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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
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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
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
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?
``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.
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.
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
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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
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.