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Senators Renew Call for .XXX Domain
An anonymous reader writes "It's an election year again, and the usual PR causes are being picked up. Senators are once again pushing for a .XXX top-level domain to 'corral pornography'." From the article: "The bill suggests, but does not require, that .xxx serve as the domain name ending. Any commercial Internet site or online service that "has as its principal or primary business the making available of material that is harmful to minors" would be required to move its site to that domain. Failure to comply with those requirements would result in civil penalties as determined by the Commerce Department. It's unclear whether the measure will go very far. First of all, it could be struck down as unconstitutional, said Marv Johnson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "
and when porn.com/net/org/everything else is told to move to as single .xxx, what then of mindless politicians with no understanding of the interwebnet superhighway?
I hate grandstanding.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Failure to comply with those requirements would result in civil penalties....
Which means big freaking whup for internationally hosted sites?
So what happens when Porn sites in other countries refuse to move to the .XXX domain? Would the U.S. Government then try and block non .XXX porn sites?
looking at this map: http://moat.nlanr.net/International/images/collab_ world_map.gif
There are a lot of places that, surprisingly, are NOT The United States of America. I hear that those places are prone to ignoring laws passed by the United States. I cannot fathom why those things that are not America would not follow our laws, but I do believe it would make it hard to use a United States law to get them to move thier titties and cockies to a different server.
liberty >>>>> safety
the Political Inquirer
Despite the huge technical and social problems with this kind of change...
.xxx site can be blocked, browsers can be configured to refuse to load any resource from an .xxx site, search engines can refuse to search/list pages in .xxx domains, etc.
*If* it could happen, it would be great for many of us who want to block it out. Which is the purpose of the bill, of course.
Any mail that references an
It's also possible for this to happen, I believe, to an extent; at the very least, due to the wonderful recently-showcased fact that the US controls the Internet naming infrastructure. Even foreign sites can be forced to comply by simply removing them from the top-level domains, and threatening to remove sites from top-level domains that host adult content.
One thing I'd worry about though is how one defines what is pornography and what isn't. Is a site that talks about STDs and safe-sex going to be labelled as adults-only by the religious right? Is a nudist colony site pornographic or simply counter-culture? Is a site that has "bad words" an adult site?
I would want to see a very clear, objective, strict, narrow definition of adult/pornographic content for this bill. i.e., "Images displaying sexual intercourse." (That is slightly too narrow, I'd think, but the intent should be clear.)
That's not it at all. There are several issues:
.xxx domain. Basically, anything sexual that has no artistic or social merit gets taggede
.com? Write about the hot sex you had last night, get fined (or go to jail).
.com is an international domain.
.kids type domain, where only content that meets certain criteria is allowed *in*. Trying to regulate the entire world's speech in the .com domain "for the children" is a bad idea, totally unconstitutional, and ultimately doomed to failure anyway, since .com is an internataionl domain.
- "Harmful to minors" is in the eye of the beholder. It is unconstitutional for a law to be vague, since it means people can't know if they're breaking the law or not. Is a warez site "harmful to minors" since it corrupts their morals? How about frank discussions of wartime atrocities? Sites that debunk Santa Claus?
- This particular proposed law would require, for instance, websites for crappy teenage hijinks movies (Dukes of Hazard, etc) to use the
- Laws like this impringe on adults' rights to free speech. Have a blog where you share your innermost thoughts? Hosted on a
And, of course, in addition to the blatant unconstitutionality, there's the fact that it's pointless:
The only solution for this kind of thing is a
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
How the hell is porn harmful? That's the worst part of this American culture. Killing people is glorified but OH CHRIST DON'T LET ANYONE BE SEEN MAKING LOVE!
Once upon a time, Frog was taking a look at Toad's garden. Toad had separate plots out marked "carrots" "tomatoes" and "peppers". He also had one plot marked "weeds", which was unkempt and full of weeds. "Toad," asked Frog, "why the hell do you have a separate plot for weeds?!" "Well, Frog, it's so that they stay in that plot and don't go in any of the others."
