Slashdot Mirror
ICANN Likely Finally To Approve .xxx For Porn Sites
shmG writes with this from the International Business Times: "The company that oversees Web addresses is expected to give the go-ahead on Friday for the creation of a .xxx suffix for websites with pornographic content, company officials indicated on Thursday. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which oversees the Internet on behalf of the US government, has in the past resisted creating a .xxx generic domain name system akin to those for .com and .net."
Hopefully, this is a sign that our policies are not dictated by the "Think of the children" crowd.
With the new rules letting any company/group create a TLD if they've got the money and infrastructure, it's only a matter of time before we'll be going to Sprite.coca-cola and BigMac.McD.... so why not give the sex operators a red light district that's easily blockable. Sure, it won't block 100% of porn, but it's one rule that can block 100% porn with no false positives.
I hope this doesn't encourage would-be censors to restrict the kinds of content allowed in non-xxx domains. Not all content fits neatly into an XXX designation, and even if it did it is simply not right to restrict XXX content to XXX domains. Having an XXX domain has always struck me as either pointless (insofar as XXX content might continue to be hosted on non-XXX domains) or otherwise a really bad idea (insofar as no XXX content may be allowed outside of XXX domains).
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
The owners of Slashdot.org would most likely serve a C&D on whomever registers slashdot.xxx for the clear trademark violation. TLD owners like .TV and .CC used to brag about the major companies registering all their trademarks with them... when really all those companies were doing was making sure nobody else used their brands the wrong way.
Nobody will use it. Using .xxx will allow every administrator to just wildcard block the .xxx domain, and I doubt its in the adult industry's best interest to use it.
It's almost baffling that the "oh, think of the children" crowd doesn't want this. I would think it would be of their interest to "force" (which I doubt could ever happen) adult companies to use the .xxx domains to allow this "dirty content" to be easily censored, and create a "red light district" of the internet, which you could just easily block with a simple wildcard filter. Fortunately, most of the censors are idiots and would rather put their head in the sand than acknowledge it exists and there is no way to get rid of it, since there will always be demand.
Either way, whatever ICANN approves or disapproves the usage of .xxx domains, it won't make a difference either way. The internet will be full of porn, everybody who wants it will be able to get it, and .xxx will continue to be unused, whether it's available or not.
Well, the .xxx domain is probably pointless. The vast majority of adult sites aren't going to be moving so you still won't be able to easily filter based on that criteria. The doc you linked does mention a different idea that I could get behind though, establish a .kids which would be a semi-walled garden of child appropriate material. That allows the creating of a relatively safe space for children which would be relatively enforceable by knowledgeable parents without creating the privacy and legal concerns that everyone seems to have with a .xxx domain.
Really you want a default null tld so Slashdot.org would just be slashdot. I don't care where a site is based, whether it's for profit or not. I want to just type:
slashdot
ubuntuforums
bbc
etc and not try and guess/remember whether they're: .com .net .org .co.uk .org.uk
etc etc. The distinction is meaningless to me.
This is the best improvement of the internets I've heard in years. Hunting for porn should be greatly enhanced if it's address is centralized! I wonder if those military guys who invented internets ever realized what would become of their tech.
"Men willingly believe what they wish." - Julius Caesar
It's also worth pointing out that "sex" and "xxx" probably only have meaning in American English - in British English, XXX certainly used to mean "beer".
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Really you want a default null tld so Slashdot.org would just be slashdot. I don't care where a site is based, whether it's for profit or not. I want to just type:
slashdot
ubuntuforums
bbc
etc and not try and guess/remember whether they're: .com .net .org .co.uk .org.uk
etc etc. The distinction is meaningless to me.
The distinction doesn't exist solely to help you mentally organize sites. It exists because DNS reads from right to left, and it has to start somewhere. Otherwise there would be no way to organize them.
Members of the American religious right also oppose its creation on moral grounds.
I respect freedom of opinion, but this attitude is plain fucking stupid. As if pornography will become more/less prevalent if the .xxx tld is approved/denied.
This is the same brand of ignorance that believes teens will have more sex if educated about it, or that prostitution should be outlawed instead of regulated.
As a species, we wouldn't still be here if sex wasn't a big deal to us, but the range of cultural attitudes today is astounding. There's Amsterdam, where one can window shop for sexual services. There are ultra-religious societies where women must be covered from head-to-toe since, presumably, their men could not control themselves in the presence of exposed female flesh. There are countries where women have their genitals mutilated to prevent the enjoyment of sex. And there is America, where murder and violence are standard fare for entertainment, but God help us all if a nipple pops out!
It seems to me that creating a new TLD is like printing money. Anyone with a brand to protect will be coerced into buying up their {brand}.{TLD} to park it and prevent abuse. Consider for example: www.disney.xxx or www.ford.xxx Creating this won't eliminate porn on the other TLDs and centralized censorship is generally a bad idea.
Hmm... .xxx domains matching our current domains and/or name and make them redirect...
I suppose we should buy up
That might be pretty fun too... Or maybe just really creepy... Can't decide which it is...
PROTIP: There's more to the Internet than the Web.
Without a mandate to move all porn to xxx, a new xxx TLD would be worse than useless. Indeed, since the laws of the US (supposedly) end at the borders, how would this stop a (foreign to the US) porn site owner from using the standard .com TLD?
