments (clear)

  1. Don't even bother. by CyricZ · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's probably not necessary to even bother listening to more objections. No matter what they do, the various Christian extremist groups will be against it. No solution will be acceptable to them, except perhaps a complete ban on pornography, erotica, and any such material.

    --
    Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
    1. Re:Don't even bother. by coshx · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The thing is, this would make it easier for them to ban pornography / erotica / alternative lifestyles / education / muslims / jews / ... sorry, I know, they're godly people who only want to do good *ahem, crusades, ahem*

      It's much easier to simply ban all .xxx domains than to ban certain blacklisted sites or keywords or do image recognition.

      With this domain in place, it would also be easier to get legislation passed (in certain countries) forcing all sexually explicit sites to use this domain.

      So...maybe it's a good thing they're not supporting this because they're just too damned stupid?

    2. Re:Don't even bother. by CyricZ · · Score: 2, Insightful

      But even then, it shouldn't matter what anybody's definition of "obscenity" is. If Americans truly hold freedom of expression in high regard (as is often claimed by them), then the only focus should be on guaranteeing the ability of pornographers to distribute their pornography.

      That's what freedom of expression is truly about: supporting the expression of ideas which you completely disagree with.

      --
      Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
    3. Re:Don't even bother. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      That's what freedom of expression is truly about: supporting the expression of ideas which you completely disagree with.

      Er, not quite.

      Supporting the freedom to express an idea is not the same thing as supporting the expression of that idea.

      For instance, I support a fascist's right to express his or her fascist ideas, but I do not in any way, shape, or form, support his or her expression of those ideas. In fact, while I support that right to expression, I condemn the expression itself.

    4. Re:Don't even bother. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful
      The people currently opposed to .xxx will try and get all pornographic material placed under the TLD once it goes live. The registry pushing for .xxx will side with the moral objectionists because it translates directly into profit for them.

      The XXX domain name itself is the singular most offensive thing being pushed on the internet

    5. Re:Don't even bother. by indifferent+children · · Score: 4, Insightful
      The thing is, this would make it easier for them to ban pornography...It's much easier to simply ban all .xxx domains than to ban certain blacklisted sites or keywords or do image recognition.

      The reason that your comment and the GP are missing each other is because of the word 'ban'. You are talking about 'filtering' the content on a family or individual basis. What the GP meant by 'ban' is that the Christians want to make sure that nobody has access to porn. They aren't trying to protect 'the children'; they are trying to assert their God-given right to control your life.

      --
      Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
  2. This is the stupidest thing ever by zappepcs · · Score: 2, Insightful

    well, maybe ever... if all sex sites had to have a .xxx tld, it would be *SO* easy to block it.... How can even the religious zealots be against that? If you have pr0n on something other than a .xxx site, you get a big big fine... this sounds too easy to ever be workable...

  3. This is a collossal piece of cowardice by LardBrattish · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Looks like the American government is controlling the internet.

    Even though this would make the lives of concerned parents (etc) 3,000,000x easier by putting an e-red-light-district on the web to make either finding or filtering pr0n a non-issue.

    What a stupid decision.

    --
    What are you listening to? (http://megamanic.blogetery.com/)
  4. My 2 cents? bad idea by directorx · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why do we need a .xxx account? If it is implemented, it will be two months until The Raging Arsemunching Mothers for Protection against Society (TRAMPS) will be requiring that all pr0n will be put on .xxx servers and not on anything else. Or anything that looks like it might link to something that MIGHT talk about birth control. And there, ladies and gentlemen, goes the internet as we know it.

    1. Re:My 2 cents? bad idea by Mattintosh · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I like what someone else suggested in the last thread about this (very stupid) .xxx TLD idea - a "whitelist" in a .kids TLD. No porn allowed. Nothing even remotely close to porn allowed, in fact. Hell, let the freak-ass religious retards regulate it to their liking. Then let schoolkids look at *.kids and nothing else.

      Meanwhile, leave the rest of us alone to put up sites about interesting, mature, and even possibly (god forbid!) nude things.

    2. Re:My 2 cents? bad idea by typical · · Score: 2, Insightful

      (a) Why does it have to be a TLD? This is a US issue. Why not *.kids.us?

