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."

Comments

Is this necessary?

[Poromenos1]

Why do we need a .xxx domain anyway? Will it make easier for people to block these sites? You can't get into them unless you pay anyway. Is it better for categorization? All the other sites are in 2-3 TLDs. I just don't see what this would help.

Re:Is this necessary?

[Bios_Hakr]

It really is the wrong way to think about it. It'd be better if there was a .safe domain.

My company pays a lot of money for filtering software. On top of that, we fire dozens of employees a year for doing shit they shouldn't online. Most of those are porn-related. It would be so nice if I could just block everything, then allow .safe domains.

There should be a better catagorization of the internet. We should purge all .com/net/org and never allow them to be used again. We should enforce the use of country domains. Slashdot.org should be slashdot.or.us. Or maybe, since they advertise, they should be moved to a .co.us instead.

Re:Is this necessary?

[SeeMyNuts!]

It just occurred to me that the domain system has similar flaws as the DOS/Windows drive letter system. The top-level .com, .net, C:, D:, etc. are so separated that moving between them is inconvenient at best, and once committed to one choice it pretty much is permanent. E.g., don't try to move MS Office from C: to D: or vice versa...the registry is *not* your friend. There are just too many adult sites (spread internationally) committed to .com, .net, .biz, etc. that filters working on .xxx will accomplish nothing.

Re:Is this necessary?

[drsmithy]

Who would be responsible for determining which domain sites would belong to? Would it be up to the sites themselves?

In a sane system, yes.

It doesn't seem like such an opt-in approach would do much to segregate pornography away from less potentially objectionable content.

But it would. Difficult as this is for anti-porn crusaders to comprehend, the people selling porn really have no interest in aiming their products at a) adults that aren't interested in looking at porn (small as a such a group is) and b) children.

I would expect porn sites to exodus to a .xxx (or equivalent) domain en masse, were it to become available (although obviously this process would take several years). Mainly because then the people trying to filter porn out would have a much easier job, and their biggest opponents would, largely, not have a leg to stand on.

Where do you draw the line? What about sexual education/health web sites?

You make the system voluntary. 99% of porn sites would take advantage of that, because its better for them as well as everyone else.

More formally, local laws *could* be implemeted saying the "porn sites" must be in .xxx, depending on whatever their local definition of "pornography" was. Personally I would have no problem with that.

Re:Is this necessary?

[Bios_Hakr]

I've thought long and hard about that too. It really is a complicated problem. How many customers from how many countries does one need before registering a .com?

Should Microsoft be allowed a .com?

Should Slashdot?

How about me? Should I be allowed to run a .org? Why or why not? /. grew out of a blog. It was CTs personal site where people began to e-mail him stuff to post. Eventually, it grew into this. At what point should Rob have been allowed to register a .org?

Once he started selling ads, should he have lost the .org designation? After all, /. is part of a for-profit company; OSDN.

Amazon.com should be disbanded.

Amazon.co.ca would buy/sell in Canada, .co.uk would buy/sell in the UK, and .co.us could buy/sell in the US.

It's that fucking simple.

Re:Is this necessary?

[Jaruzel]

It is that fucking simple, if you were rebuilding the Internet from the start, but unfortunately we're not, and the current system is SO fubarred that theres no way in hell that it'll ever be fixed in a way that most would find acceptable.

Whereas most would agree that the current TLD system has been totally abused (I count myself as one of the guilty people, having several .com's and one .org, and being neither a US company* nor a charity), theres simply no way to reset all the domain names to a sensible single tree hierachical naming convention without severely disrupting routers, firewalls, proxys, caches, blacklists, whitelists, favorites, links bar, and every single page on the internet that links to a remote site. Yeah, you could put a translation layer in so that the original name still works, but as any infrastructure architect will tell you, these temporary 'fixes' almost always end up being permemanent .

Back to the topic in hand. .XXX is a bloody good idea, ONLY if sites with adult content are forced to switch. If they are not forced it's a totally pointless exercise. Why is it a good idea? well for starters we all know that viewing internet pr0n at work is against office regs (unless you work in the pr0n industry I guess**), so removing those 1000s of pr0n URLs from the corporate proxy list and replacing them with a single 'Block: *.XXX' rule makes it oh so simple for those network admins. For parents who feel that censorship is the way to safeguard your kids online (and not the old fashioned method of actually talking to them) then knowing that Firewall Product X 'BLOCKS *ALL* .XXX DOMAINS!' would give them complete peace of mind.

Of course those of us who like and enjoy pr0n on a regular basis, wont be affected by the .xxx change - if anything

Personally, I get my pr0n from usenet, it's free :)

-Jar.

* I know .com isn't solely US companies anymore, but it was intended to be.
** I once worked for a UK broadcast company (one of the big-five) and they had a whole dept dedicated to maintaining their own pr0n sites.

