ICANN Meeting Passes on .com, .xxx decisions

Rob writes "As the Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers wound up its annual meeting in Vancouver yesterday it was inactions that were still causing all the controversy. Major decisions on the .com and .xxx domains had been postponed until next year, as the domain name management body seeks to balance the interests of governments and commercial domain name organizations."

Comments

Why .xxx won't work

[voice_of_all_reason]

If you're not going to mandate that adult content can only be hosted on .xxx, then it will be useless for the reasons the fundies want. You know, that bit about not being forced to give up property of your .com domain?

On the other hand, if you were hoping for a burgeoning directory of naughty stuff, then yes, you're boned :(

Re:Why .xxx won't work

[Pxtl]

And what happens to the many news + porno sites that nerds like to visit? Where do you draw the line? Fark has boobies links for example - but only a prude would call it a porn site. But there are numerous sites that slide down the line between Fark and straight out porn sites.

The big problem would be that only an idiot would put their porn site on .XXX - because with that level of labelling, you'd risk more than just client side filtering (which only a foolish porno webmaster would complain about) but full-fledged back-end censorship - any one of the middling systems between your users and your site could be owned by "family oriented" bodies who might just drop all .XXX packets.

Seeking to balance the interests of who?

[dada21]

The only interests that matter, IMO, are those of the individuals. There is no mass-interest-level that can be made into a number and protected by a law or a regulation. In fact, interests change constantly.

For governments and regulatory bodies to try to assess interests for the masses, failure will always be the end result. We have the free market where the billions of consumers make decisions every second and the market continuously changes in response to the demand by consumers and the supply of a given service or product. On the other hand we have regulatory bodies and governments that change over years or even decades in order to satisfy 51% of the voting block.

Domain name extensions don't make sense anymore -- as we continue to add more, the value of the old extensions diminishes (except, maybe, .com). Why not just open the floodgates and let the market create what it needs? Why should anyone have a say in guiding those billions of buying decisions, other than the individual consumers making them?

Is there a new date set for decisions?

[httpamphibio.us]

The article just says, "next year," and then calls the current meeting an "annual" meeting. Does that mean we're going to have to wait another year for any changes?

.xxx and .kids

[70Bang]

You might as well have both TLDs and make it known "East is East & West is West".

Turn .kids into a walled garden: *.kids can point to and only to *.kids.

As far as .xxx goes, start peeling the spammers off of everyone's windshields. Instead of waiting for 50'000'000 pieces of evidence, cut them off at the knees a bit earlier. Why with .xxx? redirection. If you filter your email, it doesn't appear to come from someone you know, and it's got .xxx within the content, reroute it to the porcelain euphemism (just remember to flush twice & hard -- it's a long way to the kitchen).

would adult sites object to self-monitoring?

[rjnagle]

The assumption made here is that porn sites would object to being labeled "porn." I don't think that is the case. They would love a way to make it easy for content filters to block access for children. That makes their job easier, not harder.

There is a benefit to self-description, as long as the registering body isn't forced by that business's government to label certain things as porn. It has to be voluntary.

Ok, I see how edge-cases might raise questions, but why not just open the TLD and see what happens?

Judging from the time for the approval process, you would think they were trying to solve Fermat's Last Theorem. Hey, guys, it's fricking three letters. What's the holdup?

Robert nagle