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ICANN Rejects .XXX Top Level Domain, Again
eldavojohn writes "After yet another contentious vote on the .xxx concept, ICANN has finally rejected the pornography TLD. The debate has gone on for quite some time, and the 9-5 decision was the third time a decision was reached on the subject. This is the second time the body has ruled against the idea, and is likely the last time we'll see it come up for vote any time soon. One member abstained from voting. From the article: 'Many of the board members said they were concerned about the possibility that ICANN could find itself in the content regulation business if the domain name was approved. Others criticized that, saying ICANN should not block new domains over fears like that, noting that local, state and national laws could be used to decide what is pornographic and what is not. Other board members said they believed that opposition to the domain by the adult industry, including Web masters, content providers and others, was proof that the issue was divisive and that .xxx was not a welcome domain.'"
Rejection is what keeps 'em in business.
Is that classification does not equal regulation. It can be used to assist regulation, but usually classification serves a lot of good purposes outside of regulation. That being said, I don't know that .xxx would be the only place the target material could be put (if it were, then it would be regulation), but honestly, unlike a '.adv' (advertisement), I would think they would like the TLD themselves (the content providers) because it would make them just that little bit easier to pick out.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
So they add retarded domains such as .biz or .info and reject .xxx? Way to go. Perhaps we could get .enterprise and .xml approved instead.
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
...door?
.XXX domain would make a simplistic filters only effective for simple people. I doubt a porn domain owner is going to drop chickswithhorses.com and move everything over to chickswithhorses.xxx. He'll just use redirection and have two front doors to his domain.
.com. There's simply too may jurisdictions out there in our wonderful world.
.XXX media attention and effort seems pointless to me.
Having a
ISP's and government authorities will NEVER be able to move porn off of
All of the
In the absence of an international treaty governing pornography, any decision to create a .xxx domain would probably violate the laws in one country and the civil rights in another. Avoiding the problem was a wise choice.
.xxx domain is just trying to get someone else to do their dirty work for them. Sorry dudes.
We have international treaties on things like trade and maritime law but something on pornography is unlikely because it's a moral issue. What is viewed as harmless erotica in one country will get you executed in another. Anyone trying to get the
It sounds like not everyone in the adult industry was happy about the domain.
Actually, it sounds like, this time around, there were more people against it than for it, but the people against it didn't really find a consensus on why they opposed it, only that they did. Which is interesting. At least this time around it doesn't look like a case of "the Republicans told us to reject this."
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Let's hope this is the end of the .xxx stupidity.
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As soon as this is finally accepted im buying the domain MM.XXX with the hope of cashing in, in 2030.
See, that's why I think TLDs are redundant. There was a proposal some time ago to abandon TLDs, and restructure DNS. Since nobody seems to care about what a TLD means anymore, aside from perhaps the US Gov't still using .gov, why keep up with the charade? .com, .net, .org seem to have very little relevance to the content of the actual sites.
I don't know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. -Anonymous Coward
Sure, it seems pointless, but create the Domain anyway. Filters can easily block some additional stuff and at the same time, provide a new domain for porn mongers to use. .xxx extension, even if not exclusively, it will reduce the .COM bloat.
.ABC for all I care.
I expect a lot of new websites would use the
My point is, who cares, create
ICANN was right to reject the .xxx TLD. If it had been implemented, we would see a rash of laws designed to utilize by classifying not only porn, but other material deemed objectionable by just about anyone. These days you cannot use medical terminology without offending someone. Congress would start mandating that all objectionable material be moved to .xxx and they would likely be the body that creates the rules by which objectionable material is classified, WebMD would soon have to be moved to .xxx because they extensively use the words vagina and penis.
Because having .com .net .org and .museum means you're _not_ in the content regulation business.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Erecting XXX domain faces stiff opposition
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
No thanks. Instead please enjoy a complete block on all SMTP connections from machines with reverse DNS entries in the
Country-level TLDs are significant. For example, I KNOW that http://www.toyota.ca/ takes me to Toyota Canada's page, while http://www.toyota.com/ takes me to the US page. Using country-level TLDs for this purpose is correct and should be encouraged - it is a lot better than the alternatives like having a stupid URL like http://www.hyundaicanada.com/, or forcefully re-directing people based on their geographic location (what if I am using a proxy? Or what if I want information on the American prices for comparison?).