Therefore blocking .xxx would not mean you are blocking all porn.
There are only two winners in this scenario of mandating porn go to .xxx: the politicians for doing something that doesn't actually, well, do anything substantial or helpful in any way. The other winner would be the .xxx registrar. Money and campaign contributions for nothing. .xxx would be just another TLD ghetto like .biz. I don't know of any legitimate businesses that use .biz instead of .com, and the ones that probably do have FQDNs that end in both .biz and .com.
It's not like domain names or TLDs matter much anymore. Yes, sex.com was worth a lot of money at one time. But that was before decent search engines. I have not gone anywhere on the Internet in many years by guessing a FQDN. It's been a long time since the 'net has been a "library without a card catalog."
--
BMO
There's a big difference between trying to force all porn sites to use .xxx (or any other specific term) and allowing people who wish to buy .xxx domains to do so.
In other news, who cares?
Got Apathy?
The adult industry would be smart to get behind a push to move material to .xxx
It would be great PR.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I've been saying this for years. Most people don't know about the different TLDs, and because of that most popular sites buy up the other TLDs that match their domainname to prevent people from squatting there, and they redirect (or not) the traffic to their "proper" TLD. Take for example http://slashdot.org/ http://slashdot.com/ http://slashdot.net./
I've always held that country code TLDs are of value. It sucks to do some online searching to buy something and end up at a .com address that is in the UK.
Actually, I don't dare type a URL in my location bar that is not already in my history and/or bookmarks that is automatically completed. Too dangerous if you misspell the sucker. Google is the real DNS provider. Sometimes names aren't what they would think they are either. EG, its not bmw.com, its bmwusa.com.
To belabor this stupid point further. WTF is up with .name and .museum ? TLDs have digressed from their original goal. To simplify and classify things. I mean, how is slashdot.org really a .org anymore? Its a commercial entity. What was ever the point of .net? .biz? And then countries sell off their TLDs like .to, .fm, and .tv, and those are rarely used.
Google (or similar) is the authoritative TLD master, the rest is just novelty.
Well, the .xxx domain is probably pointless. The vast majority of adult sites aren't going to be moving so you still won't be able to easily filter based on that criteria.
The .xxx domain definitely has a point. If porn sites don't move, you won't be able to filter them by domain. So, they will be forced to move by law, you know, for the children. That gives the government a legal cudgel it can use against anyone who hosts borderline material. This causes a chilling effect on healthy discussions of sexuality, advancing the agenda of the puritanical community.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
What did children do to be locked up in a prison of mind? Or rather, do you want to teach them that they should expect such?
Because, sorry, porn does not even interest kids before puberty (really, they simply don't care - no threat of lifelong damage or anything, its just that). And after puberty I think you should kind of have to realize it is a human urge that cannot be suppressed entirely without negative effects. Even more iportantly that at the time of puberty they are definitely getting some of the last opportunities on the path to maturity of mind.
If you prevent them from learning about what's REALLY out there in the world (wikipedia, news, violence, porn and prostitution, inequality and unfairness...) and even to feel hurt by it, they may never in their life manage to deal with it.
> If porn sites don't move, you won't be able to filter them by domain.
Exactly. The law of unintended consequences. But in this case it isn't really unintended because a lot of people have been raising the alarm on the perfectly natural result creating an .xxx tld is going to have and the activists are sticking their fingers in their ears and humming really loud. By now they should realize what they are doing but apparently they are refusing to face reality. Idiots!
This is going to become a nightmare within a year of the .xxx domain going live. Just watch. If anyone were thinking rationally we would make .kids, allow parents to lock a browser into that domain and stfu with all this "we must do it for the children" nonsense.
Democrat delenda est
Personally, I would think a fair number of adult sites would WANT to move to .xxx. .com for the people that are trying to grab that demographic, but if the majority of porn users are actually adults in their own homes LOOKING for porn, the .xxx domain would make it very easy to know where the porn is. And as a result the porn sites will move there to get more exposure to their best customers: people who want, can pay for, are legally allowed to consume, and are currently in a place where they can browse porn.
I mean, obviously it will be banned at work, schools, libraries, so there will still be sites on
That said, I am still against the gov't trying to regulate what is and isn't porn and requiring sites to move.
> In order for your plan to work, the root DNS servers would have to personally know every hostname ever and what IP they're on. Sure, you could have the root DNS
> server tell you who is responsible for "slashdot" but it would still require the same amount of storage on the root server for the address, plus you get to spend more
> time asking a second server for the real address.
No, because you could have a dummy tld of, for example, ZZZ, and so when you get a request to look up slashdot you add .zzz to the end (because there was no extension on the request, which is the bit which is easy to code for) so you end up with slashdot.zzz, then you look up slashdot.zzz to get the ip address. You're just not requiring the user to enter .zzz because it doesn't technically exist.
The free speech concerns come in when you realize you can't define "adult content" let alone "porn"
Should wikipedia be forced onto .xxx? Theres plenty of nude pictures on there.
Same with National Geographic.
And any website that can ever host files (photobucket, tinypic, etc).
What about websites that discuss sexual information either STD information or even the slightly less pure but still not porn sites that describe masturbatory techniques?
And if you dont ban those, what about erotic stories?
Movies with sex scenes?