      (b) This has already been proposed

      (c) Many of the problems of the .xxx TLD still apply. It's still a single bit. It tries to apply a global bar for what is acceptable for a kid to view to the *entire* world, rather than flagging based on type of content. It is primarily pushed by registrars that just want to sell more domains. It has only domain-level granularity. It's a lot easier to bypass than metatagging.

      --
      Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
  5. .xxx - worse than nothing by YrWrstNtmr · · Score: 4, Insightful
    What would it acheive? A false sense of security for those would would want to filter based on it. Nothing really requires pornography to belong to a xxx domain.

    That is, if we can actually define porn. Beach pics? Lingerie ads? A hand, 6" one way or the other, is the line between porn, and sales.

    1. Re:.xxx - worse than nothing by m50d · · Score: 2, Insightful
      What would it acheive?

      More money for registrars. That's the sole motivating factor.

      --
      I am trolling
  6. They want eradication, not censorship. by CyricZ · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's because religious zealots do not want just censorship. They want complete eradication of such material.

    --
    Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
  7. Re:pr0n is TRASH by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Think about the amount of work involved in what you propose. Then think about the benefits. The only reason you give is for porn not to be accessible to kids, however forcing all adult entertainment sites to switch domains through legislation is not the answer. Besides, there are a lot worse things on the Internet than just the porn. It may hurt productivity, and the paysites can be hazardous (to one's personal economy), but other than that.. It hard to see how anything done by two (or more :)) consenting adults is more hazardous to look at than violence, the kind of stuff that gives kids nightmares. Check out rotten.com - was fairly popular in our school... Besides, even though you ban porn on the Internet most kids will invariably come in contact with it in some form of another (MTV? :P), most at age 13 or less.

    Porn may be an annoyance, and some prudist cultures have trouble accepting it, but just because you don't like it, doesn't mean everyone else (who do like it) have to suffer. This kind of thinking is exactly why people hate fundamentalist christians...

  8. Good thing the evil UN isn't involved in DNS! by leoc · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Because if it were, some dumbass religious zealots from a backwards country would be using their influence to stifle things they don't like... oh wait, never mind.

    --
    STFU about slashdot bias.
  9. Re:pr0n is TRASH by Lehk228 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    you guys may find it funny sitting thousands of miles away. living here it is fucking scary.

    --
    Snowden and Manning are heroes.
  10. No more new TLDs! by Animats · · Score: 4, Insightful
    We have too many TLDs now. Remember all those stupid TLDs from the last round, like ".museum"? Nobody uses them. The big-name museums are under .org or a country domain. (Here's the complete list of domains registered under .museum. Most of them don't even work, and for the ones that do, they're usually an alternate name.) Have you ever seen a domain in ".aero" or ".pro"? ".biz" gets used, but mostly by sleazy operators. There are so few legitimate businesses in ".biz" that it has the reputation of a strip mall in South Central LA.

    ICANN should stop considering new TLDs. In fact, it might be worthwhile to start phasing out some of the newer TLDs due to lack of interest.

  11. It'll never pass by foreverdisillusioned · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Or rather, if it does pass it will still never become compulsory.

    Disregarding the issue of different countries and differing standards of pornography, I'm sure some bright fellow will point out that several passages in the bible are explicit enough to qualify for the xxx classification.

  12. Re:pr0n is TRASH by DarkTempes · · Score: 5, Insightful

    what about bloggers and review sites and not entirely porn related sites that occasionally have links to or actual nude/pornographic images.

    what about nudist webpages?

    what about nude photography art?

    'Sir, this is the FBI. You recently posted to foo.bloggerbar.com a pornographic image of your new baby boy. Because you posted this horrible pornographic image, I am sorry but we have no chance but to confiscate all evidence, including your child. Thanks for your cooperation in this matter of National Security in our efforts to Save the Children of Tomorrow.'

  13. Because there is no plausible deniability by aepervius · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If porn is on .com then your next religious zealot can always say "i was searching for web site on horse, and really , I clicked horseteen.com but it turns out it was not about teen riding horse lessons". Now if it is with XXX at the end they can't plausibly deny they clicked on it accidentally.