.net, and .org), are indeed irrelevant.
.com / .net / .org. Then a company doesn't have to register 3 domains, and they only have to register country-level domains in contries where they actually have a presence.
The "generic" top level TLDs however (.com,
Personally, I think the answer is not to *abolish* TLDs, but to make them *optional*, and abolish only
But how would you implement it - how do you reconcile those domains if different people own them, who gets the new TLD when they are amalgamated?
People, please stop using ICANN root DNS servers. Use OpenNIC instead:
www.opennic.unrated.net
I wouldn't personally interpret it like that. It could be that all of them are for porn and that only 9 are willing to be associated or it could just mean that only 5 of the 14 think that this would do anything other than move the activity completely offshore.
In the end, the likelihood of this making any difference is quite small for the cost involved. A better focus if we want to regulate the porn industry is to keep them from spamming. I remember I set up a fake account once and was inundating within a week with hundreds of spams a day. Of course the majority were brittany teen makes out with horse things type spams.
The issue of domain names is really not worth dealing with until after spam. Perhaps the regulators could just start yanking registrations for known sites that benefit from spam.
Okay, if the TLD isn't the answer, and I'm pretty sure it isn't, what about this: If you serve content that you should reasonably know is age or otherwise restricted you are compelled to mark it out as such in your url. Failure to do so would impede your ability to legally accept US funds / bank with US partners / etc. If you are incorrect in your assumption you'd first be assessed a small fine, like a parking ticket. And just like parking tickets, you'd be expected to pay remotely, or show up in court. Failure to do either activates those laws. Also like auto-related laws, you should eventually expect to exhaust the court's tolerances with repeated violations of the law. Are we going to be able to put guys in China in jail with this? No. Can we make it very difficult for them to, say, process a credit card transaction with a reputible vendor? Yes. Come on Slashdot, poke some holes in this! I know you want to...
``Periodically there are proposals to mandate the use of a special top level name or an IP address bit to flag "adult" or "unsafe" material or the like. This document explains why this is an ill considered idea from the legal, philosophical, and particularly, the technical points of view.''
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3675.txt
We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from the machinations of the wicked.
The best structure IMHO would be to have only one main TLD which would be int (for International or Internet, your pick) and country TLDs subdivided as each country wishes. So there could be a .us.com in which the US could enforce the commercial nature of websites if they wish so or .us.gov or dot us dot whatever they want. Same for each country.
Slashdot anagrams to "Sad Sloth"
Um, so who gets to decide what should be age restricted? What age should it be? Why should I submit my content to the demands of your arbitrary rules? Who exactly is going to US banks not to do business with a website that refuses to participate in this scheme? And of course, who gets to decide what kind of content should be age restricted? I, for example, think that no one under the age of 95 should be exposed to websites promoting crackpot extremist christian views like intelligent design. Can we add that to your list? Enquiring minds wanna know.
Life needs more saving throws.
It's about time to stop flogging this dead horse.
Now, do I put that comment on www.blog.bestiality, www.blog.necrophilia, or www.blog.sado-masichism? Life would perhaps be easier with www.blog.xxx
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The other, and I feel even more important, issue is.. who gets to decide what "porn" is? The definition of what is and isn't acceptable changes from year to year, country to country, state to state, and household to household. People have been arguing over what's acceptable for (literally) ages, and it's definitely not going to be solved anytime soon.
.xxx domain, what has to be moved there? One person's obscenity is another person's fine art, medical diagram, or even religious iconography. Everything from Gray's Anatomy to cultural studies to the contents of any art museum could end up sequestered to .xxx because someone somewhere doesn't want the kiddies to accidentally see naughty bits.
So, if we did get the
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Take a domain name "domain" with a tld (.tld), and rename the domain "domain.tld". The .tld would just be part of the name. All you would have to do is retain a list of the 'old' tlds so a domain is not interpreted as a subdomain. This would all be done through DNS; completely transparent for the user. Eventually old URLs would become redirects to new ones w/o tlds.
