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

[TuomasK]

And if it is forced, where does the line go? For example, if I have an automobile site that has some pictures of girls leanin on cars without bikinis, do I have to get .xxx domain or can I still use .com? What about wallpaper-pages that have nude pictures along other images? And so on..

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.

Re:Why .xxx won't work

[Woldry]

You don't have to change Slashdot to prevent yourself and your children from seeing the things you find "depressing".

There are many commercial filters that can filter out offending sites by keyword blocking. The things you object to on Slashdot could probably be blocked, if you truly don't want to read them. The downside is that you would probably wind up being mostly unable to read Slashdot if you applied such a filter.

Alternatively, you could write (or hire someone to write) a plugin for your browser that would find offensive words and, say, display them only in a white font, or insert the word "Smurf" every time an offensive word appears, or any other workaround that would prevent you from seeing the terms that offend you. I wouldn't be surprised if someone has already written these, or sells software that does effectively the same thing.

If, however, you meant that you think you have the right to decide what my children should be allowed to read, that's a completely different matter. I will not help you find ways to do that, and I will oppose any effort to impose your standards of what qualifies as "filth".

Re:Why .xxx won't work

[Woldry]

My definition of filthy is simple profanity without reason and the different flavors of hate speech ... the anti-semitic and racist posts that I see

This is not a straightforward definition (despite its brevity). Define "profanity." Define "reason." Define "hate speech." Define "anti-Semitic." Define "racist."

I am sure that you have clear conceptions of each of these (and your conceptions of them might not be all that different from mine), but I guarantee you that your definitions of each will vary widely from other people's. What's more, though I suspect we agree substantially on these definitions, I must admit that I disagree quite strongly that such things constitute "filth".

So whose definitions would you want Slashdot to use to determine "filth"? Yours? What privileges your definition over anyone else's? Why not mine? Why not Larry Flynt's? Why not those of the very people who post what you consider "filth"?

I just wouldn't want any kids under say 14 years old reading some of the posts.

So you are saying that if my kid is under 14 years old, you would prevent him from reading them? That would be my decision as a parent to allow or forbid it. I don't recall surrendering my parental rights or responsibilities to anyone else. If you want to keep your own kids under 14 from reading them, fine and dandy. That's your right as a parent. (Mind you, I'll think you're silly, and naive, and doing your kids a disservice. But I will still support your right, because they're your kids.) Don't fancy, however, that your own necessarily subjective standard should apply to other people's kids.

Finally, just to keep this even marginally on topic, the same applies to the .xxx domain. Whose standards do we use to determine what belongs there? My father thinks Ernest Hemingway is pornographic. Shakespeare has been called that, too. The movie Midnight Cowboy earned an X rating when it was first issued. If it were released today, it might merit an R, but even so, it's significantly milder than much other "R" stuff out there nowadays. I don't doubt that various religious groups would put Baywatch or Richard Hatch's bare-assed antics on the original Survivor into the porn category. Robert Mapplethorpe's photography was attacked in the 1980s as pornographic. Parents have been hauled into court to defend innocent photos of their own nude children. So who gets to decide what qualifies as .xxx material and what doesn't?

If it's meant to be a system whereby people can opt to register as .xxx to make the pornographic nature of their goods clear, then well and good. But if it's meant as a way of preventing "pornography" from being available anywhere but a .xxx domain, then (just as with the parent's apparent desire to filter Slashdot for the rest of us) I would oppose it on both philosophical grounds (as being de facto censorship) and pragmatic ones (as being impossible to draw the line).

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?

Re:Seeking to balance the interests of who?

[kindbud]

Why not just open the floodgates and let the market create what it needs?

Because the market is not your girlfriend.

Because the market is not Santa Claus.

Because the market is not a creative entity.

Because the market is dumb as shit, and easily influenced.

Because the market is not a panacea for every societial ill.

(except for extreme forms of free-market-fetishism, in which social ills are wished away)

Re:Seeking to balance the interests of who?

