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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.
But openly calling for porn?
What will their wives say? (And you can leave Barney Frank out of that - his "friend" pimped a gay sex ring right out of the Senator's apartment...)
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?
Time to register "BringBackPorn.com"
BBH
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
In accordance with megan's law, CmdrTaco.net has been renamed to CmdrTaco.xxx
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
They're going about it all wrong. If they want .xxx to fly, they should require the ICANN to create one and pass a law affirming that if a web site is only accessible via its .xxx name then the site operator is deemed to have taken adequate care to prevent access by minors.
Then let the individual site operators decide whether they want the liability shield. Guess what? They want it. And if that means they elementary schools will have an easy time blocking access I guarantee they won't shed a tear.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Ok, let see what's on channel 169, hmm how about 269 ... wait, try 369 ... nah see what's on 469 .. I didn't mention channel 69 because that's now msnxxxbc.
.. I kind of like to watch my kid and see what she gets into, novel concept.
There are far more greater dangers our children are exposed to on a daily basis than internet porn. I have a 4 month old and quite frankly my fear that she'll have clean air to breathe is more startling to me than what she might or might not be able to access on the internet. But
This is the result of lazy parents who want their p4 to babysit their children safely, without much attention from them.
Much like our lawmakers, parent's need to understand technology before exposing their children (or their legal pads) to it. I think congressmen should have to display a CCIE / CCIP along with that spiffy Harvard degree if they wish to legislate the portion of the internet US entities serve.
But in the spirit of cooperation and being a good citizen, I'll take ta.xxx please.
Could someone much smarter than I am please calculate the amount of oxygen that has been processed (and wasted) on this effort?
Personally, I don't mind the idea of moving porn to a .xxx extension. IMHO, the one thing we need to avoid is tossing up barriers to porn that people have to pay to get around. If porn is free, then the pornographers don't make money. Throwing up artificial barriers to porn creates income opportunities for the pornographers.
.xxx extension might be good in that it would help people who want to avoid porn to filter it out. It might help those looking for porn to find free porn. It seems to me that if a .xxx extension created a path to free porn, it might undermine the income source for pornographers.
For example, a few years back, there was the stupid suggestiong that giving a credit card numbers for age verification would prove a person was old enough to view porn. Getting the credit card number is the hardest part of making an online sale. This idea taught a generation of teenage boys how to steal credit card numbers. It also put a lot of money in the hands of pornographers.
The
believe it or not. There's a concept called a "deadweight loss" in economics. And basically, it's any kind of harm (something someone dislikes for whatever reason) which has no corresponding *benefit* for anyone. If I take a dollar from you, that's not a deadweight loss, because your loss was my gain. But if I burn your dollar, you lost, and no one gained. (That's a simplification, but you get the general idea.) And obviously, deadweight losses are bad.
Now imagine a town that has a problem with thieves breaking windows so they can get into stores and houses to steal TV's. Here is ranking of the TV owners' preferences:
1) No TV's be stolen or windows broken.
2) Windows broken, but no TV's stolen.
3) TV's stolen, but no windows broken.
4) TV's stolen, and window's broken.
Here is the typical thief's order of preference:
1) Get TV's, but not have to break windows.
2) Get TV's and have to break windows.
3) Not get TV's and not have to break windows.
4) Break windows for no reason.
Currently, option number 4) on the TV owners' list, and option 2) on the theives' list are prevailing -- TV owners lose TV's and windows. Thieves get TV's but have to break windows.
Now here's the kicker:
For some economists, an "efficient" move would be to give the thieves free TV's! Why? Well, the thieves are better off -- they get TV's, but no longer have to break windows. The owners are better off because, while they still lose some TV's, at least their windows aren't broken! Everyone wins! Yay!
Except, as anyone with a functioning brain knows, all that would accomplish is that the thieves would get TV's, and then some of them (or newcomers to the thievery profession) would still steal more TV's. The problem, like with the "separate plot for weeds" that you bring up, is that you can't corral thieves by giving them free stuff. Give weeds a place, they'll demand more. Give thieves TV's, and thieves will take more.
It amazes me how the average person sees this, but some economists don't.
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
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
Inconstitutional? That's unpossible!
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".