.xxx registry sues US government

An anonymous reader writes in to say that "ICM Registry LLC, the company behind the proposed .xxx internet porn domain, is to sue two departments of the US government for access to documents it claims show the US pressured ICANN into rejecting the domain. The Florida-based startup will sue the Department of Commerce and the Department of State to get them to release documents that they redacted when they responded to a Freedom Of Information Act request that ICM filed last year."

Comments

In the end...

[taskforce]

In the end I think that the domain was rejected becuase it recieved little support from either political disposition.

Libertarians rejected the domain beucase it would make porn easier to block, and Christian Moralist groups rejected the idea because it would in some way sanction the appearance of porn on the net and make it integral it's structure or backbone. That and they couldn't figure out that it would make it easier to block porn.

In many ways it has the same advantages for all sides as Net Neutrality does, except without bussiness interests causing corporate lobbyists to stick their neck around the door.

Re:In the end...

[Dasch]

"In the end I think that the domain was rejected becuase it recieved little support from either political disposition."

What right does American politicians to decide whether or not there should be an XXX TLD? It's because of things like this that other countries want an international organization to control the TLD's.

The only reason I'm skeptical of such thing is that several countries would without doubt use their influence to restrict the freedom of the 'net (*cough* China!)

Re:In the end...

[buysse]

There's a third reason, and the one makes it a bad idea IMNSHO.

Define porn. In a way that people from (non-inclusively) the Vatican, Tehran, Singapore, Beijing, and a small Baptist congregation in the US Bible Belt will agree to.

Does it include a site from a plastic surgeon that has before and after pictures? How about information about safe sex, including proper condom use? Does it include the picture of a celebrity with a bit of cellulite that the National Enquirer paid US $50,000 for? How about pictures from a family vacation that include an unmarried woman tanning on a beach? Where can you draw the line internationally?

Re:In the end...

[FLEB]

Second things first... The situation of sites being forced into .xxx may be un-Libertarian, but this is not a Libertarian situation we're dealing with. Nobody's been forced into any domains as of yet, but a .com setting up in a .org space isn't going to generate near the measure of moral indignation than having PORN (!!!) outside its bounds. Examine that one of the reasons thrown around for this is "protecting people from porn"... without some sort of force, that goal would be no better served than on the current Internet. Having places for widely objectionable material is just opening the door for regulation forcing that material into its place. As I mentioned before, the conflict with that comes when someone doesn't feel their site is pornographic, but the ones in power do.

In things like movies and music, the rating requirement has been largely kept as a private function (with the PMRC stickers and MPAA ratings), but the difference is that the restrictive costs in distribution mean that the private companies can take an effective "gatekeeper" role. Any distributor that can reach a reasonably wide audience is allied with the ratings system, which has made it universal enough that external forces need not apply. With the Internet, though, a site can go online for less than $100 a year, and there's no "Wal-Mart" of the Internet that's big enough to influence private action. What does this leave? Government intervention and legislation.

Compulsory filtering certainly won't happen, I agree (the people do need their porn, after all), but if compulsory filing-as-.XXX comes into play, it does mean that some of these edge-case "maybe" sites are basically being forced to register to the quick-and-easy central-control block-list that many filtering providers will undoubtably implement across the board. Although I do understand that the Libertarian idea would be "they can block it or not block it", realistically, what blocker is going to scour .xxx looking for sites that might be miscategorised, just so they can put a sticker on the box saying "Now Blocks 10% Less .xxx Sites!" The problem is not that the blocking is universal and compulsory, but that the blacklist would be universal, and implementing the .xxx ghetto just asks for it to be made compulsory.

Re:In the end...

[killjoe]

It gets even more complicated when you take into account the billions of fetishes in the world. For some people pictures of people wearing slippers is porn, for others pictures of accidents are porn.

Porn is what happens in your head, not what's on the screen.

Re:In the end...

[Easy2RememberNick]

So you're saying people in different countries with different cultures think differently than each other?!

