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ICANN Meeting Puts Off XXX Domain Again
An anonymous reader wrote to mention an International Herald story about a recent ICANN meeting on the proposed .XXX domain. Australia, the U.S., and the EU have moved to block the idea, with most commentators surmising this will prevent the concept from ever moving forward. From the article: "Some people maintain that a triple-x domain name, and the ability to enforce rules to qualify for it, would rein in an out-of-control Internet phenomenon. In registering, a company could have to abide by ratings agency standards, require proof of age for entrants, maybe even pay for Internet filtering research. The company pushing the idea, ICM Registry, also argues that dot-xxx would be good for customers of pornography sites, assuring them of certain business benchmarks, like being free of adware or computer viruses."
How are they going to guarantee that? And if that's their plan, why don't they implement it for .com as well?
porn sites garenteed to be safe and malware free? I'm sure most male (and probably most female too) would love the prospect of the ability to get porn *legally* without the risk of infecting their PC. Vetting the domains could stop underage people both visiting and appearing in .xxx sites too.
Of course no politition wants to actively promote porn so they'll stamp on it to promote 'christian values'
the decision on xxx domain is taking looong time, just like they never reach orgasm in xxx movies till bazillion years.
That they keep putting this off is because of the embarassment it would cause when .xxx sites outnumber all .com .net .biz and .org sites put together.
Why are these countries opposed to something that would allow contgrol over what most of the conservatives in those countries claim to hate?
I would like to find a link to the responses by the countries blocking it if anybody has those in more detail.
New and improved Guilt. Now its alcohol soluble!
It seems like all these extra rules and details are just going to get in the way of the point of having a .xxx TLD, namely that "pron goes here".
"The company pushing the idea, ICM Registry, also argues that dot-xxx would be good for customers of pornography sites, assuring them of certain business benchmarks, like being free of adware or computer viruses."
The fact is, laws passed for the "common good" invariably end up harming those they were notionally intended to help and in fact end up greatly benefiting a very small group of people.
In this case, the average punter will see his prices rise, to pay for all the regulation the porn sites would bear, the number and variety of porn sites would decrease because of their extra costs and ICM Registry would do very well out of it *indeed*.
I have tagged this story with the tag "boobies" and I hope you do too.
Cowards!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Since when does porn have to be regulated like the tobacco industry? It's not like these sites are ruining lives by giving people cancer.
And what's to stop me from making amazingsexvideos.COM and not paying fo the fees? I doubt that not having a .xxx TLD will decrease the amount of traffic I see...
Quite honestly, I am tired of waiting for the .xxx TLD. Without the .xxx TLD where else am I going to obtain my adult entertainment?
Why is it that slashdot is so obsessed with this issue (I'd track down the links, but I see a post on this topic at least every 2 weeks so its not like you have to look far to find them).
Honestly, NO ONE seems to think this is a good idea. Governments don't want it because they think it'll somehow legitimize it. The XXX industry doesn't want it because they think they'll get pushed off into some dark corner of the web and shunned easily by ISPs. HOW and WHY does this issue keep coming up--none of the truly interested parties are in favor of it!
Does that mean I can then secure whitehouse.com to peddle my lucrative house painting business?
Is not FORCE people to use .xxx. Just make it a choice. Then whoever is offended by porn can simply block out .xxx, and they can at least block out a good portion of the porn sites out there. The reputable sites (Playboy, etc) will probably switch, so you'll at least clean up the internet a LITTLE bit. I think doing this would be better than nothing.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
adding a XXX domain wont solve anything. Its like having a town where everyone HAS to carry a gun. It doesnt address the problem of guns being everywhere else in the world.
a better solution is to create a domain that only has child-friendly material on it. Like creating a town with NO guns allowed.
Parents could choose to only allow their kids to visit this domain and be assured they wont stumble across pictures that they might not want them to see.
I don't think I would have my children live in censorland, but at least the parents afraid of letting their children see the real world would have a place to hide it from them.
Because the .com TLD is the repository of all crud. It's open to everybody.
