ICANN Plays Down U.S. Influence

aychamo writes "The ICANN (the company that distributes most of the world's internet addresses) is denying that it gives the US government too much control over its operations. For instance, the US was the only country able to stop ICANN from using .xxx for pr0n domains, instead of .com. The ICANN is planning events to show that it is not US influenced." From the article: "ICANN's board of directors appears to favor a proposal for a new set of Internet addresses that end in .Asia, which would more easily identify Asia-focused Web sites. Approval of the new top-level domain could come during the ICANN board of directors meeting on Sunday. One other major development this week involves progress toward allowing the use of non-English language characters when steering a Web browser to a particular site. ICANN is now exploring a proposal to open Web browsers up to dozens of the world's other alphabets. Actual tests of just such a system are now in the works, Twomey said. "

Comments

What good is it without enforcement

[Monoman]

What good is it to have the xxx TLD if they won't enforce it? There will probably just be a rush to get their existing domain names as ADDITIONAL domain names before the squatters gobble them up.

Slashdot uses a .org but should be on a .com! :-)

Re:What good is it without enforcement

[Bogtha]

What good is it to have the xxx TLD if they won't enforce it?

Pornographers, who make far more money from adults with credit cards than kids, can choose to be filtered out more easily from kids, thus wasting a lot less bandwidth on the kids who can't pay for anything anyway.

People often demonise pornographers as though their sole purpose in life is to corrupt innocent children. That's nonsense, of course, they care about the bottom line as much as any company.

Re:What good is it without enforcement

[tehwebguy]

then why don't they take cases to court when people share passwords, spread files via p2p, etc? they know that it has a hook as good as a drug for some/most people. someone might not be a paying customer today or tomorrow, but once it is hard to find what they want via p2p they might become one..

or when they turn 18..

or when they get a credit card..

or when they find their parents' credit card..

Re:What good is it without enforcement

[JWSmythe]

I agree completely. It's a bunch of BS. Porn will still show up on every domain that exists. The idea of trying to enforce it, while still theoretically feasable, means the almost certain death of every existing porn site. I'll use the site that pays my paycheck as an example. voyeurweb.com. According to Alexa, it's #319 of all web sites. With an average of close to 2 million unique visitors daily, or 9 million uniques weekly, it would be very hard to explain to them that there is a new name. Surely if we weren't in on the first minutes of the XXX registrations, people are going to be snagging up voyeurweb.xxx, right along with every slight variation of the name. There are hundreds of thousands of pages that link to some *.voyeurweb.com page. There are plenty of companies who are different with different TLD's on the same name, so it will be a huge name grab and years of threats and lawsuits before the dust settles.

Along with that, we have several pay sites. The biggest headache will be proadult.com, which is a hosting service. There are roughly 80,000 sites which use proadult.com for authentication. Those 80,000 sites are either under the *.redclouds.com domains, or under their own domains, the majority of which are also .com's. There will be literally hundreds of thousands of pages to fix to make it work. Most webmasters are almost as bad as regular users. They created their site once, and don't have the technical ability to update all of their pages. If they do, they recognize that it would take a long time to accomplish it.

Porn site users are your average user. Tell your average user to update their bookmarks, and they'll give you a technical blank stare. "How do I do that?" Judging by support emails, I'm surprised that most users can even get to a web page.

The logistics nightmare has little to do with this story though. The US government has millions or even billions in tax dollars at risk. I know just our companies pay out millions in taxes.

The move won't "kill" the adult industry, but it will sure make for headaches for some time. Every link on every site will need to be changed. All the search engine rankings will go away for a short time, which is probably a good thing considering the abuses so many webmasters have done over the years.

The control issue for the US is a biggie. The US Government loves to have the power to tell the world what to do. For the Bush administration, they love the power to say "put this on the back burner for a couple years". Back at the tax dollar issue, if it goes past this administration, the sudden drop in tax money will be the next administration's headache, and for a federal budget that's already screwed, they can blame the next administration for any headache's that it brings on itself.

