New Vote on .xxx Internet Address Nears

Billosaur writes "ICANN is once more set to vote on the creation of the .xxx Internet address. Though the proposal has been voted down by ICANN's board twice before the group behind those previous proposals resubmitted after they 'agreed to hire independent organizations to monitor porn sites' compliance with the new rules, which would be developed by a separate body called the International Foundation for Online Responsibility.' Once more the proposal has led to pornographers and religious groups finding themselves on the same side of an issue, the porn industry worried that the domain would lead to government controls, the religious groups worried it would make access too easy and allow porn to expand even further onto the Internet."

Comments

Why not?

[ArcherB]

I fail to understand why we DON'T have .xxx domain names. If we did, we could lump all the porn sites together, making them both easier to find and easier to block. No one would accidentally stumble upon a porn site while looking for something completely unrelated (remember whitehouse.com?). This also gives the added advantage of freeing up porn sites to do more of whatever it is they wish to do. Gone is the excuse of "What about the children?" because blocking it would be so easy, than even an ISP could do it. Imagine, all you have to do is call your ISP and say, "Please block all html-based porn. Thank you." All your ISP would need to do is simply block all .xxx domain names. Your children are safe and porn operators have that much more freedom!

I don't understand how this is NOT a win-win for everyone! (Except for those that either want to block porn altogether and those that want to make it that much easier to "stumble on." F*ck both those groups!)

Re:Why not?

[solafide]

Because nobody will want only a .xxx domain. Let's say you're [pornsitehere].com and the xxx tld gets approved. You can't let [pornsitehere].xxx get snapped up by someone else and feed off the people expecting [pornsitehere].xxx to be the same as [pornsitehere].com. Thus the porn sites will now have 2 addresses: [pornsitehere].com and [pornsitehere].xxx.

Meanwhile the legitimate high-profile .com sites will also need a .xxx site: there will be misspellings, and imagine the bad rap that, say, Microsoft would get from microsoft.xxx being a porn site. So the legitimate .com site owners will have to buy up the .xxx domains too.

So now we have everyone buying a new .xxx domain name which points to their original site and keeping their own .com site. No porn site will move to being only .xxx because everyone is used to .coms, and no legitimate business will risk a domain-squatter in the .xxx domain. It's no easier to block porn as before, nor easier to find it. All this does is give the domain registrars more money and the DNS servers more headaches.

The only possible way of moving all porn to .xxx sites is by legislating it, and it's impossible to have a legislative solution that works, because people's definitions of porn vary. So porn will always be a presence on the internet, and you are still responsible for your own filtering.

Re:Why not?

[eln]

You're trying to segregate objectionable content so you can block it. This just can't work, because everyone's definition of "objectionable" is different. If we decide to do this to porn, what's next? A special TLD for violent content? Or maybe politically objectionable/inconvenient content?

The only possibly sane way to do this would be to have something like a .kids TLD, and then have kid-friendly sites voluntarily join it. Then you could make a "kid-friendly" browser by allowing access only to stuff in the .kids TLD. Of course, that would mean someone would have to constantly monitor sites on that TLD to make sure no objectionable content shows up. So, that's not really a perfect solution either.

The bottom line is really that you're trying to mandate a subjective standard through technology, and that sort of thing just doesn't work. You can get rid of the obvious stuff with existing filtering technology, but at the end of the day you still have to actually watch your kids if you want to make sure they stay away from stuff you find objectionable.

Re:Why not?

[Penguinisto]

"I know it when I see it"
-US Supreme Court Justice Frankfurter, defining obscenity (IIRC)

Therein lies the problem - what's porn? Nekkid chicks? Nope - half the Smithsonian's art collection would qualify. Is it nekkid people doing the nasty? Umm, nope - plenty of porn sites specialize in costumes and full rubber body suits. Sexual depiction? Well, there goes every health site which does 2d and 3d clinical cut-away renderings showing how human reproduction occurs.

Also - let's look at a state like Utah... the place is hella restrictive on what it considers "porn"; I could see the Utah state legislature mandating that ALL ISP's who do business there block the entire .xxx TLD from its citizenry. Adults, kids, whomever... everybody looking for pr0n gets the firewall in the land of Deseret. I suspect that more than a few counties and towns/cities/etc in the Southern US would happily pass similar laws (see also alcohol and "Wet Counties" vs. "Dry Counties") Care to be a multi-state or multi-national ISP having to add that selective and patchwork firewall burden to your list of things to do?

Just looks to be more trouble than it's worth on a macro scale, IMHO.

/P

Re:Why not?

[vivaoporto]

If we did, we could lump all the porn sites together, making them both easier to find and easier to block.

