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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?
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.
"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'm personally glad its being blocked. Once its created, its a short step from being able to register a .xxx to being forced to use .xxx for "obscene speech". Once you have that, you have an issue with free speech rights being trampled as the government tries to regulate what it obscene or not.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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.
Because it doesn't really address anybody's concerns. Let's say .xxx sites have to be actual bona-fide porn sites to qualify. Great. That absolutely does not stop porn sites from continuing to use .com, .org, or whatever, now, does it? And since porn sites can elect to use .xxx or .com as they see fit, you can't protect the children and innocent library patrons by simply blocking .xxx domains, can you? Unless, of course, you decide to mandate the use of the .xxx top level for porn. But now you have to define porn. You are going to run headlong into a morass of free speech issues, etc. It won't happen.
.xxx domains is because politicians like to get easy votes from people who don't really understand the issues.
The only reason we continue hearing about
Seeing as we have right wing religious zealots controlling Congress and the White House, I don't think its a stretch at all. Look at the laws that have already been struck down by the Supremes this past decade, such CIPA. Look at the other restrictions to freedom passed by Bush. Its not a remote possibility, its a damn near certainty that it *would* be passed, in some form (how onerous a form would get passed would be the question- the republicans might push a weak test version out first to test the waters). And with the additions of Alito and Roberts, both hardcore conservatives and Alito particularly being pro-government power, its very possible that they wouldn't be struck down this time.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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.