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ICANN Finally Rejects .xxx Domain
stalebread writes "Faced with opposition from conservative groups and some pornography Web sites, the Internet's key oversight agency voted Wednesday to reject a proposal to create a red-light district on the Internet." From the article: "In a split 9-5 board decision, the organisation acted ruthlessly, against its own previous position, in order to put an end to an increasingly difficult and controversial issue - the approval of a .xxx top-level domain. The .xxx registry application has been the focus of enormous political pressure on ICANN for the past six months and was used at one point as a political football in a wider tussle for power within the internet."
By managing to force ICANN to kill this initiative, you've made certain smut remains where it belongs...out of sight and out of mind (your sight and your mind, anyway).
Never mind that by stopping the
Never mind that porn is as old as the human species, and will continue to be present on the Internet just as it has been present in every other media in human history.
Never mind that your rejection of an accepted place for it to be located just insures that it will remain in unacceptable places.
Nope...it's much more important (not to mention easier) to address the hot-button issue of the legitimization of adult content, while conveniently ignoring the reality: that porn isn't going anywhere, no matter how much the fundies shout..
So porn on the Internet will remain where it belongs...all-pervasive and impossible to effectively block...but at least you made your 'stand'. Well done.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
I really don't get why "conservative" groups would *not* want it...it would make filtering (for sites following the rules) so trivial it'd be ridiculous.
For that matter, why are some of the porn outfits against the idea? Aside from worrying about a squatter getting your domain name, what's the downside? It's not like a .xxx domain is going to have some stigma that customers would avoid.
I just don't get it.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
A huge campaign against .xxx has seen ICANN's public comment board for the registry flooded in recent days by hundreds of posters with little or no understanding of the .xxx bid, but all stating their opposition to its approval. The same campaign has been raging for months, with one ICANN Board member sent threatening letters due to an assumed bias for the registry.
Sounds like a typical day on Slashdot... but seriously, everyone's so concerned about the problem of pornography and had to limit access to it, and yet here is an attractive solution, with very little downside, and of course the fanatics are opposed. They want porn banned entirely, and aren't willing to even see a half-measure put in place to curb and control it. THey want to throw the baby out with the bath water, all because their "morality" is somehow superior to mine. Well, last time I checked, the Constitution of the United States gives me the right to decide for myself what I want to look at and see, and also allows me the right to do it without fear of persecution by the Government or my fellow citizens.
Not everyone believes what the fanatics believe and every individual is entitled to his/her own opinion. And while your opinion might be different than mine, I don't get to foist mine off on you and visa versa. So the fundamentalist s need to go home and play with their toys in private and leave me alone.
What happened behind the scenes was that the US administration told ICANN chairman Vint Cerf and head Paul Twomey that it did not approve of the domain, but due to the difficult political position that it would put both ICANN and the US government in were it to be seen to be directing internet policy (against its publicly stated "hands off" policy), there has been a carefully co-ordinated effort to kill the registry through delay.
Ok, who sees this for the FUD it is? Of course the US Government is directing things at ICANN; they've been basically getting ICANN to thumb its nose at the rest of the world's concerns for years. Why should now be any different? They undoubtedly made it clear that this wasn't going to happen, and Cerf and Twomey then had to find some way to kill the thing gracefully, rather than coming out and saying "the US made us do it" and face the wrath of Congress. And so the slow, lingering death.
ICANN gets less relevant every month it seems.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
"1) establish .xxx domain .xxx domains only .xxx domains." .xxx domain is useless all porn is moved back to the normal domains (outside US,just like taxes)
2) pass law forcing all questionable content to use
3) block all
4) Now that the
5) Create a timemachine go back to the earlier stages of the domain suggestion and cancel it.
6) MORE PORN!=)
What makes .xxx a farce is that you would never be able to enforce step 2, and the meaning of 'questionable' is highly subjective. I think ICANN is right to reject the idea of the .xxx TLD, it is a ludicrous idea.
...in zoning regulations, and accidentally allowing them to pop up anywhere without restriction.
As stated, it is a foothold for censorship... of the worst kind, and that is because it will be totally ineffectual, cannot be enforced any better than any other pornography law. Worse, it would make some groups feel they are getting something done, and soon there would be other domains where this or that is supposed to be neatly filed away.
.xxx domain is the right thing to do as it would only allow the same result as above, and not achieve anything but allow ICAAN or others to make more money off of the porn industry... sigh
The ONLY real answer is sensible sex industry cooperation and self censorship. I don't mean they should take their websites down, but they should open their site with a uniform warning page allowing the site to be filtered thereafter, or other such methods. By following rules that make them nice netizens, they will effectively allow the law enforcement agencies to track those that are not playing nice... and it IS the ones that don't play nice that we all want hammered into dust. Pop-ups, spam, pop-unders, hijacking... all these things need to go away, and if legitimate porn sites played nice, it would soon become apparent how to attack the problem from a legal standpoint.
Not having the
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
And I sure as hell support this domain. Why? It's the only way to let us conservative Christians block porn that won't get struck down by the courts.