1) Will it be voluntary or mandatory? If it is voluntary, it will not work on principle, because every porn operator out there knows that the so called "blocks" will not be implemented only for children, but for everyone that is under anti-porn zealots internet jurisdiction, even who wouldn't mind to access this kind of content. Just see what happens now, the whole bias the media already has (both ways, liberal and conservative). Imagine it being imposed ISP level too, if you have no choice of ISP and the owner is against porn, he can simply impose his view. Now, if it is mandatory, it could work, but ...

2) How will you define porn? Is it sensual posing? Partial nudity? Full frontal nudity? Simulated sexual intercourse (softcore)? Pixelated sexual intercourse? Uncensored sexual intercourse? Is it only for pictures? Movies? Radio podcasts? Will it include foreign porn? Are written stories going to be censored? If so, only the online version or the good old printed book too? How will the foreign ones be translated? And, the most important question: Who will define porn? Who will catalog every internet content and create the blacklist and the whitelist? Who decides what is an acceptable expression of art and what is filthy debauchery?

People have to understand that you cannot both regulate artistic expressions (whatever kind it is) and have free speech at the same time. The judge that stroke down the COPA understood that you cannot deprive the whole society of its liberties in order to protect the children, specially because they will grow and become adults someday, and they will be entitled to those freedoms too, unless we take it away from them. If you are concerned about your children browsing habits, there are already software available out there. There is no reason to legislate everybody to suit to your personal needs.

Re:Why not?

[rrohbeck]

> I could see the Utah state legislature mandating that ALL ISP's who do business there block the entire .xxx TLD from its citizenry.

Now what I'm wondering is how Utah is going to force all pr0n sites to change their domain name (and give up their old DNS name.) Especially the many sites outside the US. And let alone the many sites that have tame and XXX sections, and much in between. Like blogs, pic sites etc.

Just making pr0n sites register a .xxx DNS name is going to change nothing at all. Making pr0n content (whatever that may be) in non-xxx domains illegal, that's what it's all about.

Re:Why not?

[Penguinisto]

"What constitutes murder vs. manslaughter vs self defense?"

Intent, as proven or disproven before a jury at trial. If the prosecutor screws up and mis-names it, he loses.

"What is the difference between libel and parody?"

Intent, as proven or disproven in civil tort at a lawsuit.

Notice the similarities? The examples you posted as per law require either a trial or lawsuit to hammer out. You, umm, really want to have that happen on a case-by-case basis with (at level best) tens of thousands out of a porn-site ownership pool numbering in the millions, if not tens of millions?

Notice the differences? The examples you posted involve action against individuals or highly definable entities for the most part (you sue a single entity for libel, you try a single person or at most a small group of persons for murder vs. manslaughter).

"As for porn, it could be as simple as nudity for non-educational purposes."

I have a coffee table book at home, called "Fille d' Joie: A History" (IIRC - I'd have to check @ home for the exact title). It contains a rich collection of stories, illustrations, photographs, personal accounts, insights, artifact images, and historical data - from prostitutes, madames, pimps, and historians throughout time. Many of the images in there are rather graphic, and there are probably more than a few sites who would dearly love to make money from displaying most of it - sites which feature pornography from a time when most folks' grandfathers probably spanked their collective monkey to 'em.

I bought it at the local bookstore, where it sat plain as day, for anyone with the funds and the means to carry it to the checkout stand. As a book, it's apparently just fine for sale in the Historical section where I found it. Online, it would likely get slapped with an ".xxx" TLD. It is after all educational, if one actually reads it. OTOH, anyone dying to get their jollies can prolly just flip through the pictures.

"Otherwise, don't do business in Utah. What's the problem here?"

So everyone there will automatically have the means to simply pack up and leave, right? (FWIW, I'd moved out of there a period of time ago). It's very similar to the anti-smoking laws that are soon to hit the state... easy enough to say "well if you want to smoke in a bar, do it in Nevada, or Wyoming, or just move elsewhere..." but for folks not able to simply do so, that's an awful big burden to place on them. I realize that we're just talking ab't pr0n here, but what happens when the subject gets more serious (e.g. anti-smoking laws getting too intrusive, etc)?

Sure, big ISP's will have local DNS servers in place (but not necessarily per-state). Now they would have to have one per state, or per county or town (in the case of selective county or municipality laws to such an effect, etc)... Do we get to the point where every single IP address user has it's own personal DNS server, and has to to correspond to a physical area just to comply? If so, we'll have to stock up on IPv6, 'cause IPv4 numbers will start getting tight much sooner than anticipated.

I'm just weighing the benefits vs. burdens, and apparently the burdens win out by a large margin IMHO.

/P

Re:Why not?

[Un pobre guey]

You are making a classic mistake, the rational analysis of the benefits and liabilities to average citizens of a fundamentally political question, as well as the practicalities of actually making it work. This has nothing to do with whether this or that is better for society or for children, or whether pornographers will benefit or lose from it (porn will continue its current dynamics regardless), or who will decide what is porn and what is not (good luck to the poor bastards). It is a pure distillation of political bullshit, an equation which has more to do with maintaining the flow of political contributions and winning future elections than anything else. If you apply your rational analysis to that, you will get somewhere.