.com, the registrars should guarantee that it means something. For example, the .edu domain is restricted, and the registrar (a compnay caled Educase) is responsible for guaranteeing that it doesn't get full of spammers and scammers. Some country code domains are usefully geographically limited. By contrast, the .biz domain is stupid, because there's nothing in it that wouldn't be better off in .com unless you're trying to fool somebody with your scuzzy "CapitalOne.biz" domain.
.edu domains because Educase backs them with their reputation. If the rep fails, the .edu domain owners will be pissed off, because they're paying for exclusivity.
.xxx domains who host malware. The guys keeping them honest will be the .xxx domain owners themselves, who are selling a legal but sleazy project where some degree of trust is needed. (In the real world would you trust a porn purveyor with your credit card?)
.xxx domain owners would get people less wary of visiting their sites. They'd pay through the nose for that. They can't guarantee it completely, but if they investigate reports seriously and shut down domains spewing malware they might just get some trust. I'd be willing to give them a shot. It's a valid reason to establish a new domain, unlike most of the other new TLDs, which are just pork for domain registrars.
If the TLD isn't
People trust
So maybe, just maybe, these guys will be vigilant about kicking out the registrations of people with
That "guaranteed free of malware" would involve a lot of vigilance on their part, and in return the
"I cannot believe that America is so pro-porn. All the research shows how it leads to violence against women."
Links to all this research, please?
"Americans are all sick degenerate perverts."
Also, making a generalization about roughly 300 million people is not very nice. It's like saying that all Chinese (or Indian) people wear funny shoes. There are people in every group that wear funny shoes, just as there are "sick degenerate perverts" everywhere, but that doesn't make everyone one of them.
What about sites like the Online Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition or the Online Victoria's Secret Catalogue go? They're not porn, but they're definately in that grey area. Most people would consider them fine for a regular .com, but you gotta figure that there'll be a vocal minority of people who'll be like "All boobies must be XXX, won't somebody PLEASE think of the children? I'm old and stodgy, get off my lawn, blah blah blah" .XXX is something that is a good idea, but there's definately some areas that need to be hashed out still.
When asked, my 6-year-old daughter strongly endorsed the idea of a separate space on the Internet for pornography.
Of course, that's not quite how I put it to her. I said some people wanted a place on the Web where only adults could go.
"And a place where only kids could go, like pbskids.org?" she asked, leaping to a conclusion I hadn't considered. "That's a great idea."
My question is why are there so many people who refuse to consider the much more logical course of creating ".safe" domains? It just makes much more sense then trying to force or coerce objectionable material into a single domain and would be much more effective for those who want to censor.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
It won't stop at .xxx. Then they'll want .sex and .cum. With four letter like .info then they could ask for .fuck, .anal, .oral, .shit, .dvda, and probably .wank. But let's not stop there with just four letters why not .boobies, .masturbation, .cunnilingus, .blow-job, .fisting, .hot-karl, or even .filthy-sanchez. Yes, the possibilities are endless.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
I'm guessing it's the XXX sigma that is causing the fuss. I say they change it to .AAA. Can't see that offending anyone. Okay you piss off one road service company but I can live with that.
Don't feed the troll... it's just a merkin trying to make non-merkins look stupid.
Lalala
Here's a link to some research and here's another. The evidence of the research is clear. There is a causal link between men using pornography and then commiting rape.
"I thought America was the land of the free, but it seems women are not free from offensive pornography!"
.xxx so that you can just block it and not have to worry about it anymore?
This way of thinking is one of the biggest problems with people in America. You have all kinds of nifty rights under the Constitution. You definitely don't have the right to not be offended.
And...if you don't want people to have to look at "offensive pornography," why not fight for
What about sites like the Online Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition or the Online Victoria's Secret Catalogue go? They're not porn, but they're definately in that grey area.
.xxx TLD is a good idea, but not because of censorship.
.xxx names, then we would by necessity need to define "porn" to decide who has to move, and that is a difficult task at best, and it wouldn't guarantee that suddenly .com is free of porn.
