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The .XXX Saga Continues in Wellington
netrover writes "CircleID is reporting on the latest developments on the .XXX top-level domain as the related ICANN meeting is currently underway in Welligton, New Zealand. From the article: 'The .XXX TLD was widely expected to receive its final approval at the ICANN's last meeting held in Vancouver about 4 months earlier but the discussion was unexpectedly delayed as the organization and governments requested more time to review the merits of setting up such a domain.' But as it has been reported, it appears the discussions at ICANN Wellington are in limbo once again."
First of all even if it DOES pass do they really think they're gonna be able to push all the porn sites into one domain...seriously. Secondly who is gonna be the comittee that sits down and says X is porn, Y isn't. Just how much of a breast can I show before it's porn? Will Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition become porn? This is my biggest concern. It just seems like too much of a damned fine line even bother passing this domain. Just my .02
This demonstrates how stupid most people are about DNS.
.xxx, and types in the IP address? IP addresses don't end in .xxx. He's just sidestepped the filter.
What happens when the kid resolves
Would porn sites have to use email@porn.xxx for their emails? How about for their administrative FTP servers?
This is not something you fix in DNS, you fix it elsewhere. Anyone that doesn't recognize this immediately, has *no business* taking part in the discussion.
Good idea/bad idea issues aside, if this were made mandatory what would the enforcement cost be, and who would pay it?
.XXX domain)? If not, then would they strictly be dictating what kind of content I could put on my site?
Last time I checked, domain names were treated like property. Suppose I own hotsweatymonkeysex.com (which I don't, unfortunately). Could they force me to give up my domain name without compensation (other than a free
The former is reminiscent of "imminent domain" (pun intended), and the latter is a violation of my freedom of speech. The only remaining option I could see would be for them to buy me out, but who would foot the bill?
Given the logistics of it, I could only see this working on a voluntary basis, which is to say that it wouldn't.
No, Slashdot should remain slashdot.org, because it's entirely virtual (despite having a disproportionate number of US readers). There are a lot of sites that should be under country-code domains (all .gov and .mil sites come to mind, as well as every .com run by brick-and-mortar companies that only sell within the States), but Slashdot isn't one of them.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I would be amazed, AMAZED if even 1/5 of the content on P2P networks was not porn.
Do you know what found it's way onto the original Napster (what a great service) fast? Porn. Napster could only share MP3s, or so they thought. It quickly occurred to people that you could just rename your file to .MP3 and then it could be shared. Napster didn't care if your MP3 was 1 meg or 1 gig. You would search for some song and find files named "something about porn or content (change extension to avi).mp3".
Plus there is what is on news groups (NNTP), the web, FTP sites, and who knows where else.
Music is what made P2P famous in the press, but I'm sure it would be just as big and popular if MP3s never existed. Porn ends up driving just about every technology, like it or not.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I always get confused when I hear people whine about how ISPs and the government are encroaching on free use of the Web and promote ways of making things more distributed and much harder to control. Then, in a slightly different context, I hear people support ways to make it much easier for these entities to clamp down on how the Web is used. If it's made easier, people will do it. It's hard for you to filter Internet use because I and many others WANT it to be hard. I don't really care about you filtering your employees' use, and I even support that, but the problem is that any tool that can make it easier for you will make it easier for any other agency as well.
The problem governments have with the .xxx domain is that, while it may make reguilation of porn easier (doubtful, by setting aside a domain for pornography, it _legitimatizes_ it. The govt would be in the uncomfortable position of saying that obscenity/pornography is bad, but here's a government approved place for it.
.xxx to go into effect because it would be endorsing something he wants to eradicate; after all, if porn was gone, .xxx wouldn't be needed. If the next president is a Democrat, .xxx will be endorsed "for our protection" - along with hefty fees to pay for the implementation of said regulation. (e-rate, anyone?)