I'm for it - if only because it's worth the experiment. Anxieties over prejudices from US lawmakers or some such don't mean much to me. I'm not from the US and I very much doubt that even those that _are_ from the US can do much more than express those anxieties. Nobody can prove anything. Besides that, the reasons given by ICANN are bogus. 'Not in the content-business' ? We're talking about the same organisation that sanctioned '.museum' ?! And even if porn were regulated in there, it would take _years_ for the lawsuits to dry up, by which time '.xxx' would have found a natural place. I'd say: give it a chance. Who cares.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
...first level domains should not exist at all... ehr...
CTRL + F Funny ---> I had you!!!
The inverse (a domain exclusively for child appropriate sites) always seemed much more practical and effective to me. Let's call it .kids.
.xxx is that undesirable club that you have to force people in to. The pornographers don't want to be in it because they know that it will get filtered out at a lot of places. So it cuts into their business.
.kids domain, is the place where everyone who produces child appropriate material will want to be because they know that a lot of parents will filter out everything but .kids. So you set up .kids and put in place a gatekeeper who monitors to make sure that only the material you want is in it.
.xxx want to run .xxx and not .kids because running .kids will be a lot more work (with the content monitoring and all) so they won't make as much profit.
.xxx to .kids because their ultimate goal isn't just to prevent children from seeing pornography. Their goal is to prevent you from having any access to pornography. And that will be easier if it is all in one place.
.kids will admittedly be challenging (I would suggest putting librarians in charge of that, they have experience with classifying material and setting up child-appropriate sections). But it won't be that challenging because companies would have a very strong incentive to follow the rules. So isn't .kids a much better idea?
.kids better.)
Let's put it this way, if you were starting a club, would you A) make the club undesirable for people to come to and then try to force them into it, or B) make the club a place where people wanted to be and then only allow in the people you wanted.
Well,
But a
Of course, the companies pushing
And the moral crusaders prefer
Now, that "gatekeeper who monitors" bit about
(If you're really going to pursue porn filtering at the network infrastructure level, that is. Personally I think the whole idea is stupid. I'm just saying that if you're going to do it, isn't
If the goal is to protect children?
Rather than argue over what is and what isn't pornography, why not just setup a .kids domain which is explicitly for children?
That way, those seeking to register a .kids domain would have the onus of proving their material was appropriate for kids. (Not that this is difficult). With the .xxx domain, every .com .net .org, etc... site has the burden of proving they don't belong in the .xxx domain. But, if the opposite approach is taken, only those sites specifically meant for children will have the burden of proving their content appropriate for children, and we can leave the rest of the internet as is.
I'm not sure why politicians keep on beating a dead horse when neither liberals nor conservatives want a .xxx domain. And "protecting the children" is as simple as giving them their own TLD, rather than trying to disrupt the internet as we know it.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Looked at the way DNS handles reverse lookups lately? Not horrible, but a kludge.
As long as the world will soon render IPv4 obsolete (despite tremendous opposition), I can't see DNS lasting too much longer. A decade, tops - probably less.
I don't even see DNS living too long within private IPv4 networks after (if) IPv6 becomes the standard. Who wants to preserve an obsolete kludge like DNS? It'll end up going the way of sendmail and uucp, IMHO. Still there, still operational, still usable - but who (except for some COBOL programmers) would want to maintain it?
Sorry, but ICANN just sucks. I mean it's one of the domains that is most desired by a great many of users. They refuse. No, it's not censorship. It's zoning and marketing.
.xxx domain. We get crud like .museum instead. !@#$%
It would simply create a "redlight district" on the web. That doesn't mean porn wouldn't exist anywhere. Just as strip bars and what not exist outside of redlight districts. However, most such entities will locate in a red light district so that they can be more easily found. (And yes, more easily avoided.)
I'd wager $100 bucks the ICANN voters got a nice bit of cash under-the-table from several of the major porn industry.
Of course, where as a large portion of the the people want and
"Feel free to replace 'Christian' with the intolerant fundamental religious idiots of your choice"
This "disclaimer" does not let you off the hook. The fact is that no established religion is in favour of pornography. By singling out the Christians for mention, you betray where your prejudices are.
In general, beware this manipulation of a democratic process; it happens on national scales, too. Take a close vote and just keep voting on it until the resolution passes. Then, once it passes, generally you don't have to vote on it again.