I've upped my standards, so up yours.
Whoever registers .com.xxx and .net.xxx first wins!
"The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting"
-Gloria Leonard
--
BMO
Finally after 30 minutes of looking for a description of it. Here's a Congresscritter's words on "Harmful to Minors". As defined by him/his committee/his intern in 2003.
Fact Sheet on H.R. 669: Protect Children From Video Game Sex & Violence Act of 2003e t.htm
http://www.house.gov/baca/hotissues/video_factshe
The government has harmed more minors than any pedophile on the planet.
They wont pass national healthcare, so millions of children do not have healthcare.
They do not properly fund education, thus hurting millions of children
They allow corperations to dictate our country and outsource jobs at an alarming rate, thus putting the parents of children out of work, thus taking away any healthcare they had. (if they had any)
They send the children of parents off to die in an illegal war, started by the criminals that run our country. Bush, Cheney, Wolfiwitz, Rove, Powell, Delay, Abramof, Frist, Santorem, hatch, Leiberman, Kerry, and countless others... AND the ones that survive... come back seriously injurred and need special care their entire lives... which the government fails to provide.
They most certainly do hurt far more children than all the pedophiles on the planet combined.
A .xxx domain can't work to do what I think people want of it. At least not by itself. No matter how hard you try, there will be some things that don't make it into .xxx that someone will complain about. The non-.xxx domain can never be clean enough. Plus, putting someone in .xxx will condemn them to additional costs for no other reason than that some people who don't use them think that they should bear additional costs. I think it's great to have a .xxx space for those who think it's a virtue, but treating it like the presence of .xxx means you can then proceed to overregulate .com is bad.
.kids domain would be something that people should aspire to be a member of (to attract that fussy audience that wants it), and that you can be exiled from if you don't adhere. Plus, the cost would be on the people who think it's needed.
.xxx, and let it be unregulated. And let there be .kids and let it be hyper-regulated. And leave the middle ground to those more Libertarian among us who think we don't have to hide out in one or the other space in order to get along just fine.
By contrast, a
There will always be a clash between people who think that "public space" is "unregulated" space and that people who want "regulated" space should get a private area and people who think that "private space" should not be regulated and that people who want regulation should keep it to the "public areas". Society simply does not agree. That points to the notion that there must always be two kinds of public space, and it should not be thought of as all of one kind. So let there be
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
You're running a difficult line here if you support this move. A bill such as this would essentially grant the government the power to regulate some things it has no business regulating. Consider that all "porn" is moved to .xxx. Who decides what's porn and what isn't? Is a movie site for an R-rated movie relegated there? How about my 2TB archive of incredibly disturbing homemade movies I want to give away for free? According to a strict reading of the bill, the former must have an .xxx TLD while the latter can be powerrangres.com.
And once we've partitioned up the internet, what's to say that ISPs can't decide to block all access to these sites for its customers? This may not be a big deal, but what happens when we propose another bill to create a .anti-us TLD for unamerican sites and .heathen for non-christians? And by this day and age, WalMartISP will of course block domains that don't support family values...
So perhaps my tinfoil hat's showing a bit, but this doesn't seem far from some pretty serious censorship waiting to be applied "by choice".
Except that the "anti-sex" interpretation of the Bible isn't the only one. The Bible's full of sex. Song of Soloman, for an obvious example
It's not so much a matter of "the Bible says X, so we believe in X" as it is "we want Y, let's find support in the Bible".
Actually... to paraphrase a comment I heard a long time ago (not sure where from), "erotica is what I like, pornography is what people I don't know like, and filth is what people I dislike like".
I'm often surprised by how true this is - there's a surprising number of people out there whose sexuality would be considered "deviant" at best by mainstream society, and who will still berate you for being a sick pervert because you have some fetishes they don't have. Talk about cognitive dissonance...
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.