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XXX Goes Live In the Root Servers
An anonymous reader writes that yesterday "IANA added the .XXX Top Level Domain to the root nameservers. While the registry operator Afilias is still in their setup process for ICM registry, the zone is currently propagating. While a number of registrars have already been taking pre-registrations, the actual timeline for the launch has not yet been published."
No, ICANN finally approved it because all their criteria for a new tld had been met. There were some back door manuoverings to block the domain during the Bush Administration, specifically Karl Rove told the head of the Department of Communications (who oversee ICANN) not to add it the last time they were going to (the decision had been a "go" at ICANN, and they asked DoC to include it) as a favour to the Southern Baptist Conference who has specifically asked for it in exchange for delivering the south.
This of course isn't legal in that there were processes set up and this sort of thing was never accounted for.
Now, .xxx couldn't sue icann, their contractual obligations mandated they go through arbitration first. Cerf behaved very cagily and it went against him and the arbitration panel decided icann had to do what it said it would do.
And yes it goes back to 1996/97. Up until this year I made sure .xxx worked in every alternative root cluster; I was sorta there at the birth of .xxx
Note that about 10 years prior I also had alt.sex created.
This took all the porn off the rest of Usenet and put it in one place. Those that wanted to filter it did, those that want to find it, know where it is, and you never heard any more about dirty pictures elsewhere in Usenet. For the most part.
My favorite line I ever used during the DNS wars was when I got to tell the newly appointed director of DoC, who'd just been handed the the domain stuff to deal with: "Don't worry Becky, half of .com ISN'T porn". My guess is, in 10 years a porn site in .com is gonna seem really out of place.
It's nice to see this finally go through but they have a way to go to be profitable. 10 years at about a million a year adds up. But I'm sure they'll do fine.
Disclaimer: I have no interest or stake, financial or otherwise in .xxx (or any tld).
Need Mercedes parts ?
The porn industry could give a shit. Seven people own nearly half of .com names and a bunch of wanna ba .com kings have hands full of .com names. Enough of these guys felt threatened that they paid some no-account porn people to protest. They even paid a homeless guy in San Fransisco to protest. http://rs79.vrx.net/works/photoessays/2011/dot-xxx/
There's no real opposition in pornland. They don't give a shit. It's the guys with ".com portfolios" that were doing this to try to keep .com names valuable.
The whole point of tld expansion was to create new resources and to prevent regulation of extant resources; that is, life doesn't end at .com. Opposition with vested interests not withstanding.
Need Mercedes parts ?
> the zone is currently propagating
Domain name zones do not propagate, and there is no "delay" in "publishing" zone information.
Domain name information is provided by domain name servers. As soon as the server can provide the data it is considered "published". When people talk about propagation they are mistakenly referring to cached false-positives or false-negatives.
A cached false-positive is when a previous lookup has returned a result that is no longer accurate, but the cache persists in providing that result. Instead of doing a new lookup and finding the --now changed-- data, the old stale data is returned. This is an indication of failure on the part of the domain administrator to reduce the cache time-to-live (TTL) field on the record or the entire Start of Authority for the zone.
A cached false-negative --typically on Microsoft operating systems-- is when a previous lookup has failed to return a response, the system caches that "there is no response." A subsequent query by an application OUGHT to do a DNS query and resolve properly, but the cache instead returns the --now stale-- "there is no response." This is an indication of failure of the operating system authors to have read the relevant RFCs on DNS (or ICMP or ...) and indicates lack of knowledge, a poorly designed product, and years of asshattery.
As soon as the ".XXX" TLD was available on the gTLD servers, it ***was*** live. Here's what affilias has: ;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
xxx. 300 IN SOA a0.xxx.afilias-nst.info. noc.afilias-nst.info. 70 7200 3600 3600000 300
You'll note that the TTL is 300, the minimum allowable value (300sec=5min). That means they have PROPERLY set a value so that results are refreshed by those who cache them.
Best regards,
Ehud Gavron
Tucson AZ