.xxx domain names can guarantee that the sites who buy .xxx domain names are reputable and free of [spy|ad|mal|phish]ware, then people would probably be willing to pay a premium for access to that site. (If I recall correctly, .edu does this type of thing already.) It would not take the malware out of porn sites, but it will take reputable porn sites away from the disreputable ones. Ask yourself, would you be more willing to give your credit card to a .com site or a .biz site? What about a .edu? If that same level of trust was created for the .xxx domain, everyone benefits: the reputable porn sites get a good name, the customers get a better porn-browsing experience, and the registrars get to make money.
.kid TLD, which is porn-free. Block everything but .kid and let your kids run wild and free without seeing a single filthy, traumatizing boobie.
The creation of a
If we tried to force all pornographic sites to move to
However, internet porn is a very popular vector for the delivery of spyware, malware, and phishing attacks, because of its popularity and taboo nature in our society. If the company that registers
If we really wanted to make censorship easy, let's create a
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
If only I could delay blowing my load as long as they have managed to delay this conference.
If only...
I am for the regulation of pornography because I don't want kids to be able to access it. There need to be reasonable regulations in place to allow only adults to have straight forward access to it, and the .xxx domain would represent a critical move in the direction of protecting the average kid from easy access to porn. From a libertarian POV, porn must be regulated because children are not part of the equation as they are not "consenting adults." If they want to become adults, then they need to become emancipated which would naturally carry the added responsibilities and no excuse making that comes with being a legal adult.
.xxx. They'd have no reason not to. There could even be a 1 year period in which .com domains for porn sites get automatically redirected to the .xxx domain legally.
Most countries where pornography is legal would probably support forcing all bonafide porn sites to use
That said, I am ashamed sometimes by how unwilling social conservatives are to compromise. They act like compromise is the last word, that all compromises are set in stone with divine fire and that their opposition has immediately won if they don't get What They Want, When They Want It. All or nothing, so fine, most people give them nothing.
Most of them are too stupid to be effective leaders. Anyone who is unwilling to shop around and elect leaders who can piece together what they want in politics deserves what they get. It's the reason why I couldn't care less about the problems plaguing a lot of poor areas in the cities. They vote lock step Democrat each year, and so their vote is taken for granted. Hell, the Democrats could do everything but burn a cross and scream "WHITE POWER!!!" in the middle of DC and they'd still get their 3 electoral college votes in 2008.
That's the same problem that social conservatives have. The Republicans take them for granted. They get elected by promising them what they cannot deliver, and in doing so get a free ticket to a lot of great benefits. When was the last time the Republicans made a **credible** attack on abortion? I'm anti-abortion, and I voted Libertarian because Badnarik said that he'd not support a candidate that could actually read Roe v. Wade in the very plain text of the U.S. Constitution. He didn't trust such a nominee because he'd be some statist bastard that'd say that the interstate commerce clause gives the federal govenrment the right to regulate the height of the plants in your home. Yet I get told I'm wasting my vote for going Libertarian by those "hard-headed realists" who voted for Bush in part on the abortion issue.
But, whatever. The social conservatives get to play martyr. Woe is fucking us. We can't affect the culture because we're a bunch of idiots who cannot stomach thinking outside the box. They pushed Bush to shitcan this proposal the first time because it might lend legitimacy to the porn industry. Oh really, then all I can say is that if porn was really in need of legitimacy, "God's Own Party" wouldn't be inviting the likes of Mary Carey to fund raisers. *Sigh* Those that have eyes to see, let them see. Those that have ears to hear, let them hear. Those that have brains to think, let them think...
Slashdot is boring. I'm gonna go view some more pornography. I'm so degenerate. *fapfapfapfap*
.kids = gauranteed to be kid-friendly (whatever THAT means)
.xxx = gauranteed to be porn-friendly (whatever THAT means)
.com = no garauntees
The only problem is figuring out who backs the garauntees but I suppose that's why you have registration fees
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
Further more, it is one thing to have age restrictions for models on these sites, but is it really apropriate to tell people they must be at least 18 years of age to view porn? I don't believe I have met one single person in my life who has never seen _any_ porn prior to the age of 18.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
I'm not certain this would work technically, is there anyone out there who can help shoot it down?
I would love to be able to go to Google, type in a word like "breast" and not have a lot of porn sites come up, but instead be able to filter the search to just medical and medical related websites.
