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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. "
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.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
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.
.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.
.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.
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
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
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
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
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?
Sorry, I'm a writer. That makes you raw material.