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

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.