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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."
The whole issue has been considered, filed, reconsidered, trashed,
untrashed, contemplated and cogitated for some while.
There is a relevant RFC with very cogent arguments as to why it is a bad idea.
http://www.rfc-archive.org/getrfc.php?rfc=3675
OK, I'll tell you the downside then.
.coms now can they? Besides, even if it is free of adware/malware, it may still not be legal, who knows if they actually have the distribution rights to whatever random piece of porn they are distributing.
.xxx sites too.
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.
Not really feasible. They can't enforce that for
Vetting the domains could stop underage people both visiting and appearing in
Appearing? How would this have any effect on that? But I digress, visiting. OK, so how do we verify the age? Most places now want a credit card number, and call me paranoid, but there's no way in hell I'm giving out my CC or even my name to some random porn site. How about a central site that is trusted and verifies who I am, then verifies with the site without giving out who I am. Great on the surface, except it still means that you have no anonymity in your surfing, its just one agency that knows everything instead of many singular sites that just know about them. I understand wanting to verify the age, but if you can't do that without stepping on anonymity then forget it.
Of course no politition wants to actively promote porn so they'll stamp on it to promote 'christian values'
Actually just the opposite. The politicans want this, if they can force all the porn into one TLD then it becomes trivial to block it. Your "christian values" will be pure and unbesmirched as long as you block ".xxx". That is in fact the point of this entire discussion, and why it keeps being proposed.
The real problem here is what should be forced into this domain. Hardcore gang bang site, sure. How about an education site about how to have a better sex life with your wife? hmm. How about a photographer who usually does landscape/architecture pictures but also a few artistic nudes, or maybe just topless? How about an artist who sketches nudes? How about a blog which usually has nothing to do with sex, but occassionaly mentions some encounter? Now what if the blogger is homosexual, same standard? It all comes back to the age old art/porn discussion which is unenforcable, especially in a global forum where the standards on this vary so much.
"The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw."
RFC 3675
http://outcampaign.org/
And NO, there WON'T EVER be pictures of CowboyNeal naked. Period.
Don't even think about it.