  Let others (soverign nations) decide what pornography is to them and don't impose US values on them. Sure a breast seen on TV or in a magazine may be OK in the UK but considered pornographic in Iran, that's how the World works. It also doesn't mean the situation can't change later, maybe in a hundred years the example I gave will be reversed.

Re:In the end...

[jambarama]

No way the libertarians got this blocked - there are what, 5 of us? Seriously though, there were bigger problems than Christian moralists. For example:

The domain name allocation problem was a big part of the reason this got killed. Obviously the names would be auctioned but no one was sure if all the names should be auctioned at all. Who gets "baptists.xxx" or "mormon.xxx" or even "usgov.xxx"? Should anyone? The Baptists, Mormons & US Government probably don't think anyone should get these domain names.

The very existence of a porn site with the same name as a non (or anti) porn product is problematic - Coke can buy Coke.xxx but for those businesses that can't afford to buy out the domain - the very existence of a site could be slanderous. And if firms/churches/organizations all buy thier corresponding .xxx domain, critics could easily say - "look! Disney owns porn sites - they're hippocrites, poisoning young children's minds!"

Don't get me wrong, the right wing Christian contingency was against this, but they weren't the only ones.

Re:In the end...

[pembo13]

Instead of something as vague as porn, offer it as a tld for business that offer adult entertainment as their primary product/service.

Re:Why?! This .xxx registry is a big waste of spac

[simonjp]

Why would it make it easier to find pr0n? You can type just about anything into google or similar to get something pornographic. It's *already* (too?) easy to find porn online. whatever the tld ending, it wouldnt matter from someone searching as i doubt they rarely check the url and concentrate on the "content".

However, if a large majority of sites ended .xxx, then if you were say with AOL etc, the filtering of such a site would be very easy and could be done on an account level set by the parents. This surely is a good thing ? Indeed, you might still get the same results from google, but once clicking the link it would just get blocked (so that free previews couldn't get viewed either). If you werent on AOL then perhaps the ISPs could offer it at a different way. Filters based on content of pages being viewed sometimes give false positives but with .xxx i'm sure most filters could get it right.

Sure there would be sites which wont do .xxx or try to get around it, but at least this would have been a start.

Oh, and in response to "Who cares if the US pressured them into rejecting the domain" its people like me who believe that the US should not be allowed to dictate what it wants to the world. But thats a different story...

Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

I care. I don't care about the .xxx TLD. I think it wouldn't hurt, but it won't help either. But I do care how the decision was made: I want to know if it was independent or if ICANN just executed what the US government demanded. In discussions about control over DNS and the root servers, the US constantly reiterate that ICANN is independent, and even though it is on US soil, it acts without interference from the US government. If there is evidence that the US government pressured ICANN into making a decision that it would have made differently on its own, then it is high time for the rest of the world to establish independent DNS roots.

Re:Why?! This .xxx registry is a big waste of spac

[vertinox]

Secondly, if .xxx sites get registered it'll make it even EASIER for kids to find porn now.

And easier for parents to block.

Well... If they so choose to educate themselves on the matter in order out how to set their router firewall to block all *.xxx connections.

Not that kids have been looking at their parents porn mags and adult video tapes for the past 20 years. Truth be told... Porn never hurt any kids. Uncaring parents too disinterested in the welfare of their kids have.

Teach your kids to be sexual healthy and not sexually repressed.

Otherwise they are going to learn the hard way... You know... Teen pregnancy and STDs.

The fundamentalists fear it will encourage porn.

[FatSean]

You know, out of sight out of mind. The people who fear porn and their own sexuality often stand by these trite axioms. They don't want condom use being taught in school because it will increase teenage sexual activity. They don't want female nipples seen on television because it will encourge children to have sex. They don't want an XXX domain because it will make it easier for children to find porn, which will irreperably damage them somehow.