    ;).

    --
    C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
    http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
    visit randi.org
  14. .xxx is a really, really bad idea by typical · · Score: 3, Insightful

    if all sex sites had to have a .xxx tld, it would be *SO* easy to block it.... How can even the religious zealots be against that?

    A lot of reasons. I've posted scads of problems with it, but here are my two favorite reasons:

    (1) .xxx sucks from a technical standpoint. Using DNS to categorize sites allows anyone else to set up a non-.xxx address that points at the same address. .xxx is useless for blocking, for this reason. .xxx allows only a single bit of information to be encoded about a an entire domain (is it "adult", whatever that means, or not?) There are better, existing systems to embed metatags in web pages. These approaches are far more powerful ("contains REALISTIC_VIOLENCE and NUDITY" and lets the user or ISP choose how to filter based on these content flags), provide better granularity (you don't have to stick an entire domain in .xxx if it contains one adult page), and can't be bypassed as blocking systems just because someone uses a proxy or something similar.

    (2) .xxx sucks from a policy standpoint. We sorta-kinda can get away with saying "This is adult content, and this isn't" in the United States, because we've got a *somewhat* universal standard of acceptable content. Even then, there's friction (in San Francisco, it's been ruled legal to do nude yoga on a city street -- try doing that in the Deep South). But it's not nearly as much as the differences between countries and continents. Remember that this is not xxx.us -- this is a .xxx *TLD*. It applies to *everyone*. In the UK, it's considered perfectly harmless to show topless women on television. In the US, we consider that unacceptable and obscene. In some conservative Islamic countries, a woman in regular business wear (or worse, a bikini) would be considered completely unacceptable. How do you do a good job of reconciling all these various wildly-differing social values into that single bit of information? No matter what happens, an awful lot of people are going to find your classification completely unacceptable. A .xxx TLD promises *years* of culture wars and infighting.

    There are two main groups pushing for a .xxx TLD. First, there are a lot of people who simply don't have the technical background to understand the drawbacks of a .xxx TLD, but know that they want to be able to filter porn. They aren't familiar with the alternatives, and a .xxx TLD is easy to explain to them. The other group is the domain name registrars, which are absolutely salivating at the possibility of having people have to pay for a new domain based on the kind of content they are providing. Heck, get past the initial big step of getting people used to paying a domain name registrar tax to serve a particular type of content, and you can do it with all *kinds* of content. There's nothing that a domain name registrar would like better than something along these lines.

    And that's why I really don't think that most people actually want a .xxx TLD. They may want to be able to filter porn, but they don't want a .xxx TLD.

    --
    Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
  15. Less TLDs by typical · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Totally unnecessary.

    Not from a registrar's point of view.

    Their take (which is apparently correct) is that if they're selling database entries, then a business needs to buy subscriptions for *all* possible related entries. If they come out with a .biz TLD, then IBM needs to buy ibm.biz to avoid concerns that someone *else* might buy it.

    It's completely necessary to enforce an ever-increasing tax against businesses. It's free money for the registrars -- why *wouldn't* they push for more TLDs?

    It's sad that ICANN can't tell said parasites to shove off.

    --
    Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
  16. So what happens if you put a porn pic on a .com? by Jackie_Chan_Fan · · Score: 2, Insightful

    whats the point of .xxx ?

    What if i want to show my buddy some hot chick? What if i want to put a naked girl on my website?

    would i have use a .xxx just because theres nudity?

    Whats the point of .xxx?

    Sounds like censorship to me.

  17. ridiculous by Pliep · · Score: 2, Insightful
    1. PARENTAL ATTENTION is the way to bring up and protect children. Not dumping them in front of a TV or internet and have the insane fscking government decide.

    2. If all US pron was to be put on .xxx domains, I for one would be the first to claim the now-free porn.com domain from within a non-US country and get rich by selling porn.

    3. The definition of "porn" has been undecided and vague for about 500 years. Go and try outlaw "porn" to special domains, and see where medical images, scientific articles about reproduction and images of animals having sex have to go.

  18. Re:Is censorship really helpful? by typical · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "Censorship"? No. Not showing *everything* to a kid until you, the parent, determines that they are ready, yes.

