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."

Comments

Well, done, fundies, well done.

[TripMaster Monkey]

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 .xxx domain you've neatly made it impossible to protect minors from exposure to pornography (your ostensible goal)...after all, the style is more important than the substance, and 'heroically making a stand against the legitimization of pornography on the Internet' sounds quite stylish, doesn't it?.

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.

Re:Well, done, fundies, well done.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, ICANN protected free speech by refusing to restrict so-called obscene content to certain, easily-blocked, corners of the internet.

Re:Well, done, fundies, well done.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Never mind that by stopping the .xxx domain you've neatly made it impossible to protect minors from exposure to pornography

Allowing a .xxx domain would've done nothing to protect minors from exposure to pornography.

I can't imagine why you think it possibly would. The .xxx domain was just another way to make money from a TLD domain rush (quite a good one I suspect, looking at how much sex.com ended up being worth).

Re:Well, done, fundies, well done.

[Just Some Guy]

Never mind that by stopping the .xxx domain you've neatly made it impossible to protect minors from exposure to pornography (your ostensible goal)...

I normally agree with you, but I think you're completely off-base here. I was against .xxx because it was a bad idea. There were two main possibilities: 1) usage was voluntary, or 2) usage was compulsory. The former was silly; I don't recall anyone ever saying that they actually looked forward to using .xxx. The latter was scary; who decides what goes in there? What countries are affected? What's the penalty for deciding to publish a nude photo under .com and being ratted out by an over-zealous watchdog group?

No, I can't think of a single change from this proposal (other than compelling 90% of the population to add .xxx to a TLD blacklist in their browser - if you don't want to look at porn, you won't mind blacklisting it, ja?). No one wanted it, it couldn't have worked, and it would have caused more problems than it ever could have solved.

Utter stupidity...

[drakaan]

Well, I suppose that if you ignore the reality that internet porn will continue to exist, then it's a good thing to not have it segregated to a particular TLD.

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.

Who are they kidding?

[Billosaur]

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.

Let's see....

[Churla]

The conservatives don't want an easy to access way to find lots of porn. They want to keep it tucked out of sight.

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 .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))

Is there ANYBODY who actually has a good reason for this to exist?