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.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."
...xxx screws YOU!
Czech language for absolute beginners
I thought the government was only allowed to redact documents obtained under the FOIA to preserve national security. Since when does letting people have a naughty domain name threaten national security?
FFS, kick the knee-jerking puritans out of office already.
[http://www.internetgovernance.org/pdf/xxx-foiapag e.pdf]
are a very interesting read and show how the US Government changed its mind from neutrality to influencing the decision. Probably due to pressure from conservative family-oriented politicans...
BUSH: "Ya see, that's what the pr0n terr'ists want! They'd love us to just release this information. Can't you see people will get hurt! National security (of the children) is at stake here."
.xxx domain then we should probably take the magazines down from the top shelves and put them with the rest.
Suing the U.S. Government? Fair play, you got some balls and/or a lot of naivety. Good luck.
Also, if we don't want a
Just a thought
"Secondly, if .xxx sites get registered it'll make it even EASIER for kids to find porn now. "
It ALSO makes it easier to block. No more wack-a-mole with porn sites.*
Unless that your kind of thing. Nothing wrong with that.
It's the mentality of these people. Never tell the truth, or at least the whole truth, even if doing so would be the simplest course. Refuse to release information, withhold vital pieces of information, mislead, or outright lie -- but never just tell people what's going on. Honestly, I think there are an awful lot of people in government who do it, basically, for the little-kid thrill of saying "I know something you do-on't, nyaah nyaah!" It's an attitude which I saw way too much of in the military, and one which, in the *cough* post-9/11 era, has pretty much taken over every level of government from the White House to your local city council.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
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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".
.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.
.xxx or try to get around it, but at least this would have been a start.
However, if a large majority of sites ended
Sure there would be sites which wont do
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...
, , , , , karma elon
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.
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.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I'm not really sure how to take that tagline...
Anyway, why shouldn't there be a xxx domain? Not mandatory, but if a particular site wants to say right up front, "Hey, I'm porn," what's wrong with that? Maybe it seems a little much to give a whole domain to a single topic, but if you don't want to accidentally see porn it gives you a decent way to greatly reduce the amount you see, and it's one of those universal things in our (and by our I mean the whole world's) society, there's some people that want to see porn and some that don't, and at most a very very small percentage that don't care one way or the other. Give the way TLDs are used these days it seems a hell of a lot more useful than any of the others beside .gov and .edu. Doesn't hurt anyone either, anyone that wants to find porn can find it in as long as it takes to type "porn" in the Google search box.
Don't get me wrong, it's not a "strong" in the computer science meaning of the word filter, but it's decent and it helps out people on both sides of the fence. I don't see why this is being fought. Is disallowing this TLD going to stop porn on the Internet? Am I missing something here?
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Many people (including myself) resent this disgusting smut. I would rather it didn't become legitimized by having its own top level domain. These "adult entertainment" companies should all cease and desist for the morality of the U.S.
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I completely agree that these people (government types) play this childish "nyaaa-nyaaah I know something you don't know!" game. I don't know if things are more likely to be redacted now than before 9/11, but it's been crazy for a long time. A long time.
Yesterday, I was just curious what one had to do in order for the FBI to start a file on you (something that I aspire to have at some point), so I googled for "How do I get an FBI file?"
The second hit is the John Lennon FBI Files, which is hilarious and frightening at the same time. In particular: The Parrot Story was at first given to a researcher in a completely redacted form. Only after going through a court battle over this and other redacted documents did the true, criminally horrifying nature of the Parrot Story become clear. John Lennon had been harboring "Linda", who owned a parrot:
Remember, that ENTIRE STORY had been redacted, and remained so until after a court forced the FBI to reveal what the page contained. Not only did the federal government spend American tax dollars collecting the story, they spent money, time, and legal resources depending their goal of keeping it secret.
I suspect the reason the government does this is similar to the reason that the RIAA or commercial software publishers might corrupt peer-to-peer networks with corrupted versions of files. In both the redaction and peer-to-peer cases, The Man is introducing noise into the medium and frustrates efforts of users to get at the content they are looking for.
Maybe the sequel to the Freedom of Information Act should be the Freedom from Redactions act.
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?
... hmmm, I know I left that goddamn piece of paper around here somewhere ...
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
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.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I wonder what would happen if this company ICM just went out and bought some bandwidth (guess they already got some of that), and set up a DNS server that would handle requests from the .xxx domain, and started selling subdomains of it to people who wanted name resolutions there.
Although ICANN are 'the domain authority' they have refused to handle this TLD so surely its up for grabs? ICM could advertise their services and its up to the DNS admins of all the DNS servers around the world if they want to add it as an authoritative server, surely? If some porn sites decide to get on board and offer free porn to all comers (heh) then the end customer demand might be high enough that ISPs the world over add it.
I freely admit, I am no DNS admin and I dont know how it works.
I gave it a try, and googled just about anything
The third result is the porn site, how to bang just about anything around the home.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
There is a W3C article, Why Using TLDs for Filtering is Ineffective, Harmful, and Unnecessary, that points out all the downfalls of creating a .xxx domain. This excerpt sums up why I am personally opposed to the idea:
"7. The definition of what is offensive obviously differs greatly from country to country, from year to year, and from person to person. If bare ankles are considered obscene in some cultures, but are permitted in photos of Web sites in France selling sandals, then individuals wishing to keep photos of bare ankles out of their home using filtering on ".xxx" are unlikely to succeed. How will sites about safe sex or AIDS be treated? Who will establish what is art and what is pornography?"
Also, having read these documents it appears to me that this whole thing is nothing but a land grab by ICM.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Due to the highly sensitive nature of the information involved in this lawsuit (namely George Bush's nightly visits to www.wifeysworld.com and the fact that he doesn't know how to change the bookmark address in IE), we're not going to grant you the necessary security level for which to challenge our authority. Lawsuit dismissed!
You're the knee-jerker. The
When pornographers and conservatives both oppose something, you know it has to be bad.
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