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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.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
1) establish .xxx domain .xxx domains only .xxx domains.
2) pass law forcing all questionable content to use
3) block all
Although it would have been fun to own goatse.xxx..
Last.fm - join the social music revolution
Faced with opposition from conservative groups and some pornography Web sites
I guess that if those two can be united against a measure, it's probably a really iditotic measure.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
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
http://www.big.co.ck/ is still available I believe; let the auctioning commence!
throw new NoSignatureException();
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
Tripmaster, I often agree with you, but not this time. I would, but for this one thing:
Creating a 'red light district' would be a fine idea IF that could limit the 'red light' business to that district. But of course it doesn't -- Joe Boobmaster will have one more domain to register, but will keep right on doing business in the existing TLDs -- so this can't be used to protect minors from exposure (one might even argue an extra (obvious) domain would INCREASE exposure).
If you can come up with a way to effectively force 'red light business' to stay within their designated TLD, I'd be all for it. Really.
"Good news, everyone!"
In many discussions it seems that this is getting turned into a "conservatives vs. liberals" discussion or similar. I do not really see why.
.xxx tld domain a good idea after all is that I cannot see how one would ever be able to come up with rules about what should or should not belong there, in a world with such diverse opinions about what is sexual/inappropriate/pronographic/etc and in a world with such diverse laws about pornography.
It seems there are both good sides and bad sides to having a XXX domain, but many of them do not have to do anything with the question of whether one hates or not pornographic web sites.
My main reason for not finding the
So remind me: what *good* was this TLD supposed to be again?
I was all excited about buying an xxx domain and putting no porn on it, thereby breaking the system.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
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
The announcement coincides with ICANN's move to dismiss the introduction of .XXX.
An ICANN spokesman commented off the record, "In truth, we should be more honest. XXX indicates we're hiding something."
He added, "That can't be on the open and transparent internet. We feel that Dot-FUK and Dot-SUK represent what everone is looking for, just like all Dot-ORGs are not-for-profit groups, right? Know what I mean? Say no more."
ICANN also expressed interest in adding .GAY so "straight dudes and closet dudes needn't worry."
ICANN's next step coming in June is a decision on .PERV, whose supporters hope can be used to herd all the child molesters into one spot.
The move is opposed by the producers of Dateline: NBC, who say it could destroy their growing cottage industry of filming pedophiles being confronted.
ICANN is believed to be leaning toward adopting .PERV, as all things on the internet belong in nifty containers marked accurately.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
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