[dada21]

You bring up an interesting point, but it is one that is widely thought of as unacceptable in this case. ICANN would not exist if it had been deemed that the "free market" would come up with a suitable solution on its own.

ICANN also has the money to market themselves as necessary, whereas I don't have the money to market that they really aren't necessary. This is why I work slowly trying to convince individuals, who as a group are more powerful than the wealthiest advertiser. That is the free market at work :)

Domains cannot be influenced by the free market, as you would either have so many domains that you would have search google every time you wanted to find a website, or everyone would be so lazy that there would only be one. It is important that there are some rules determining what a domain can represent, and that there is a collection of people who are willing to debate propriety of creating or redefining a new domain.

Interesting -- I already use Google more than I use the address bar. In between those two I use my bookmarks. Google has blown up in popularity because there are ALREADY too many domain names to recall them. If you want someone to remember your domain name, you either ask them to bookmark it (online) or you print the proper one on your business card. The person doing EITHER action doesn't care if you are .biz or .com or .net or .tv -- there may be dozens of other companies with the same name but a different extension. This is the free market at work and unlimited extensions would not cloud or confuse the issue at all. The world is completely able to deal with McDonalds.com, McDonalds.tv and McDonalds.xxx and even thousands of others.

If it was left up to the free market, the chances are that any rules that may be created would be haphazard or confusing, or we would be left with a chaotic mess without any rules at all.

How so? Why would ANY company want chaos and confusion? In my experience, companies do what they do in order to increase their profit, and that means getting along with what consumers desire. I don't see how ICANN reduces confusion in any way. If a bunch of ISPs wanted to offer domain names that others don't want, then the market will make the decision to run those ISPs out of business. In fact, this has already occurred.

You cannot expect the free market to sort out the problems of the pensions crisis in Britain, or to regulate the monopoly of only-just-privatised companies like National Rail, Royal Mail or BT.

Actually, the pensions crises in every country comes from the fact that the currency they are based in is being debased, and that the companies that invested in the pensions are finding themselves uncompetitive because of those pensions. Let the individual decide how to save for the future, don't mandate it through social security or "force the employer to offer pensions." In fact, the pensions of private businesses came out of the desire to avoid taxes, not out of a competitive atmosphere.

If they don't regulate it, then who will? And who would enforce all of these newly determined free-market solutions? I certainly can't be bothered to spend my Sunday afternoons on the problem.

Yet your purchases regulate the free-market solution. If you like something, you buy it. If you don't, you don't buy it. Companies that provide a solution you like, and offer it at a competitive price, and service and support it in the long run are generally the ones that last the longer. Companies that try for rock bottom prices and offer terrible service get run out of business.

The big fear for many is that one company, such as AOL or Microsoft, could all of a sudden control the majority of the Internet and start shutting out smaller ISPs and businesses. Yet the way the Internet is built -- millions of subnetworks tied together, sometimes with two or three backbones -- makes it virtual

christmas present xxx

[missing_myself]

I was expecting a christmas present from ICANN...

Time to do our own thing then

[Anonymous Coward]

I reckon it's time to start seeding our own DNS servers with the required domains then, seeing as ICANN can't manage it. And rename then to ICANT.

Criticism

[Bogtha]

He went on to observe several times that ICANN is criticized for not moving quickly enough as frequently as it is criticized for moving too slowly.

Um... that makes sense, I guess. In other news, Slashdot is criticised for posting dupes as frequently as it is criticised for duplicating posts.

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?

The real reason

[andyring]

I think the real reason they haven't made a decision yet is because this is what happens when you take a bunch of high-paid bureaucrats who answer to no one and let them have free reign of things. They don't make decisions! They're simply incapable of it. It's easier to defer a decision under the guise of some lame excuse for a long time, that way you can more easily justify your "job" and it makes it look like you're actually doing something. Mix it in with governments from around the world, and it's a picture-perfect recipe for nothing to happen.