I'm tired of the pornographers whining about the "ghettoization of their free speech." Why don't we just let them sell their goods in the kids' section of a book store? Pornography is not sexual speech. Should it be outlawed? No, each adult has to work on their own morality and forcing them won't make the right moral changes to fix society.
Let's call a spade a spade. Pornography is only art if you consider a picture of the virgin Mary painted in elephant dung to be art. I consider Playboy's photos to be low class art. A typical porn site is not even remotely art or expressive except in the lowest, most attavistic sense. There are two good reasons for not banning porn: we don't want judges and legislators legally defining what is and isn't art and it's a private moral issue that cannot be stopped by the stroke of a pen.
The conservatives don't want an easy to access way to find lots of porn. They want to keep it tucked out of sight.
.org or only net based businesses being .net or only businesses in a certain country using that countries extension (i.e. .us and .uk for example))
The porn industry doesn't want to be partially forced into one little cubbyhole where they can be easily targeted and persecuted for the services and products they provide. They want to stay out of the limelight of persecution.
The geeks know that this is useless as it will be impossible to enforce (just like ONLY non profits being
Is there ANYBODY who actually has a good reason for this to exist?
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
Never mind that your rejection of an accepted place for it to be located just insures that it will remain in unacceptable places.
.com, .org, .net , etc domains?
What's so unacceptable about pornographic sites residing in
People in western countries, and in the United States in paticular, have, for reasons inexplicable, a huge problem with sex. It's still seen as wrong, dirty, nasty, etc, etc. Unfit for public exposure. Unacceptable.
Tough shit. People are interested in sex. People want to know about sex. In fact, people need to know about sex. Just because certain wretches find anything to do with sex perturbing does not mean that the rets of us have to kowtow to their demands.
Of course, most contemporary pornography is pretty grotesque. This is of course, a result of the mass censorship and taboos placed on it, not because sex is inherantly predisposed to concoct such images.
Todays fun fact: In the 1930's, the Irish Free State Government commissioned a report into the sexual behaviour of the strongly Catholic, highly conservative irish population. What did they find? Rampant deviancy. Incest, Beastiality, pedophilia, rape, extra-marital affairs, sado-masochism, etc were all extremely common. Why? Because of the censorship and vilification of normal healthy sexual relationships. The report was vigourously supressed, and is largely unspoken of to this day. Now I understand where all those jokes about farmers and sheep came from when I was growing up.
My own opinion is that the Bible Belt territory of the United States is probably in a similar state, thank' to years of repression. Whenever I see images of crowds of "moral crusaders", I'm of the opinion that a large number of them are very depraved in private. I think statistics would back me up if anyone had the gall to do some surveys on the matter. I suspect that these are the people buying all this twisted porn.
So screw them. And screw the opinion that the rest of us should have to censor ourselves because of their dirty minds. People should grow up knowing what a clitoris is and what it's for. If some poor girl grows up never knowing because her idiot parents or pastor felt it was better that she didn't, that's unacceptable.
May the Maths Be with you!
In many discussions it seems that this is getting turned into a "conservatives vs. liberals" discussion or similar. I do not really see why.
Why? Because the whole issue only exists because of a division in US Republican Party internal politics. And since the Republicans control the US Congress and White House, they have a certain amount of influance over ICANN and were pushing this issue one way or the other.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Ok, take the analogy to the next step: .whitesupremacy. I don't think a great majority of the planet likes the idea any more than I do, so let's segregate it as well.
This isn't a free speech issue. Anyone can sign up for a domain name and host a web site. You can have just about any combination of domain and TLD you can think of to represent your business, your ideas, your organization. And it's free for anyone to access (except in China [different topic for a different day]). Not only is it free to access, it's also possible for you to avoid content you don't like. The choice is yours -- it should not be up to any subgroup or splinter faction.
Now, I hate white supremacists, but they have the right to espouse their views just as I have when I post here. Do I go to their web sites? No. I avoid them. Real easy -- I don't search for them and don't follow links to them. If they wanted their own TLD (and ICANN decided [with US Government "assistance"] it was ok) that it was ok, fine by me. It makes it easier for me to find, true, but it also makes it easier for me to avoid. Don't go to sites with the TLD .whitesupremacy. Buy filtering software for my computer so my kids can't go there either.
In the end, this is not some heinous idea. It won't lead to the fall of civilization -- lying, backstabbing, graft, corruption and violence will take care of that. I see your point, but I don't think you've taken into consideration the scope of human belief. THe only way we're going to make things work in this world is to accept the premise that everyone is different, while at the same time those differences can be bridged by common, fundamental rights that all can enjoy without duress.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
The problem is this. If you create a top-level domain specifically for porn, you are admitting that porn exists. And unfortunately, there are too many people who have a problem with that.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
With a
Now, this would not do anything to "protect" the children from a
"Protection" is in quotes because this is about filtering and legal liability, not "protecting" children.
That being said, I don't think another TLD is scalable. Instead, a