RFC 3675
http://outcampaign.org/
Somehow the NRA feels that the US totally controls the internet and that the US should run ICANN. at least this is according to the latest NRA magazine, I am not sure how ICANN and the internet are leading to the eroding of the 2nd ammendment. I am a member but sometimes the leaps of logic that is made truly boogle the mind. I just want the us to keep their noses in their own business and each person to make the choice what their kids watch or do not look at. Yet another way that ICANN really isn't seperate. Technology decisions need to be removed from individual morality concerns. No one else needs to tell anyone else what they can't look at.
An armed society is a polite Society
Is this going to be a mandated move? IE: Will it be mandated that established porn sites move to their .XXX counterpart? Or, will this be voluntary? Also, what about borderline sites which serve multiple purposes, but do have pornographic content? If it's mandated, will this end up putting sites like that out of business?
All the research shows how it leads to violence against women.
This, from the types of people who stone women to death and own them like property.
It will never happen because the U.S. and Australian governments at least, among others, will never allow themselves to get into a situation where they appear to be endorsing porn. If they allow special technology to be built into the internet specifically for porn sites, conservatives will be up in arms. Creating a special domain for porn is simply not an option for these governments. Maybe in five or ten years things will be different, but at this time the U.S. is very religious and very conservative and will never endorse a porn-specific domain.
It's the greater threat. More wars have been started over religious differences than just about anything else; from the Crusades, to modern day Jihads and fatwahs against the Americans.
Worse yet, three of the major religions, ( Christianity, Islam, and Judaism ) have Holy Scriptures that are stomach-churningly evil.
Islam is an obvious target; the sexism and rampant discrimination against women's rights is obvious. But the Bible also contains passages which not only condone but encourage human slavery, genocide, and the slaughter of innocent children, and both Christians and Jews share many of those passages of Holy Scripture.
No one bats an eye when the Bible is available online; but it's full of horrible, evil docrines that are simply unacceptable in modern society: (for example, a man's wife is an article of property, just like a cow or a donkey, according to the Tenth Commandment. Children are torn to pieces by a bear summoned by the will of God when they call Elijah "baldy". Women, men, and boys are slaughtered on the battlefields by the Will of God, but He orders the young girls are to be "taken" (presumably as concubines (ie. sex-slaves), but perhaps an actual mass child-rape is what was intended). In either case, it's beyond sickening.
I'd rather my sons and daughters, should I be fortunate enough to have any, grow up with a healthy appreciation for sexuality and it's place in their lives; and I'd rather they never even consider the notion that women should be kept as slaves, or children tortured, let alone tortured and raped, under any circumstances. Given the option, porn is a thousand times healthier than The Bible, The Koran, or the Torah.
Porn may indeed prove to be bad for children, or for society in general; but until you ban religion, you might as well lock the barn door after the stampede has torn the entire building down.
Perhaps he should have asked for unbiased studies and research? It is hard to trust something from "Morality Media" and something from a person who has 'dedicated her life to stopping violence against women'.
"Down with this sort of thing!"
Drill baby drill - on Mars
The ICANN guys were too busy masturbating to schedule the damn meetings.
My sig is too lon
There may well be a causal relationship involved, but I seriously doubt that pornography is the cause. More likely, a man's obsession with his own sexual gratification and the effect of sex on unwilling women will cause him to seek out both porn and rape victims.
Removing the porn won't solve the problem, just give him one less outlet... and as a woman, I would prefer if all the creeps stayed inside with their kinky porn collections (internet or otherwise) and left me alone.
I'm going to quote a previous post of mine regarding why .xxx isn't a great idea:
.xxx is a blanket statement. It allows only one bit of information to be stored regarding a website -- contains "adult" content or not. Use a tagging system, and you can say with page-level precision, contains NUDITY, contains PROFANITY, whatever.
.xxx is already a vastly technically outclassed solution.
.xxx URLs from people. However, TLDs are exceedingly poor technical choices for this purpose. It would be just as easy to obtain this data via the IP address or an alternate URL, not just .xxx. Hell, I could easily see someone setting up a DNS that mirrors .xxx just to screw with the system -- foo.xxx would also be reachable via "foo.xxx.pornbypass.com"
.xxx TLD block, whereas metatags in a page cannot be bypassed (unless the proxy specifically filters these metatags out).