I suspect ICANN will once again nip it in the bud because politicians will merely shout hysterically and lecture piously and pass the hot potato on to someone else. ICANN does not even want to start figuring out the things you mention, and it is unclear who would. Therefore, bam! goes the gavel again: rejected!

Re:Why not?

[fyngyrz]

So who decides what goes in the .xxx domain?

<SARCASM>

.xxx is for offensive material. Filth. Vice. You know, like Christian and Islamic websites. Surely we need to protect the children from this. They might grow up to be suicide bombers or abortion clinic bombers; get on television and lie to old people in a blatant attempt to extort money from them in return for "prayer." Or they might build on land in your town, claim they don't have to pay taxes, and saddle you and your neighbors with the portion of the tax burden they should be paying. Or they might encourage censorship, even online "ghettos" where material that doesn't fit into their ridiculous mythologies goes to be blocked by ISPs they control through PACs and other unsavory influences.

Yes, I think we need to move all religious content to a tld such as ".xxx" or ".lie" or ".myth" so we can easily block it. As for sex, no need for that. My kids know sex is perfectly OK, and lying about superstition is not — they're smart kids. No need to lean back towards the dark ages. I was happy for them when they had their first sexual experiences. I'm just as happy they've managed to avoid being conned by these superstitious dimwits, but you know, not all kids are as smart as mine. That is why we have to put religion in its own tld. It must be blocked because I don't like it!

</SARCASM>

Re:Why not?

[Kadin2048]

They're two sides of the same coin; many of the people pushing for .xxx as a TLD are in favor of schemes which could only work if all pornography occurred there. In fact, many of the justifications they use for creating the TLD in the first place (e.g. "protect children") are meaningless if you can't somehow magically put all the porn there.

If you accept that it's impossible to restrict porn to .xxx, and further realize that most porn sites will just register two domain names, one in .xxx and one in a regular TLD, then many of the reasons cited for having an "adult" TLD fall apart. At that point, the only people it benefits are the registrars and ICANN, because it would force a massive namespace land grab: everyone would need to get their existing names in .xxx, either to use themselves or just to keep someone else from getting and using. (You think Disney isn't going to buy disney.xxx just to keep it out of circulation?)

There's no point in just creating an .xxx TLD for the sake of having a new TLD. It wouldn't do anything to assist in censorship for folks who don't want to see porn; it wouldn't 'protect' anyone; and it wouldn't make the internet 'cleaner.' It would just make ICANN and Verisign a few billion bucks each.

Re:Why not?

[arkhan_jg]

You know, as a European, I'd actually agree with your argument without the tags... Sex is a perfectly normal thing, and children wanting to learn more about it is also perfectly natural. Statistically, societies with much higher controls on pornography (and the repressive attitude that goes with it) also have much higher rates of teenage pregnancy, as boys work much harder to actually have sex instead of wanking to porn.

Organised religion on the other hand, is responsible for inciting many of the past - and current - wars and atrocities. Iraq can oh so easily be classified as a religious war, just look at the portrayal of muslims in the US press. There really is a good an argument for filing religous websites away on a separate section we can easily filter - as much as there is for filing away sexual websites, anyway.

I'll tell you why not.

[uberjoe]

The problem is that there is no way to define what IS and IS NOT porn.

Re:I'll tell you why not.

[mrchaotica]

How about "if it shows nudity for non-educational purposes."

Is a family photo album site, which happens to contain pictures of a kid taking a bath, "educational?" Is artistic photography "educational?" I'd say "no" and "no." But neither of them are "porn," either!

Re:I'll tell you why not.

[mdwh2]

How about "if it shows nudity for non-educational purposes."

What about non-nude pictures which have still been intended for sexual arousal? This is especially the case with less-vanilla stuff like BDSM material. And whilst you and I might count that as erotica rather than pornography, bear in mind that many people and Governments do not (e.g., the UK Government's definition of pornography in their plans to criminalise possession of simulated and consensual "extreme porn" is any image which was produced for the purposes of arousal, whether or not it shows nudity or sex).

On the other hand, there could be nude pictures which aren't porn, but aren't educational either. I mean, would a topless woman count? Breastfeeding? What about nudists?

Another problem, even if we have a fixed definition of porn, is that it's not easily to split everything up into different websites. For example, what if someone wants to post an erotic picture on their LiveJournal? Suddenly we'd have to have LiveJournal.xxx, and split it across two domains.

Personally I think rather than trying to split off "porn", it would be better to split off a "for kiddies [and anyone offended by stuff they don't have to look at] only" domain, leaving an "adult" Internet for the rest of us.

