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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."
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
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.
.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?
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,
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.
Um... that makes sense, I guess. In other news, Slashdot is criticised for posting dupes as frequently as it is criticised for duplicating posts.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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?
sig.
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
You might as well have both TLDs and make it known "East is East & West is West".
Turn
As far as
All scammers, spammers, phishers, and other Internet fraud should be conducted through .con domains.
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! =)
Green's Law of Debate: Anything is possible if you don't know what you're talking about.
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
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
Let's pretend .org stands for .orgasm, and use that one instead.