.xxx.us. There are undoubtedly some people who honestly don't realize that there are vastly different social standards in the world. In a conservative Muslim country, what we consider street clothing on a woman might be considered obscene. While we consider female toplessness unacceptable in the United States, folks in the UK get female toplessness on their TV regularly. No matter what bar is chosen for .xxx, it is going to be completely unacceptable to some people.
.xxx -- the fact that it is essentially a new tax sending money to registrars, the fact that it will cause social friction between countries, the fact that it starts a precedent of using TLDs to segregate content (completely broken, unless you have only one classification that you wish to do on the Internet), the fact that it ignores metatags...I honestly think that every person out there that is in favor of a .xxx TLD has not thoroughly thought through the implications.
It's a bad idea.
If you want to rate pages, there are already standard mechanisms for plugging content metadata into pages. Just for a start, this is a technically-superior system -- there is absolutely no reason to need to purchase an entirely separate TLD just because you have a few pages that contain adult content. The domain name registrars would have loved this -- heck, they'd love people to have to buy a new TLD for *every* sort of content, not just adult.
In addition,
So
What else is wrong with it? The obvious point of such a TLD would be to block
Any proxy usage will bypass a
And, finally, the worst issue. It promises a long and unpleasant future of social problems, precisely because it is a TLD. Even if this were a technically good solution, it would still be better to have
The argument "more data is better than none" does have some merit, but the disadvantages of
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Now I RTFA and I didn't see that phrase. Our local press put on a wry grin and said The point is, in spite of all the protestations earlier about who controls ICANN, here it is in headlines, ICANN is controlled by governments, bureaucrats, born-again Southern Christians, and mullahs.
some people think a women exposing her breast to feed a baby is porn.
Which is the problem, who decides what is pornographic? I mean what porno grafic to a Relgious nut, probably isn't to me. At some point they will overlap, naturally.
There are people that get upset because a statue has a penis, or a breast.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Some people would even argue that certain parts of Wikipedia constitute pornography. Do we force an encyclopedia into .xxx, too?
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
In other words, they opened Pandora's box long ago and now there's a huge mess of p0rn all over the place. Good luck trying to clean this shiat up!
And NO, there WON'T EVER be pictures of CowboyNeal naked. Period.
Don't even think about it.
"How can it be the land of the free when I'm not free to limit other people's freedom? This country would be much freer if everyone had to do as I say."
You, sir, hurt my brain.
That is a great idea! All we'd have to do is hand-filter every single website everywhere in the world for any content that might offend someone. How many can there be?
A .xxx domain would just be a marketing tool for porn purveyors. That's all it would be, and any claims that it would make filtering easier for parents and schools are a con game.
.com names: porn sellers could leave their current operations intact. Or they could keep their .com host names pointing to the same machines as the .xxx servers; or they could use the .com names for sites that lead users to the .xxx sites by IP address.
It wouldn't reduce the amount of porn accessible through
Porn hosts will not be segregated to a specific IP address range (impossible to enforce anyway), so filtering efforts would not be easier or more effective than they currently are.
I am a porn webmaster! Yes to the mandatory .XXX urls! And speaking as a quivering pasty-skinned U.S. porn webmaster, it would be the best thing since glossy print! Please, please, pleaaaase, please Mr Baucus and Mr Pryor, make my sites diiiiiirty again! And if anyone is actually reading this, I am not being tongue in cheek, I am absolutely serious. XXX would be great! Please pass it!
Please make the forbidden hard to find. Make it seedy, make it dirty, and the seedier and dirtier the neighborhood the better. Lets go back to YOUR teenage years. Let's go to the bad side of town driven by a bothersome urge that can be temporarily silenced by force of will... most of the time.
Lets add a dash of danger of getting caught. Its all about reading (aah, not even reading, but intently absorbing) the forbidden magazine at 3 am in a dirty alleyway in the bad side of town by the light of a red lightbulb with cops and dangerous nightwalkers everywhere, all ready to invade your private business. A part of you hates it, but the part of you that loves it really LOVES it. Oh yea, baby! .XXX restrict me all the way!
