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?

[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?

[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.

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?

Re:Think again.

[macdaddy357]

.XXX? Why not .CUM?

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

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.