It's analogous to the situation in Pennsylvania (and Montgomery County MD, where I live) with "states stores". In order to better regulate the sale of hard liquor (presumably more dangerous than beer), sales are only allowed through government owned stores. But this now makes the government the purveyor of a substance which can have dangerous consequences and bad societal results - alcoholism and drunk driving. And when this is pointed out, and the effectiveness of the "regulation" is called to question, the unspoken truth is that the State of PA and MontgoCo are as addicted to the money from sales as alcoholics are to what is sold.
So Bush doesn't want
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
No, it really wouldn't. The trouble with black or white-listing based on TLD is that the implications don't hold up. if/when
Both of these implications would be totally untrue. With
Also, there will always be fringe cases that don't neatly fit into a category.
"Why do we need a .xxx domain anyway?"
.XXX has been around for a very very long time. The prehistory can be told later, but the point is it was proposed to ICANN, they approved it and they submitted it to the Department of Commerce to rubber stamp as ICANN only makes "recommendations". The DoC said no. Why?
.XXX.
That isn't the issue. Can ICANN get it into the US Government controlled root servers, THAT'S the issue.
They can't.
Here's what really happened.
Wellll, turns out a right wing group who had the ear of Bush had trundled into Karl Rove's offifce about that time and had three "action items": 1) No gay marriage, 2) No stem cell research and 3) no
Rove read the list and said "anout that third one", made a phone call and the newly appointed head of DoC stepped on it.
ICANN bullshitted and suggested it needed fruther study by world governments.
Because as everybody knows, the naming of hosts on the network has to be ratified if all the worlds governments. Never mind the DNS apparantly worked ok for over a decade without any world governments knowing the network even existed.
ICANN is a very expensive single-point-of-failure. A choke-hold on the entire net. And now you're watching it in action. Or inaction.
The US governemnt will never let go of it's control of the root, ever. When it came dangerously close to looking like the warring facitons of the DNS wars of 1996 would actually agree to settle their differences and cooperate, that movement was torpedod by the man who would later be the head of ICANN. Old military officers never really retire it seems.
You might ask why the US government still has control of the Internet domain name system. Good question.
Recall that it was the genius of Steve Wolff that the NSF backbone was turned over to private industry and the commercial internet was born. I did ask him why he didn't do the DNS and IP space as well. "I forgot about that; it didn't seem important at the time" was the answer.
It's long been joked that the seventh layer of the TCP/IP protocol stack is the "political layer" and it's no longer a joke. The technical administration of Internet names and numbers should not have any politicians in the loop.
They have the laws of their own countried to do what they want - Jon Postel recognized this, hence the requirement that a cctld administrator be a resident of that country - but ICANN made a deal with the devil, in a nutshell "if we recognize you and your government will you recognize us as authoritative over the internet" an that was it, Pandoras box was opened. And now the goverments of the world hold the internet by the nuts.
My day in the sun was as the formation of the DNSO within ICANN in Berlin way back when. It was suggested by the ICANN board that a "Government Advisoty Baord" (GAC) was needed by consensus. When I got my 2.5 minutes at the mike I asked for a show of hands for who thought this was a good idea. Thirteen people (out of about 800) put their hands up and the ones I could see were all government poeple. There is a realvideo (sic) archive of this at the Berkman Centre for Law and Technology site.
The irony is ICANN is not supposed to set policy, it's supposed to measure "community consensus" and make recommendations. But, the way they change the bylaws to suit themselves that may not even be true any more.
Need Mercedes parts ?
>>likewise if there was a .safe, the implication would be that anything other than .safe TLDs contained 'unsafe' content
.safe domain be implemented is that anything in .safe should be, well, safe. It's not saying that microsoft.com is pr0n, just that microsoft.safe is not pr0n.
.xxx, does anyone really think that all the porn sites in the world are suddenly going to drop their high traffic URLs in favour of the .xxx equivalents?
.safe domain, he/she would need to submit the content for review by the registrar. This would be similar to how movies and games are rated.
That does not nescessarily follow. The only thing one could assume should a
>>With
Hence the need for a controlled domain. If one tried to register a
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.