Slashdot Mirror
Plans For .xxx Domain For p0rn Scrapped
William Robinson writes "ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has once again scrapped the plan for a new internet "domain" .xxx for pornography. Supporters of the .xxx address suffix argued that it would have helped to protect children and others from accidental exposure to internet pornography, particularly if stronger filters were used to screen out explicit material from other internet domains. Pressure from conservative Christian groups in the US, which has a veto over the internet addressing system, led the organisation last year to put off introducing a new ".xxx" domain for pornography on the internet. That drew international complaints that the US exercised too much power over the internet and added to a European-backed movement to shift control of the online medium to an international group."
I always wondered what made anyone think that this would be a success in the first place. Registering your pr0n site as a .com, etc would always be the preffered method, since you site would have a better chance of getting around filters. Just another instance of non-technical people trying to make technical decisions.
Because teenage pranks are fun when you're about to die!
Are you all ready for the barrage of thousands of comments about how much fundamentalist Christians suck. This obviously leads to conversations about how evil the Bush administration is. Naturally this will lead to a number of non-Americans saying how the States has too much power and is too conceited. And finally, this will be followed up by comments from Americans claiming to be the core of the world anyways so the rest of the world can go stuff it.
BR> Paint by numbers, brought to you by Slashdot.
While I admit, in theory, it sounded like a great idea, helping to keep a lot of unwanted images out of my google searches, there were just too many holes in the idea and too many ways it could be abused for it to seriously work. Defining what constitutes as pr0n, whether it should be manadatory or merely encouraged, and the fact that not all pr0n sites are here in America.
Nothing else to see here, move along...
Pressure from conservative Christian groups in the US, which has a veto over the internet addressing system, led the organisation last year
So, please tell me why they have a veto, and the progressive Buddhists do not?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Who gives a fuck? The Internet in my country was funded by my tax, and my country's backbone is the important one for me.
This "Oh, we did the initial research so we own everything that ever originates from that point" argument is pathetic. Did America invent roads? No!? Well then, I think the rest of the world should be able to tax American cars. What about railroads? Another non-American invention. Tax please!
The light bulb is another non-American invention. I think for that one the rest of the world should just refuse to licence it and people like you can go and live in the dark age you so surely deserve.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
A plan for a new internet "domain" for pornography has once again been shelved, dealing another blow to the US-backed addressing system that acts as the glue holding together the unified global internet.
The setback is likely to add to pressure stresses that could eventually fragment the internet, breaking it into a collection of separate national systems, some internet experts warned.
The reason for this I assume is because if users can't easily access porn, there really is no point to the internet, is there?
__
Elephant Essays - Custom-created essays and research papers.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
A psychological phenomenon that refers to the bad feeling one gets when a discrepancy between what you already know or believe, and new information or interpretation from someone else. Religion usually falls in this framework when two people who are on opposite positions begin discussing and get further and further away from true understanding one another.
This doesn't fall under religion exclusively either, almost any aspects of life can become deeply held beliefs that we don't want to let go of when something new comes along to upset the apple-cart.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
And this will keep coming up until somebody realizes we can't force everything naughty into a ghetto.
.kids domain registrar'ed by a US company/NGO simultaneous with a law being passed covering what kind of content was allowed in .kids . Whitelisting is the only way to keep the pr0n out.
If they want a kid safe internet, they should put their efforts behind the
Not that they could agree on what falls on the "not pr0n" side of the fence.
The fact remains though that the EU should continue to have no say. They dont fund it, they never created it (at least how it is today, though England Universitys did help in some early tests) and they have shown in the past that there is no way the EU could get its head on straight enough to even run things half as well as the US has (they already admitted that they would allow countrys to limit control by their own people, exactly what they accuse the US of being capable of). If they want their own network thats fine, but I could garentee that their own people would revolt when they flicked off the switch to the rest of the world who would stay with the EU
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
CERN?
...atleast initially.
>Who has financed the internet into what it has become today. Who developed
>the technology and who operates the largest backbone?
That's Al Gore obviously. He should be in charge alone!
There are plenty of technical reasons why not to do it. See RFC 3675 for details.