Slashdot's 15 millionth comment!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's here! PARTAY!!!

local blogger at ICANN

[Anonymous Coward]

David Farrar is an InternetNZ councillor and is attending ICANN in Wellington... he's blogging on the meetings at:

http://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/

mixed in with his other stuff of course.

Useful stuff like:

But what is interesting is who else is against the proposal. I had lunch yesterday with the Communications Director of the trade association of the adult entertainment industry. And they are not in favour of .xxx but very much against it.

Their fears are the opposite of the US Government. They fear .xxx TLD may end up becoming compulsory for adult entertainment websites, with governments then legislating to make it mandatory for such sites to be in .xxx TLD. They also believe credit card companies might refuse to provide services to adult sites which are not in the .xxx TLD which will give the sponros of that TLD de facto control over the entire industry.

Go crash his server.

Re:More Appropriate Name?

[lgftsa]

UserFriendly.org already has a claim on ICANT internet.

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=19980509

...though that won't stop ICANN, judging by past actions.

Two issues

[ZachPruckowski]

There are two issues that I see with .xxx

1) Define porn. Any definition will have to involve questions of artistic merit, like they deal with in other cases.

2) What do you do with hybrid sites? I mean, wikipedia has several graphic illustrations in the human sexuality articles. Does wikipedia have to move fully to .xxx?

I have a better idea

[AusIV]

There are a lot of flaws with the idea of forcing porn sites onto an .XXX TLD. The most obvious is that it can only effect sites located within the US, but that aside, I've asked before, what happens when you have somepornsite.com and somepornsite.net owned by two different people? Is it just first come first served for the .XXX domain? And could somebody who doesn't own either of those buy the .XXX and hike up the price real high, since there will be a fight to get that domain?

And what about doorway sites? Could somepornsite.com stay open to redirect people to their new domain? If so, could it be an automatic redirect?

Forcing porn sites to buy another domain is, in my opinion unreasonable. I don't think the government ought to be trying to put such regulations on the industry to begin with, but if they are going to make such regulations, they ought to do it with the subdomain rather than the TLD. For example, at the top of this page you see politics.slashdot.org. The porn sites could keep their domains and not have to pay anything extra, the only restriction being that they have to use xxx.somepornsite.net instead of www.somepornsite.com. It wouldn't cost them anything, and it would give the politicians what their looking for by creating something that's easy to block.

As I say, I'm very much opposed to any of the above regulations, but I think my suggestion is a less obtrusive method.

Is it really a bad idea?

[Creepyguywithastick]

Couldn't we just host all NWS pictures at a .xxx image host? "TinyPic.xxx"? It seems like it'd make filtering easier to just say "Don't load anything from a .xxx" domain rather than go through all kinds of complex protocol to determine if a site contains pornography. A lot of hosts have a problem with hosting porn anyway.

Where to apply?

[Jugalator]

I'm not so sure porn is so bad for my kids, but I don't want them to risk being brainwashed by religions and want to filter them more easily. Where do I apply for a .rel? :-p

Seriously, when the DNS is used to push for stances a group of people may have, I doubt it's used for the right purposes. It's not a political tool to censor content "unpleasant" to some, it's a tool to build hierarchies.

Re:It is cowardly to do nothing about pornography

[Tim C]

The Internet is a public place and decency laws that apply to public conduct ought to apply.

Whose laws? In some places, a topless woman on the main street of town would be arrested or even stoned; other places no-one would pay her any attention. Which of those societies gets to impose their laws on the other?

Feel free to legislate your section of the internet, but keep away from everyone else's.

If there's a strip club on Broadway and Main they have signs to indicate what the content on the inside is going to be like so my kids can't accidently walk inside.

Actually they have those signs up to try to entice adults to go in, not to keep kids out. The bouncers keep kids and other undesirables out, yes, but in the case of the kids it's mostly because

a) they don't have much money
b) the strip joint will lose their licence if they get caught letting kids in too often

It's not like that on the Internet but it should be.

Every single porn site I've ever seen has had a warning along the lines of "Explicit content past this page - if you're too young or offended by this stuff, keep out!". That's analagous to your signs. Most sites also require a valid credit or debit card to gain full entry; that's analagous to your doorman. True, it's no guarantee that a kid can't get in, but then you'll be wanting to ask the parents why they have a credit card (or why the parents weren't careful enough with their own).

Do you have the moral courage to take a stance or are you a coward?

Yes, I have the moral courage to take a stance. As another respondent already said, I have the courage to take a stand for my morals, which are clearly not identical to yours. I'm sorry, but I really don't see anything particularly wrong with graphic depictions of sex. No, I don't want my six year old viewing hardcore porn; that's one of the reasons why I make sure I'm with her when she's using the Internet, so she doesn't accidentally stray from disney.com or nickjr.co.uk on to a porn site. But then I'm odd like that; I take responsibilty for what my kid is exposed to.

Re:Think again.

[Bootvis]

Only slightly off-topic:
The origin of these crosses is not known but historians believe it is a reference to 3 plagues (water, fire and smallpocks) that killed a lot of inhabitants.