.XXX has lost. Put it away for a decent time period before trying to ram it through again.
Due to the nature of random processes, even the exact same population that has the exact same opinions will have different voting outcomes on each vote. Now, if you take just one vote on an issue, it works out in the end; some things get overvoted, some things get undervoted, some things are enacted that "shouldn't" be and some things aren't enacted that "should" be. (Also, it's really hard to know which is which, so resist the temptation to point to your favorite close election and hold it up as an example; you can't prove that the election was 51% instead of 49%, it may well have been 51% instead of 54%.)
By holding votes over and over again, and taking it if it passes even once, you secretly lower the pass threshold. Add in some simple, traditional games for keeping certain groups out (like polling times or other things) and you can muck with another couple of percentage points, and you can keep trying until you get it right.
Unfortunately, there's no real way to prevent this; people simply need to be aware on some level that this is cheating.
Allow the xxx domains, but don't require that it is porn. If someone wants to put their site they can, if not the rules are the same for all the other domains. I think a lot of adult content sites would move there for the promotional value.
After seeing what sex.com sold for, I would want to have it just to sell sex.xxx, or maybe se.xxx would be worth more. Either way, whoever gets it would make a killing.
A far better answer than a single classification (XXX or not XXX) is a system like ICRA, with its self-reporting and multiple parameters. The problem for me as a parent, though, is that there's not a built-in system for using it in most OS/browser combinations. Or is there? Is there a way to use ICRA cleanly with Macs or Windows, esp. without having to buy some piece of software for all of my various machines?
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Someone needs to integrate the standard /. theme here: "Think of the AverageUser!".
.ca .uk .au than even the existence of linux! Web 1.0 worked tremendously to make ".com" the place to be. ".net" and ".org" became known as slightly more "reputable".
t ml". (Your redirector stays put even if you shift hosts, which is a huge gain IMO.) The problem - beginner users consistently try "www.funathome.com" or such and then tie themselves in knots.
I think even fewer people know about
I think this poses a small security risk, because "Ford.cx" is not the same as "Ford.com". I can see the hordes of mis-clicks into phish sites.
I've used Redirectors for years, because "fun.at/home" type addresses are always crisper than "www.JoesFreeWebhost.com/members/username/index.h
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
The debate over the .xxx domain should have died years ago. If you're really anal about protecting children, the .kids domain idea is a much better prospect.
.orgs aren't non-commercial organizations, and .nets aren't network-related, then why bother? The only domains that are reasonably well-regulated right now are the various governmental domains, plus .edu.
ICANN hasn't done enough in being a domain name regulator, IMHO. What's the purpose of a TLD if it doesn't really mean anything? If
Let us live so that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry -- Mark Twain
Hey, those sites don't work.
What is it with you and horses? I mean, damn, dude.
This would basically wipe out the internet; bookmarks, URLs hard-coded into scripts, and e-mail addresses, amongst other things, would stop working. If you're going to rebuild the internet from scratch...well, good luck.
I doubt a porn domain owner is going to drop chickswithhorses.com and move everything over to chickswithhorses.xxx
.net, .org, .info, .biz whatever then he's just turned his investments in those domains into a loss and he might find himself out of business if he couldn't acquire the .xxx and regulation does pass requiring him to move to .xxx
... if regulation were to pass then that's basically what the regulators would want. For as many porn sites to go out of business as possible.
.xxx is a really good way to put a lot of small guys out of business. Even some big guys who aren't domain masters wouldn't be able to compete with the pro squatters who have the resources to register as many .xxx as quickly as possible the very instant the TLD becomes available.
Not only that but the business is so competitive that chances are if chickswithhorses.com gets any reasonable amount of traffic someone will beat him to the process of registering chickswithhorses.xxx and then he's SOL.
Not only that but if he also registered the equivalent domain on
Of course
There's also the case of if someone owns sexysluts.com but someone else owns sexysluts.net then who gets sexysluts.xxx ?
The first person to register it, obviously. Which leaves the other out in the cold.
at $60 per domain I am glad to see it go. .US. .Microsoft and heathstats.us would stay healthstats.us .com somebody looses $100B
I pay $6 for dot coms and have 400 of them
Do the math $60*400=$24,000 per YEAR
Yeah like I want to pay $24000 per year instead of $2400 so I can be censored.