Oh, and since it's getting slow already, here's the article:

ICANN meeting passes on .com, .xxx decisions

5th December 2005

By Kevin Murphy in Vancouver

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.

During a public forum on Saturday, domain registrars voiced concerns over the proposed settlement between ICANN and VeriSign Inc, which would give VeriSign a five-year extension to its .com registry contract and the ability to raise prices 7% a year.

And proponents of the .xxx domain said their proposals to launch a porn-only address has been turned into a political football by ICANN's governmental advisors, a charge not being strenuously denied by ICANN or governments.

"The very few governments that have written to ICANN, with the possible exception of the US, are not opposed to our proposal on substantive grounds," said Stuart Lawley, president of would-be .xxx operator ICM Registry Inc.

"The ICM application is being held hostage in a dispute between ICANN and the GAC," he added, referring to ICANN's Government Advisory Committee, which has members from dozens of international governments.

Lawley had arrived here working on the assumption that ICANN's board would approve .xxx on Sunday. However, it was pulled from the agenda at the eleventh hour after the GAC asked for more time to review the .xxx proposal.

"Some governments are concerned with the content of .xxx itself, then there are those concerned about process," GAC chair Mohamed Sharil Tarmizi, a senior Malaysian telecommunications regulator, said in an interview with ComputerWire.

Members of the GAC "are just trying to understand the processes ICANN took" he said. Some had assumed that because a proposal to offer .xxx from ICM was rejected in 2000, that it would also be thrown out this time, he said.

There's a bigger political picture too. Following the recent World Summit on the Information Society, a UN meeting on internet governance, governmental interest in the ICANN process has been reignited.

"In some respects, this discussion about .xxx is a proxy for the renewed attention governments are paying to ICANN," ICANN president Paul Twomey told us.

WSIS created a document called the Tunis Agenda, which promised to leave existing internet management bodies including ICANN essentially untouched, while also recognizing the roles government can play.

"It's not unimaginable that some governments went into this GAC meeting with their own interpretation of Tunis Agenda," Tarmizi said. "There were those who saw the Tunis Agenda being a statement of political will for change to take place, there were some who said it just reaffirmed what we had already being saying."

While Tarmizi would not be drawn on which governments are demanding the extra scrutiny of

Who cares

[trollable]

of us?

...as the domain name management body seeks to balance the interests of governments and commercial domain name organizations."

I guess no one.
BTW, ICAAN seems too weak and not able to challenge Verisign or the US governement.

.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).

.con

[PhilHibbs]

All scammers, spammers, phishers, and other Internet fraud should be conducted through .con domains.

So, let's review...

[meisenst]

We don't want ICANN to be run by the United Nations.

No, wait, we don't want ICANN to be run -like- the United Nations. Okay.

So, ICANN has already passed decisions on the major resolutions of interest until next year, and instead is now the subject of political tugs of war, so much so that nothing is being accomplished except idle banter between politicians, committees and private industry.

I'd say that it's already being run like the UN! =)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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

Re:But Didnt Condi Say

[grimJester]

The US wants ICANN to have the appearance of being an international organization without any single country in control, while still reserving the option of stepping in to overturn any decision the US government doesn't like. More on these tactics.

THE answer...

[bsdluvr]

Let's pretend .org stands for .orgasm, and use that one instead.

.xxx already exists

[MobyDisk]

There is already a standardized way to do this, but nobody is using it.

The ICRA (formerly know as RSAC) defines a meta tag that allows a web site to indicate the level of violence, nudity, etc. that is on a page, or a site, or a directory of a site. It is easy, unbiased, and self-reporting. Internet Explorer supports it. I don't know if any other browsers do. All of the off-the-shelf parental control programs support it. But I don't see any sites adding these labels to their pages. Why not?

Maybe I should email the search engines and ask them to support it in their searches. Google already has a safety setting in the image search.