    If filtering out content that you consider objectionable (even if you intend to stop doing so two decades in the future) isn't censorship, I'm curious as to what your definition of the word is. Mirriam-Webster says "to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable".

    If you haven't noticed, there is a huge, wide range of maturity between 0 and 18. Maybe when you have children of your own, you'll realize this.

    And how do you think that mental maturity is reached, if not through experience?

    --
    Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
  19. .GOD by Belseth · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I say we put all religous content under a .god address. I'd like the option of blocking all such offensive material. As a parent I should be able to shield my children from such corrupting influences. I'm terrified that my young son will wind up in a chat room with a priest. They should be given their own web domains and leave the net to decent folk.

  20. Lies. Damn Lies. And Statistics. by xstonedogx · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We actually don't.

    Who the hell is "we"? Americans are not one homogenous group. In fact, we're one of, if not the most diverse nation ethnically, religiously, politically, philosophically, and every other -ly on the planet.

    Religion is the largest source of objection to freedom of expression, regrettably enough.

    In the same way that weapons are the largest source of murders, right? Religion is many things, and that some use it as a tool of oppression does not necessarily mean religion itself is the source of the oppression.

    The largest danger to freedom of expression is people in power who stand to lose power, whether they are popes or presidents. Religion is sometimes used. So is patriotism. So is the public good. So is individual safety. So is fear.

    It always seems to be Southern Baptists out claiming that Harry Potter promotes witchcraft and needs to be removed from school libraries...

    Ah. So Southern Baptists claiming that Harry Potter promotes witchcraft are representative not only of all Southern Baptists, but also all Christians.

    Back when Galileo started talking about the rest of the universe perhaps not circling around the Earth, Christianity worked very quickly to stifle him and keep him under house arrest until he died.

    Christianity was used to stifle him by people in power.

    If I use a hammer to oppress people, does that mean the hammer did the oppressing?

    The folks living large at the top of the religious food chain didn't try to just *defend* their ideas -- they knew that they were wrong, and that they were only going to win by suppressing competing ideas.

    Finally. Corrupt people in positions of power are the problem. Blind faith in religious organizations are the problem. Religion is not the problem.

    And then when Martin Luther translated the Bible into a language that commoners could read...he nearly was killed by good ol' Christianity. There was the risk that someone would have to actually *defend* ideas, instead of being able to just indoctrinate kids at a young age ("If you don't do what the priest says and give him money each week, you're going to BURN IN HELL FOREVER").

    Martin Luther was a Christian. Do you think Martin Luther would blame Christianity or the power structure of the Catholic Church?

    Christianity is steadily dying out in the United States. Christianity now claims 10% less of the population than it did a decade ago. Still a long way to go, though.

    The publication you cite does show a 10% decrease in the percentage of Christians among the total population.

    However, these statistics hardly support your claim that "Christianity is steadily dying out". According to the publication, self-described Christians actually increased in number by 5% and are still a whopping 76% of the total population.

    1. Re:Lies. Damn Lies. And Statistics. by Mr.+Slippery · · Score: 1, Insightful
      What if the guy at the gate of this fabulous place told you that you can come in, but before he lets you in he wants you to tell 10 other people about it?

      Then I'd recognize it as a scam. Sounds like a multi-level marketing scheme for a time-share or something. In fact it sounds a lot like the methods used by the Landmark Forum cult.

      Those of us that believe in Jesus Christ know that we have a wonderful place to go. The "gatekeeper" asked us to do one thing before he went back to this wonderful place. He asked us to let everyone know that they could come along.

      Certainly those who founded the cult of Jeshua ben Josesph knew their stuff; steal from previous mythologies, throw in a little of the old eternal life jimjam, and bam! You've got a top five religion on your hands.

      (BTW, I think Jeshua himself was largely innocent of this, it happened after his execution.)

      Anyway: by now everyone's heard of it. So, you've let everyone know, y'all can shut up about it now.

