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 :(

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?

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?

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! =)

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