Also, they don't want their government supporting porn in any way. There is no grey area for these simplistic people. They got their marching orders from the corpse of a long-dead civilization and they are sticking with it.

Re:Why?! This .xxx registry is a big waste of spac

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're wrong. We need all the TLDs we can get, precisely because nowadays companies try to register the same name under all TLDs. The only way to stop this silly practice is to increase the number of TLDs by leaps and bounds. Besides, only if every conceivable TLD becomes available will users learn that the TLD is an important part of the domain, not just an always-there ".com". In every discussion about DNS, someone proposes that we get rid of TLDs entirely. It's an entirely logical conclusion when you look at the way domains are registered and used today, but what are the consequences? Would you really want all domains to be in the hand of one domain registry? How are you going to determine prices without competition? No, the only way to go is to enable as many TLDs as you can find businesses willing to be the registries.

Re:Hopefully the domain registry company loses...

[M1FCJ]

You are free to not to visit any porn site. Why do you want to ruin my internet experience with your moral values? If you think your moral values are superior to mine, what is your moral basis in this? A fictitious book? I don't think you have the right to assert your own beliefs to others.

Re:And the point is....?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Regardless of whether or not you agree with the decision, surely I can't be the only person that doesn't believe anyone has a 'right' to get a domain set up?

Well, it's an interesting question; if you consider the web to be a vital tool of speech, which these days it can certainly be considered to be, then any government interference with domain registration can be construed as government interference with freedom of speech. And I'm pretty sure there is something about that right in some government document ... hmmm, I know I left that goddamn piece of paper around here somewhere ...

Really, though, this isn't (or shouldn't be) about porn, or TLD's, or anything that specific. It is about our unquestionable, self-evident right to have a government which goes about its business in a way that is as transparent as possible to us, the citizens of the country it governs. The FOIA is one of the strongest tools ever created for enforcement of that right (yeah, I know, rights shouldn't have to be enforced, but of course they do) and we should fight vigorously, on every front, against every attempt to gut it.

Re:WTF? Redacted?

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

FFS, kick the knee-jerking puritans out of office already.

You're the knee-jerker. The .xxx domain is almost universally despised.

1. Pornographers hate it 'cause it forces one level of regulation upon them. Then it's easy to block *.xxx at the ISP level or even at the national level (in slightly more repressive countries). Filtering software is easy to enable. Porn sites have to declare themselves and provide information about themselves, which makes them easier to target.
   
   
2. Borderline sites (artistic nudes, SI swimsuit, etc.) may have to move to .xxx by the law, which would be unfair to them since nothing is actually pornographic. In fact, nothing there would be illegal to show to minors, but .xxx requirements may be more than simply the Miller test. Educational institutions may filter *.xxx, preventing students from learning about Titian's Venus of Urbino or Boticelli's Birth of Venus , both of which prominently feature naked women. In fact, most art websites would either have to self-censor or move their entire gallery to .xxx. DeviantART would be in trouble because it would have to separate the really deviant art from the normal stuff. I've seen on Yahoo! Photos a checkbox to mark photo albums as "over 18 only." The new proposal would force a split of photos.yahoo.com and photos.yahoo.xxx - and then the next big news story is "Yahoo launches yahoo.xxx domain".
   
   
3. Conservatives/reactionaries and rabid Christians despise it because it legitimises porn. It also makes finding porn theoretically easier, and gives the raunchy stuff which they'd want to outlaw the excuse of saying that they're on .xxx so they should be immune. .xxx creates a "virtual red-light district" in the words of some conservatives. If the goal is to ban pornography on the Internet, why give it a TLD of its own?
   
   
4. The only group that seems to really want .xxx is the .xxx registrar itself. Note who's suing the US - the registrar that stood to make a profit, not any porn sites. What they're asking is for a government-sponsored choke hold on the entire online pornography industry, so that they can force all existing sites to re-register at whatever prices and under whatever terms they dictate.
   

When pornographers and conservatives both oppose something, you know it has to be bad.