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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'
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*.
Does that mean I can then secure whitehouse.com to peddle my lucrative house painting business?
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
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.