We all know perfectly well that there will be plenty of .com sites running porn after any mandated change. We'd be more than happy to comply, and we'd ensure all of our hosted sites complied, but there will always be some winner who wants to stay with a .com for whatever reason. The biggest one I can think of right off is spam. When .com is now a "safe" TLD, spammers will get bigger returns by advertising a .com. Sure, they can lose the domain within a few days, but spammers work under that assumption now. They give themselves a window between 1 and 3 days, from when they start a spam campaign until they either have the site or their internet connection shut down. For us, if we receive a valid spam complaint, the webmaster will get their site shut down. Any provider in a major country who likes to keep in good terms with their provider does the same thing.

All in all, it will do very little to clean up the Internet. The best way to clean up the Internet is for **USERS** to do it. Don't spend money on sites that us

Re:What good is it without enforcement

[JasonKChapman]

After say, two years, why not just refuse to resolve pr0n .com sites? The two years gives the pr0n sites plenty of time to migrate over.

Oh, good. So who gets to decide what is pr0n and what isn't? I suspect Saudi Arabia, The Netherlands, and China, as examples, would all give you radically different definitions. Hell, New York and Alabama would give you radically different definitions. Would there be an ICANN Decency Board? Would they "know it when they saw it," or would they spend a few years trying to define it objectively?

So what other categories of speech should be forcibly banned from the .com realm? Hmmm? Should the next discussion be about .politics or .religion?

ICANN is US.

[dascandy]

From the article: "CANN's board of directors appears to favor a proposal for a new set of Internet addresses that end in .Asia, which would more easily identify Asia-focused Web sites."

So... if I understand correctly, the closer people are to the USA, the easier their domain names will be. Compare:

XYZ.com -> US company
XYZ.co.uk -> UK company
XYZ.co.cn.asia -> Chinese company

What about universities in other countries? Governments? Militaries?

ICANN: Start getting a little bit international, postfix all .com, .gov, .edu etc. domains with .us. That at least makes it fair for the rest of the world. What's the point of .asia btw? just keep using .cn.

Reasons not to do .xxx

[code65536]

If ICANN wants to play down the influence of the US government, something that it could do is to provide rationale for what it is doing that come from a neutral and respected source. For example, the US Gov't says .xxx is bad. ICANN agrees. People are in uproar. ICANN then says *why* they agree with the US Gov't and state reasons that are neutrally-rooted as to why. For example, they can cite this thing by the IETF (on last check, a fairly neutral group, not tied with the US Gov't): http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3675.txt

Why does the rest of the world object?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

The U.S. government is only trying to protect the children. (CNet story about Bush admin putting a halt to .xxx TLD)

Seriously, if the TLD structure is subject to influence from 6,000 "letters of concern" from the U.S. Christian Right, what is the message to the rest of the world? That's right - "you have every reason to be concerned about sole U.S. control of ICANN".

However...

[AthenianGadfly]

"The ICANN (the company that distributes most of the world's internet addresses) is denying that it gives the US government too much control over its operations."

Immediately after the denial, however, they added, "But please don't tell the government we said that."

Further news

[pubjames]

Today ICANN announced that they would create a ".arab" top level domain name, to reassure the world that they were not overly influenced by the US government. "We think a .arab domain name would allow arabs to more easily identify arab focused web sites, and demonstrates that at ICANN we don't just focus on the US, but also we try to accomodate less significant countries, like Europe, Canada and Arab places like Iraq." The spokesman added "I'm sure it will also help the fight against terrorism".

.Asia?

[Generic Guy]

Does anybody else find it as preposterous as do I, that to identify far eastern sites they want to use .asia which is a completely western-centric delineation and uses a western alphabet?

Re:God damn it

[alexandreracine]

and it should not be .xxx or .com but .cum

Easy.

[Spy der Mann]

What good is it to have the xxx TLD if they won't enforce it?

