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

More Appropriate Name?

[eldavojohn]

...it appears the discussions at ICANN Wellington are in limbo once again.

Perhaps we should change their organization name from ICANN to a more appropriate one.

Like ICANT.

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.

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't get into them unless you pay anyway.

There is plenty, plenty of freely available pornography on the Internet. Enough to last the addict his whole life and result in chronic pain from over-masturbation. The first place pornography spread on the Internet, the alt.binaries.* hierarchy on Usenet, has always been free. Unless you just discovered the Internet yesterday, I fail to understand how you don't already know this.

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?

[mrchaotica]

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.

Re:Is this necessary?

[MBCook]

The AC that replied to you is right. I haven't been on P2P in a while (the music died, man!) but if there is one thing that is one P2P it is porn. Every single kind you can think of is probably there. And it's free. I'm sure there is true amateur content that people made of themselves, movies people took off web sites and put up, scans of magazines, copies of DVDs and VHS cassettes, etc.

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.

Re:Is this necessary?

[mattwarden]

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.

Re:Is this necessary?

[user24]

It'd be better if there was a .safe domain.

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 .xxx is approved, the implication will be that every non .xxx TLD won't contain adult content, likewise if there was a .safe, the implication would be that anything other than .safe TLDs contained 'unsafe' content.
Both of these implications would be totally untrue. With .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? No, they'll just register the .xxx as well as keeping their .com, and I bet the .com's will remain higher traffic than the .xxx's for quite some time. This is why it just won't work. If approved, this will just generate a lot of revenue for a bunch of registrars, with no benefit to users, either those who are looking for porn, or those who are trying to avoid it.

Also, there will always be fringe cases that don't neatly fit into a category.

Re:Is this necessary?

[rs79]

"Why do we need a .xxx domain anyway?"

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. .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?

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 .XXX.

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.

Re:Is this necessary?

[Bios_Hakr]

>>likewise if there was a .safe, the implication would be that anything other than .safe TLDs contained 'unsafe' content

That does not nescessarily follow. The only thing one could assume should a .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.

>>With .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?

Hence the need for a controlled domain. If one tried to register a .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.

Re:Is this necessary?

[Achromatic1978]

Or, for gay porn you could register an.us ...

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.

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.

I sure hope this doesn't happen.

[the_macman]

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

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?

Re:If TLD were enforced like they are supposed to

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

This demonstrates how stupid most people are about DNS.

What happens when the kid resolves .xxx, and types in the IP address? IP addresses don't end in .xxx. He's just sidestepped the filter.

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.

Re:Think again.

[macdaddy357]

.XXX? Why not .CUM?

Cost of enforcement?

[The Waxed Yak]

Good idea/bad idea issues aside, if this were made mandatory what would the enforcement cost be, and who would pay it?

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 .XXX domain)? If not, then would they strictly be dictating what kind of content I could put on my site?

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.

Fundamental problem for govt's and .XXX

[R2.0]

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.

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 .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?)

Drilling down..

[etzel]

Waht's next?

.069 - why not.
.mlf - no comments.
.les - keep them coming.
.hom - ughh!
.ana - maybe.
.sad - pass.
.mas - pass.
.bes - never mind.

My personal favotite: .tit

Re:Think again.

[Filip22012005]

These are spread throughout the city. SFW

Plagarized article by a troll.

[Animats]

The previous posting is an exact copy of this posting by me from December 1, 2005.

The copier may be trying to raise his karma. See his posting history.

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.