.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."

Comments

Don't even bother.

[CyricZ]

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.

Re:Don't even bother.

[indifferent children]

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.

This is a collossal piece of cowardice

[LardBrattish]

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.

My 2 cents? bad idea

[directorx]

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.

Re:My 2 cents? bad idea

[Mattintosh]

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.

.xxx - worse than nothing

[YrWrstNtmr]

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.

They want eradication, not censorship.

[CyricZ]

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

Good thing the evil UN isn't involved in DNS!

[leoc]

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.

Re:pr0n is TRASH

[Lehk228]

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

No more new TLDs!

[Animats]

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.

Re:pr0n is TRASH

[DarkTempes]

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.'

.xxx is a really, really bad idea

[typical]

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.

.GOD

[Belseth]

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.

Lies. Damn Lies. And Statistics.

[xstonedogx]

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.

Re:pr0n is TRASH

[dkf]

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.