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

Re:Why not?

[Anonymous Coward]

I run porn sites and mandatory .xxx would put me out of business. I own about one hundred domains but I'm relatively small tomatoes in the adult industry (most of those sites have a small amount of traffic and I bring in under $5k / month gross - just enough to feed myself and my family). All of my domains cost $10 / year. So it's safe to say I spend around $1,000 on domains / year. If I were forced to switch to .xxx not only would it be next to impossible for me to register the equivalent domain for every single .com and .net that I own (because of the competition), but even if I could get all of them switched to .xxx it would raise my costs to $6,000 / year because the .xxx will cost around $60 / year. That's 12% of my gross revenue.

This is forced censorship. Not choice. It would put a lot of people like me out of business (assuming we are REQUIRED to switch to .xxx).

Separate the domain from the carrier decision

[WillAffleckUW]

The reality is that .xxx content is the most profitable Net carrying traffic segment, with the highest markup, so all common carriers will carry it, just at a premium.

Anyone who doesn't will lose 4/5ths of their revenue.

Re:I'll tell you why not.

[ArcherB]

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!

Current laws define what porn is and yeah, it's subjective. Photo processing labs all over the country deal with this every day. Sometimes people get stupid and call the cops over a baby in the bathtub picture. Sometimes, people get stupid and take a picture of their child in the bathtub when the "child" is 12! So yeah, some of these are going to have to be handled on a case-by-case basis. And yes, those deciding will have to use common sense because it is subjective. Then again, so are murder laws and many other laws on the books. Are you suggesting that we throw out all laws that are not pure black and white? A baby in a bathtub is not porn. It lacks class in my opinion, but I wouldn't call it porn. Sites like Crush-photo, Met-Art, and even Playboy are done artistically, but I think they easily qualify as porn. I don't think you would find too many that would argue with that and deciding what is porn and what is not is not really that hard to do.

Re:I'll tell you why not.

[daeg]

There's no reason for a .xxx TLD. If you are worried about your kids seeing porn, maybe you should examine your parenting, or why your children have unsupervised access to computers to begin with, or perhaps, you should learn to trust and let go. If you can't trust them, examine why.

Do not thrust your desire for someone else to do your baby sitting and force the creation of even more bureaucracy around the domain system, that, by definition, cannot work. Porn is on the Internet, you cannot regulate it away, no matter how hard you try.

Re:I'll tell you why not.

[Arcane_Rhino]

Actually, I think this is one of the few areas where capitalism really could resolve the matter since websites have turned into something of a commodity.

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.

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.

Initially it will be all hell as everything gets sorted out but I do think it would work out rather quickly, and, more importantly, not result in any nonsensical Governmental control attempts.

The Wrong Way

[Bios_Hakr]

The person who came up with .xxx should be slapped. I mean, what kind of fucking idiot is this person/are these people?

If you want to clear the internet of pr0n and make it safe for kids, create a .fam domain and then make the registrar a board consisting of the LDS Church, Christian Coalition, Southern Baptist Conference, and Catholic Church. Before any site is accepted, a scan will be done on their code to ensure *every* link on the page ends in .fam.

Create e-mail servers that require a name, address, SSN, and valid phone number to activate e-mail. Have monks (like they have anything better to do) call every person who registers and verify their information.

After that, sell software that only allows .fam domains to be processed. Nothing from an IP address outside the .fam will be accepted.

Users should be classified based on their ages. If you are between 8 and 18 and you e-mail someone more than 1 year older than you, the e-mail gets sent to LDS missionaries (give them something to to besides annoy me) for review. If the content is inappropriate, your e-mail is revoked. Make it work the same way for older people e-mailing younger people. Just give more leeway.

In about 30 days and with absolutely no resistance, you could create a family-safe internet.

Seriously, if you or someone you know came up with the idea of .xxx, please turn in your geek card and go work a help desk in India and leave the real thinking to much smarter people.

Re:I'll tell you why not.

[innocent_white_lamb]

I mean, would a topless woman count? Breastfeeding? What about nudists? Yes, probably no and yes.
 
I think you're forgetting about "National Geographic" type photos of native women in Africa and so on. Would National Geographic have to move to an .xxx domain too?

Re:I'll tell you why not.

[Kadin2048]

Define "sexual" in the context of 'sexual entertainment,' so that we'll all be sure exactly what type of conduct is acceptable or not. And, please, when you state your definition, ensure that it's equally applicable to Orthodox Hasidic Jews, Lakota Native Americans, U.S. fratboys, nudists, and traditionalist Muslims.

What exactly is an 'educational video' and what's 'sexual entertainment'? If I'm a pornographer, and you make it difficult to sell straightforward porn, it makes sense that I'm going to make them into "training films" if that helps me reach my audience (or my advertisers' audience, i.e., get eyeballs/clicks).

I can guarantee you that the page 2 bra ads in most major U.S. newspapers could probably be sold as sexual entertainment in some places, but they're also just bra ads. Since the internet is a global medium, how do you propose to determine which a person is doing? Which side are you going to err on? And who's going to be the final arbiter? (And if the final arbiter is not the U.S. Supreme Court, what are you going to do when they disagree, and the USSC accuses you of hampering someone's protected speech rights? And if it is the USSC, how do you avoid making people not living in the USA effectively subject to US laws? It's a lose-lose situation.)

A glib answer like "sexual entertainment" doesn't solve any problems, it just exchanges one ('what the hell is 'pornography'') for another ('what the hell is 'sexual entertainment'') and so on as you try to define it further ('what the hell is 'sexual''). There are no universal answers to these questions.

Re:I'll tell you why not.

[Kadin2048]

Tough call, but there are porn laws on the books now. I don't see why ICANN just adopt some of the currently existing laws and use those. I get your point but I think something like foot-fetish sites would serve as a better example. It will be subjective, no doubt, but it is certainly doable.

So, which law would you like to use? The U.S.'s? (I mean, obviously we should copy the laws from a country with one of the highest teen-pregnancy rates in the industrialized world -- clearly they must have some good ideas going there.) Even within the United States, we don't have a uniform definition of pornography or obscenity; the Supreme Court intentionally left the standard vague, realizing that it varies by community.

I'm sure some European residents would probably chafe at the thought of having their web sites judged under Puritannical USian laws; maybe we should use one of theirs instead? Somehow I think that this might not go over so well in Asia or the Middle East, and let's face it, if we go by population, they have the rest of us outvoted.

Your comparison with driving is silly. Right now, we have a "road" without "traffic laws" and the whole thing works very well, thank you. There are a minority of people who think that the whole thing is just too crazy and want to slow the whole thing down, and I think it's totally fair to give them a special, padded lane, if that's what they want. It's certainly better than messing with the working system we have right now.