Re:I'll tell you why not.

[mdwh2]

Here is how the capitalism/self policing works out: if the Napa valley people want the site grape.com but grape.com is full of naked women doing odd things with grapes, they take their case to ICANN and sue for the site name demonstrating that it is a porn site and therefore should have the .xxx domain not the .com domain. Similarly, if farmer Joe discovers that people with foot fetishes drink a lot of wine so buys grape.xxx, but all it really depicts is a bunch of naked feet in grapes, the site that has the kinky grape women can also come and point out that naked feet are not pornography in any country where the internet is not already banned and sue to get grape.xxx for themselves. Other than arbitrating, the government does not have to directly police anything. The market will dictate and force the appropriate domains.

I'm not sure how a single organisation making the decisions, or people suing, has anything to do with capitalism and the market?

Leaving it to the market would mean giving to the one who pays the most, and then allowing them to trade.

Re:I'll tell you why not.

[Cid Highwind]

Classifying any given email message as "spam" and "not spam" is fairly easy to do, too. Somehow I don't think that ICANN requiring all spam to be sent from mail servers in some newly-created .spam TLD would change anything at all to the stream of mortgage offers, penis pill ads, and stock scams that fill my inbox every day. My advice to the anti-porn crusaders^W^W .xxx TLD advocates: Have fun playing whack-a-mole with porn sites operated through the same type of tangled web of international ownership and hosting as spam and phishing sites. A decade of fighting with spammers teaches us that forcing a business that operates on the fringes of legality to comply with onerous new policies is very hard.

Re:I'll tell you why not.

[Randseed]

If a someone wants to make money from porn, their site should be .xxx. So, to use an example from later in this post, if a website called "grape" is a site that depicts naked women doing odd things with grapes, it should be grape.xxx. If "grape" is about the Napa valley it should be grape.com.

Of course, ICANN, InterNIC, and their ilk completely shot to hell the entire notion of separate TLDs for different kinds of sites when they started giving out random .com, .net, and .org addresses. As far as I'm concerned, these morons couldn't even figure out how to handle those three TLDs. What makes you think that they could handle an .xxx TLD?

Strange, but...

[Penguinisto]

...wouldn't open proxies (and even to an extent anonymizers, depending on setup) obviate the whole ISP blocking of ".xxx", or any blocking software that parents/preachers get put on to avoid making it too easy to access?

Besides, considering the outright abuse of .org, .com, and .net, what's to stop ".xxx" from being turned into a mush of sites which may have little or nothing to do with porn? After all, I can think of lots of groups that would love to have an .xxx extension, just for the cool factor (bloggers, artists, and not-so-intelligent l33t h4x0r sites just as a ferinstance). Unless they have some intensely strict rules w/ the registrars - more than what they propose for it (e.g. give 'em the rules required to get, say, a ".mil" extension), it won't be just for pr0n - at least not for very long, IMVHO.

Don't even get me started on the domain-squatting and name-grabbing/auctioning, either... it'd make the Oklahoma Land Rush of the 19th Century seem tame by comparison.

Considering all of that, ICANN can prolly say "nope" yet again and call it good, for all the good it'll do. Seems like a headache all-around; and when both porn industry and fundies BOTH get all ate-up about not having it, you know something's inherently wrong with the idea.

/P

What drives technology adoption?

[Original Replica]

allow porn to expand even further onto the Internet."

Is that really possible? In all seriousness,"Internet porn is a $2.84 bln market"http://www.itfacts.biz/index.php?id=P7960 How much of paypal's success is tied up in that $2.8 bil? What about faster bandwith, or video compression, or antivirus software? Gaming certainly plays a significant part in the adoption of faster computers, I think porn might play a similar part in the relm of data transfer. We are more eager to get new toys than to work more efficiently.

No Compelling Reason

[Frosty Piss]

It's just a real estate grab that has little or no practical use in managing porn on the Interweb. It's not like all these sites will give up their .com / .net / .org names, and I'll bet within 24 hours (probably a lot less) of .xxx going "live", there will be no names worth buying left. Land grab, pure and simple, there is really no compelling reason to have the .xxx TLD.

Re:PLEASE!!!

[jtn]

Sorry. DNS is not a content-definition system. It is a system for translating IP addresses to human-readable (usually) names and the reverse. It is not for balkanizing the Internet into "districts".

It sets an ugly precedent for further dividing content into groups easily blockable by groups in control (governments, corporations, etc). Would you like to wake up some day to find that negative discussions regarding your government are deemed inappropriate, and subjugated to a TLD (by US law perhaps?) and then blocked by a majority of access providers?

Finally, uou nor anyone else are fit to define what content is available or grouped for everyone else. You are responsible for your OWN content viewing, and those you are legally considered guardian of, no one else.