.XXX "legitimizes" porn? I laughed myself to actual tears. THAT fight had been lost generations ago. Porn is and has been legitmate for decades, but what exqisite windmill-tilting!
As for these two mouthbreathers themselves.... After someone showed B&P how to use Google, they must have then sought to legislate what they do not comprehend. But hey, butt ignorance has never been a stopping point here in the U.S. for any other issue, why bother here?
So IMHO, here is a real-world idea that will work within the existing system, so therefore no one will adopt it.
Porn sites in non .XXX urls should not get immediately banned. The pornographers must either be required to switch over content to .XXX within the natural expiration period of the domain ("GatesOfHeaven.Com" becomes a site for a retirement community) or their renewal rights to that url cease and expire naturally. In other words, they cannot renew for porn content. This may take 10 years, but it will happen without fuss, and God will surely grineth down uponst them.
The idea is simple, but no US legislator will follow it. Not draconian enough, no flags to wave, results happen after their terms expire, and nobody dies horrible bloody deaths.
As for my own porn .coms and .biz domains, I am going to keep them now. Was going to move over to .XXX on my own, but the bovine minority prevails yet again!
I am also looking forward to the .XXX urls to open up for financial reasons, they will be a hundred times more valuable in this industry than any .com. There is a HUGE PROFIT MOTIVATION for me to move my smut to that neighborhood, and my boxes are already packed in their plain brown wrappers ready to go.
So how bout it B&P? Enact your dum-bass law, the existing market forces will make it happen anyway, and you both come away looking like the Sherriff in that old black and white western movie constantly running in your little heads.
BTW, Baucus and and Pryor fit EXACTLY the profile of the porn "enthusiast", and I do NOT mean casual browers. Don't let either one of them convince you they are palms-togther eyes-every-upward altar boys. They go there, and they go there often, and everybody knows their names.
They are both from a repressed demographic, porn is constantly on their minds (for good or bad), high pressure workaholics, boring long-term monogamous commitments, middle aged males, computer literate, above average income level, at age of great personal life changes, the list goes on. You KNOW they are looking at this stuff on their off time and lovin' it.... then hating themselves for lovin' it. These ARE the guys that pay my rent.
I say, bring it on you hypocritical puritanical freaks, make my retirement!
I liked the idea when it was first brought up several years ago by the king of porn in Seattle because you could simply instruct your browser to never allow .xxx to open. BUT what's to keep anyone from breaking the rule and still putting them on .com? I mean they do it now anyway and last as long as they can until their host shuts them down but then they pop up on another one. Typically their job is lure you to the real pay site.
As a man who enjoys porn, I wish more women would express your comments publicly. Your opinion is rarely heard, and often your body-count is just added to the 'women who are victimized by porn' even though you are placing yourself outside that group.
One other thing to add to your argument is this: I personally use porn as a release for the sexual obsession I suffer as a victim of childhood sexual abuse by my father. (Thankfully he is in prison, and will hopefully die there.) There's the old line that a guy thinks of sex every 6 seconds, but those thoughts are generally toward women. My thoughts involve anything, women, men (I'm a closet bisexual, my wife knows and I have never cheated in ten years of marriage), children, our daughter (who I will never allow myself to abuse), animals, holes in trees, lunchmeat, garden tools, toys, anything. Because sex was a part of my development as far back as I can remember, everything is related to it in my brain. Watching porn and masturbating when my wife isn't in the mood, is a release of those quite unhealthy thoughts, without forcing myself on her or anyone else.
In closing, if you think this situation is horrible, I agree and will repeat something I posted a few years back in response to a posting about murder being the worst thing you can do to someone:
I don't think murder is the worst thing you can do to someone, because killing me would have been kinder than making me live like this for the rest of my life. The only thing that makes it bearable, especially in regards to my daughter I mentioned above, is that if the thoughts (read: voices in my head) get too much to bear, I will go hiking in the hills and accidently fall off a ledge. I have told my wife this. Traditional suicide methods would be too traumatic to my daughter, and would probably force this secret out, which I don't want.