An intelligent filter COULD be used for sites that do use .xxx domains. Suppose you enter a .com domain and the site also has a .xxx domain. Follow all redirections until the site doesn't redirect anymore. You lookup the host name and get an IP. Then replace .com with .xxx, and lookup. Is it the same IP? Censor the other domain, or the IP. Ta-da.

Also, let's position ourselves in the near feature, 5 years from now. .xxx domains are now used. A conservative senator launches a proposal ENFORCING the now voluntary use of .xxx domains. It gets approved.

But how could such proposal be approved if no pr0n website has a .xxx domain?

The problem with rejecting some measures because they're "not good enough" is stupidity. Not stepping forward is stepping backwards.

Re:Oh great. More TLDs = more $$ from my pocket

[radja]

you don't have to. in the city I live, there's a heerestraat, a heereweg, a heereplein, a verlengde heereweg. (all street names, meaning approximately: lord's street, lord's road, lord's plaza, lengthened lord's road). no company I know of buy property on heerestraat 2, heereplein 2, etc.

the web is no different: you only need 1 adress, the rest is pure choice. your choice.

Re:UTF-8 domain names?

[M. Baranczak]

Isn't it possible to abuse UTF-8 domain names for activities such as cybersquatting? It's easy to mistake www.microsöft.com for www.microsoft.com.

It's worse than that. For example: there are several characters in the Cyrillic script which look exactly like Roman characters, like C, K, O, P, M, H... But of course they have different Unicode character values. So a malicious individual could register microsoft.com using a blend of Roman and Cyrillic characters, and it would look completely undistinguishable from the real thing. There are a number of ways to protect against that, but none of them are particularly good.

ICANN needs a Theory

[firewrought]

Seriously, why does ICANN keep coming up with proposals for TLD's like .travel and .asia? This is not a useful ontological breakdown for organizing the world's organizations. It's like going into your local library and finding that the books are divided into three sections: Anvils, Horseys, and Everything Else.

ICANN needs a Theory. The original TLD's (com/org/net/gov/mil/edu/int) had a pretty good theory that met the needs of the net at that time. Today those distinctions are less useful since .gov/.mil are U.S.-centric, .com has become the defacto standard that people expect, and there are many organizations which don't seem to fit the classification at all (e.g., personal-use domains might be one example). The ccTLD's (us/uk/jp, etc.) let individual countries have more autonomy, but it also semantically diluted the namespace (especially with opportunist looking for TLD's like .tv/.to).

I can't say what a good theory would be. Maybe the original TLD's could be cleaned up and administered better. Maybe the ccTLD's could be integrated with trademark law so that, e.g., foobar.jp means that Japan recognizes the owner of foobar's trademark. At any rate, the theory should have a few characterstics: it should be complete [cover all reasonable use cases]; it should be predictable [if I know of an organization or entity with a website, I should be able to predict the exact 1 TLD they exist in]; and it shouldn't require that most organizations feel obligated purchase multiple names to protect their trademark.

Re:Inventions and politics

[basshedz2]

Who invented the world wide web? Tim Berniers-Lee - An Englishman working at CERN in Switzerland (Thats Europe for all you Americans)

Re:Inventions and politics

[TheRaven64]

Who built the first calculating machine? Charles Babbage - English.
Who was responsible for most of the fundamental mathematics behind modern computing? Alan Turing - English.
Where was the first stored-program computer built? University of Manchester - England
Who invented the WWW? Tim Berners-Lee - England.
Who wrote the Linux TCP/IP stack? Alan Cox - Welsh

Is any of this relevant? No. Not to mention the fact that a large number of the fundamental protocols used by the Internet are a result of the IETF process, with international researchers contributing.

Re:In the other news...

[east coast]

When international TLDs ".christian", ".jewish" and ".mormons" were proposed, received feedback made ICANN to deploy also ".asian-religions", ".african-religions" ".native-indian-religions" to represent worldwide view. It was rumoured, that a call from Saudi Arabia's prince and trade officials of some government made ICANN to enforce additional sub-TLD ".islam.arabs".

Damn them! I must now petition for ".cthulhu-cult"