      --
      Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
      You cannot wash away blood with blood
  21. Re:So what happens if you put a porn pic on a .com by Belseth · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If it was about censorship the rightwingers would be for it. It's about freedom actually so they are against it. The point is a .XXX domain could easily be blocked on computers so children couldn't cruise them. The porn industry wants this very badly because it can get rid of most of the arguments against them. The Christian right doesn't want them segregated into their own part of the web they want them out of business all together. You have to remember what concerns them isn't their children seeing it it's you seeing it. It's about control and censorship. If porn companies have their own domains the right wing looses it's biggest argument about banning them all together. The plus for you and your site would be if you want to post adult material without being harassed simply post it under a .XXX domain and you'd in theory be safe. Art is a tricker subject. That is subjective. Porn may be impossible to define but it's fairly obvious what upsets the Christian Right. Ideally all women's clothing should come up to the chin and down past the ankle the way God intended.

  22. Re:pr0n is TRASH by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    By the time that children are old enough to look up porn, they should be old enough to make decisions not to look at it.

    Shouldn't that be:

    By the time that children are old enough to look up porn, they should be old enough to make decisions to look at it OR not to look at it.

    Empowering children to make their own decisions should be key for children instead of simply doing as Mommy and Daddy want them to. But then Mommy and Daddy probably don't see it that way. Getting liquored up and popping pills at the rave is fine when Mommy does it. And when she fools around with Daddy's best friend well that's OK too. But when it comes time for Mommy's little angel to make choices on her own Mommy wants her little angel to do exactly what Mommy says to do instead of choosing to do as Mommy did.

    Of course Mommy's little angel will probably decide to do whatever she damn well pleases while pretending to do exactly as Mommy says.

    Funny how that's an age old pattern that hardly ever changes and Mommy and Daddy are almost always stupid enough to buy into it.

  23. MOD PARENT UP! by JWallyR · · Score: 2, Insightful

    And MOD GRANDPARENT -1, Troll. I don't know how the grandparent poster got modded as highly as he did. In BOTH of the mentioned cases, it was the Catholic Church doing the oppressing, not his anthropomorphized "Christianity". The parent poster is right- bad people use religion to do bad things. That doesn't mean it's the fault of the rest of us that may practice that religion the way it was meant to be practiced.

    1. Re:MOD PARENT UP! by bcattwoo · · Score: 2, Insightful
      And MOD GRANDPARENT -1, Troll. I don't know how the grandparent poster got modded as highly as he did.

      Because bashing Christianity pretty much guaruntees a +5,something on Slashdot. Meanwhile claiming that all Muslims are suicide-bombing, camel-loving, jihadists will get modded down straight away. I have no love for the religious right but the double standard really pisses me off.

  24. What's the big deal over this? by cuddly_ogre · · Score: 1, Insightful

    People act like this will remove porn all together. I would love to see it gone (mostly because it preys on the young kids that are on the net) and having it moved to a central location helps parents, students, and the general public guard themselve against it, while still allowing those who have the proper permissions to see their smut. There should be guidelines on what defines a porn site, and not just a forcing a site like uselessjunk.com, that shows a smattering of everything, to be added to a xxx TLD.

  25. Re:pr0n is TRASH by dkf · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's better to laugh at such a bad situation than to cry. There's too much crying in the world already, and laughter will help to put the fools behind such asinine censorship in their place.

    --
    "Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
  26. Re:pr0n is TRASH by mbelly · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I wish I had the freedom to search the web without 8 of the top 10 hits being porn sites if my search had any word that has been used in a euphamism.

    --
    ~Belly
  27. Re:pr0n is TRASH by swiftstream · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Including, of course, the freedom to have somebody kill and eat you?

    Whoops, I guess Germany is against freedom, too.

    Speaking of censorship, it is illegal to deny the holocaust in many European countries. I guess they're all pretty un-free, eh?

    Sorry, but I think your argument is stupid, without regard to the validity of the censorship you are arguing against.

    --
    Be a PATRIOT--because the only thing we have to fear is the lack thereof.
  28. Legitimize? by Ostien · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "Critics such as the Family Research Council, a conservative U.S.-based religious group, complain that creating the .xxx domain would only legitimize the porn industry..." Legitimize the porn industry? I'm pretty sure if you look at how much money the porn industry generates today its hard to say its not already legitimized.

    --
    Reality is a big nasty dragon. Fortunately I don't believe in dragons.