The only justification for new TLDs that I've seen is that it makes companies have to buy them to protect their trademark, thereby making profit for the new registrar.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
This I don't understand. Can somebody help me out? Why wouldn't they want to keep all of the porn sites in one domain, where a very simple filter could eliminate all of it from view? It's very simple -- Christian groups don't want porn "segregated" -- they want it to disappear entirely. Providing a special domain is an admission that porn has a legitimate place on the Net, and that concept is anathema to the folks who don't just want to avoid it themselves, but deny anyone else the choice to view it.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
for example..
Children coming into school smelling like meth, (ie parents cooking it off in the house)
Children sexually abused.. A lot
Parents that expect society to instill values and morals instead of the home.
\ Nothing but tv and games all day/night.
I could go on buts its just too damn depressing. BUt we have seen it all.
If the .xxx domain was supposed to protect children well.. nothing can be better for a child than a good sound creative, loving, and supportive home, where the parents actively are a part of the childs life..
Maybe we need a .ped domain (parental education domain)... hehe or something like it.
Ive even seen crack/coke babies with all types of physical defects, while mommie is still out on the streets.
Ive seen a so much of the crazy stuff with regards to bad parenting that i think its about 75% of the problem. The children + porn thing just comes from turning Johnny loose on the net because it shuts him up so the parents can forget about him for a while..
Thats my 2$
Pressure from conservative Christian groups in the US, which has a veto over the internet addressing system, led the organisation last year to put off introducing a new ".xxx" domain for pornography on the internet.
This reminds me of far-left types who demand world peace and the end to world hunger but vehemently object to the only credible means of achieving either. War isn't going away without the removal of all tinpot dictators; hunger isn't going away without pervasive globalization of all commodity production and the removal of all tinpot dictators; and Internet porn isn't going away without the marshalling of all material into a single TLD and the eradication of all human males.
I've not yet seen a reason to have the .xxx domain. I'm not opposed, per se, but I have a hard time understanding the point to it.
Why do we have any TLDs? We can just shove everything into .com right? The point is to organize the internet into usable chunks both for content providers and consumers. Now I don't know about you, but I'd say porn makes up a significant chunk of the internet. Porn providers want consumers to easily be able to find them. They don't want young children to find them since kids generally don't have credit cards and if they do their parents look at the bills and likely will complain. They don't want people who don't like porn visiting them since it costs them bandwidth and is more likely to result in outrage/persecution of them.
Having an XXX domain gives porn purveyors a place to go where no one can complain they "accidentally" stumbled upon them. It will stop all of the "please think of the children" emotive pleas, since anyone concerned can just filter the XXX domain. This is the whole reason the domain system exists.
As to the reason some people oppose it. Certain religious wackos and the con-men who prey upon religious wackos like having an enemy. Most of them say that "porn is evil" and needs to be stopped. They aren't interested in letting everyone make up their own minds, or easily have a choice. Their concern is in telling each and every one of us what we can and can't do based upon their weird religious interpretations. As a result, they want to increase, not decrease outrage. This means they want children and other people who might accidentally access porn to do so as much as possible. They hope that by making it more difficult for people to find what they want, more difficult to avoid what they don't want, and more difficult to filter based upon easy categorization that they can outright ban porn in the entire world, rather than just let those who to see it do so and avoid it themselves.
Since a lot of these religious wackos and con-men are involved in the US government, which in holds ICANN's leash, they are using ICANN to push this agenda upon the world. That, understandably, makes much of the rest of the world less confident that the US will not use ICANN to push other agendas that conflict with global interests.
Actually, I expect the preferred method would be much similar to the online casinos that use a .net for the legal-in-the-US no-money online poker, and a .com for the not-legal-in-the-US real-money online poker.
Porn sites would probably register (or maintain) their .com address, and keep the "clean" content there — probably a "WARNING: ADULT CONTENT" page, and maybe a copy of the TOS page. The main site with the adult content would then be on a .xxx address.
As others have noted, most porn sites want those who choose to do so to be able to filter them. They also want those who DON'T chose to filter them to be able to see them unfiltered. Of course, there are some bad apples out there — the sort of "gallery" metasites that only point to other metasites, or which attempt to install various trojans. The scammers and crooks probably won't care (nor move), but the bad apples are the minority.
No, the real bane in this effort is the Religious Conservatives who don't want ANYONE to be able to see smut, regardless of the individual's age or personal preference. Which, in the present US (or globabl) political climate, isn't a complete obstacle, but is a non-trivial problem.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.