You're a coward for posting anonymously, you don't know that "invidious" is not a word, you toss out "all the research" without citing anything (meanwhile there HAS been research that shows that allowing prostitution prevents rapes... numbskull), and basically, I guarantee that you are the least-fun person at any social gathering.
The reason the "porn industry" is being so successful is precisely because the prevailing culture represses overt expression of sexuality. So it must go covert, and like all repressed things, when they are released they go way over-the-top. It's denial, man.
Also, in case you bothered reading up on it, it's actually very difficult to define pornography.
Well indeed...
One obvious consequence of making .xxx well-regulated is that there will need to be a place for people to have non-well-regulated stuff. People who want sex and don't want to pay for it will want adware, so if you regulate against it, then you need a .ADS+XXX tld to say "yes, I want xxx but I'll tolerate ads to get them".
What problem is being solved by regulating this new domain that isn't even created anyway? Is it to make it more attractive so people will go there more? I thought the original reason for this domain was to say it was outside the bounds of social reason. Now they want to make a nice sociable place out of the place that is outside the bounds of socialness? Where will the social bounds of that be?
Will there be a .XXXX in a few years because they didn't feel welcome in .XXX?
Some people on the religious right probably think any mention of sex for anything other than making babies during marriage is bad and belongs in XXX, while others think XXX defines some distinction between hardcore and softcore, and so on. Will they be forward-thinking enough to break this domain into .MOSTLY.XXX and .SOMEWHAT.XXX and .NOTREALLYVERYMUCHATALL.XXX and .WRONGLYTHOUGHTTOBE.XXX and .WHATJERRYFALWELLTHINKSIS.XXX and .WHATTHEPOPETHINKSIS.XXX and .WHATYOUANDITHINKIS.XXX and .EVENWORSETHANCOMMONLYCALLED.XXX and then make everyone be subdomains under that?
Like legislating the value of pi to 22/7, there are some truths about the world that government should stay well clear of.
Sex is a big concept, full of complexity. You're never going to boil it down to something simple enough to legislate in a uniform way and if you have to idealize it before you can confront it, it's a bad idea to try because, like it or not, the world is not anyone's ideal. You'd think government would get that.
I guess it's like most things where governments confuse the notion of the power to legislate with the notion of having the need to do it all, the competence to do it effectively, or the wisdom to do it right (if indeed there can be said to be any concept of right at all in cases like this). Sometimes it's the job of good government to say to the people calling for legislation: the world is bigger than you think, so grow up and learn to cope.Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
Once again the forces of virtue triumph over evil and depravity. As long as they can stop this domain from being created we can have a web free of filth and pr0n. Now, as a keen miniature railway enthusiast, I think I'll just go and type in a search for "model" on our lovely clean safe internerd. Oh dear, what is she doing with that express train? ... I think I had better go and investigate this somewhere more private
Don't put off until tomorrow what you can leave until the day after.
...is not if .xxx is a good thing to do, the real story is that ICANN, once it's approved the tld to be included in the root zone (like it did LAST YEAR) cannot actually get the domain past the US government.
.com after it and you'll find it most likely already exists.
In other words we have poeple in "charge" of the root zone that cannot actually do the job. The EU and Australia are old cronies of ICANN, part of the "deal with the devil" made upon ICANN's creation. You'll notice a year ago when ICANN approved and submitted the TLD for inclusion to its overseer the EU and Australia didn't say a thing/ Nor did they object in the TEN YEARS leading up to its approval.
No, the US Bush Administration stepped on it, thereby embarassing ICANN and suddenly ICANN's old friends, the EU and AUS NOW think maybe it's a bad udea. Oh puh-leeze.
Expect as time goes on more countried may object.
Never mind ICANN is supposed to "measure community consensus" implement the results. It is not supposed to create policy.
Never mind Governments of the world holds the technical administration of names and numbers by the nuts.
Never mind you can think of the most vile name, slap a
Never mind ICANN gets paid $16M a year to not be able to do its job.
For more details see my comment of a couple of days ago.
Need Mercedes parts ?