Besides that in countries like The Netherlands where porn is not blocked from children, they have a lower crime rate, and lower occourances of rape and incest. Hmmm, seems like censorship does more harm than good.
The only people this is a good deal for is the people implimenting it, they would get about $100M per year.
I say we abolish all top level domains except country ones like
So Microsoft.com would become just
But it will never happen now because if you eliminate
.cum
-Darkshadow (There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.)
It's one of the fundamental paradoxes of responsible government.
are the ones this is for.
and get rid, as many have suggested, of most of the TLDs. .com --> [ .com.us (.co.us?) | .com.intl ] .org, .net, .gov, .biz, etc., etc., likewise.
.gov.intl should not exist. In the place of that, .un.intl, .nato.intl, etc. Having a .gov domain is a really scary concept, if you think about it.
.un and .nato, but making them come under a TLD that specifies "international" is a little easier on my sense of propriety. On the other hand, the concern about who is administering the .intl domain could bother some people.
.xxx.intl ?
Except that
One might consider domains such as
Which begs the question, in such a world, should there then be a
joudanzuki, not sure if this one is a joke or serious
How did the line that started with .com get joined to the line above, across a blank line? I'm pretty sure that top line was originally three lines.
/. as some.
Guess I obviously don't have as much experience with
if I had mod points, I would.
.xxx TLD is not the answer. Without an international regulating body to determine what goes under non-country TLDs, there's a power vacuum being created for every new non-country TLD.
A lot of problems we have with the current internet are derived from people and corporations that asserted that the current laws shouldn't be applicable to the internet simply because the courts would not be technologically savvy enough to apply them properly.
(Big Microsoft corporations that want to market software before its ready, and who (not surprisingly) turn out not to be able to control its evolution in the ways they brag that they can.)
The concept of a separate virtual reality was a necessary conceit to get around the politics that was getting in the way of establishing an international communications infrastructure. It is now moslty unnecessary baggage, and has been since well before Microsoft put MSWindows666, I mean, MSWindows95 on the market.
However, a
Actually, scouting.org would probably not have that much trouble raising the fees.
.xxx as a TLD (as opposed to, perhaps, a 2LD under a .lib or .content TLD or as 2LDs under country TLDs) is not a good idea.
But local community centers would not have extra money for this tax, and, conversely, a determined purveyor of child porn probably would have the money.
High fees are prabably not helpful.
Also, I cringe every time I walk into a store that advertises that it is "for kids".
Conceptially, it makes sense to have domains organized by content. It would be useful to browse the internet much like browsing in the stacks in the library.
I'm not sure that such a system has a place being implemented at the TLD level. Actually, I'm sure it flies in the face of data access design principles, and that is the real reason why
or was that www.flog.xxx ?
http://outcampaign.org/
"Besides that in countries like The Netherlands where porn is not blocked from children, they have a lower crime rate, and lower occurances of rape and incest. Hmmm, seems like censorship does more harm than good."
You know, correlation != causation is still true even when we don't want it to be... I think it probably is true that censorship does more harm than good, but providing an example of a single country that has less censorship and less crime doesn't really tell you much.
eventually going to be implemented, in one form or another. Probably not enforced in the US and other free countries, but China has a lot of excess manpower with which they are likely to _try_ (modulo bribes and the like) to enforce those within their subnet.
.com domains should be moved under .co.us (or .com.us, I don't remember which) or under .com.intl will eventually be pressured into establishing .kids, and shortly after that, .xxx. Evolution under the hands of stupid humans has some non-optimal implications.
We should get rid of the gTLDs. Will we? Not enough people understand the context issues, so the default international domain will be the gTLDs and the US context will continue to be projected onto the international context until either the rest of the world becomes free or the US becomes not free or both. (And probably after that, as well.)
And, even though value judgement belongs within a cultural (country level or below, definitely not international) level of context, the same who refuse to understand why
(Not really arguing with you, just airing my armpits, errm, opinions. And, yes I did read your whole post, just didn't see any point in talking about the rest of it. Rude of me, I suppose, to refrain from arguing points I'm not interested in.)
joudanzuki