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Two Porn Companies Take ICANN and .xxx Registrar To Court
SharkLaser writes "Two of the largest porn companies on the internet, Manwin and Digital Playground, yesterday sued both ICANN and ICM Registry, which runs the .xxx TLD, over extorting defensive registrations with ICANN's blessing. 'The complaint focuses on ICM's recently concluded "sunrise" period, during which porn companies, for about $200, could apply to own a .xxx address matching their trademark or .com domain.' Schools also felt the same way, and had to reserve domains under their name so that no porn content could be put up on them. The .xxx TLD has also previously been subject to criticism by both religious groups and adult industry, but for different reasons. Religious groups believe the .xxx TLD legitimizes pornography, while the adult industry believes it could lead to censorship."
Although the only real solution is to replace the TLD system altogether.
Maybe the next TLD will be .X13 and then .X18.. etc. The same thing that the MPAA does with film ratings.
The $200 fee is bullshit, and clearly unfair profiteering. My tax dollars went toward the development of the Internet. Who gave ICANN the authority to require another $200 from me to register a domain name?
Porn will exist on the internet whether you want it to or not. Using a .xxx TLD makes it that much easier to identify and filter porn if you don't want to see it.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Domain names cost like $7. Why do they have to pay $200 for one in another TLD just because it has the same base name? Disband ICANN and ICM and sell of their assets.
Domains used to be free. Whose brother-in-law in congress gave these a-holes authority to charge money for a free service?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Little-known fact: humanity achieved strong AI almost a decade ago. Unfortunately, we botched its sense of humour. All lazy trolls on the Internet are actually just one super-intelligent perl script.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
$200 is definitely a high price when you try to register all typos, abreviations and variants of your mark, but a good price to deter squatters and bulk buyer speculators.
I mean .xxx does in some sense acknowledge that people market pron.
When is the last time you paid attention to a TLD? When is the last time *anyone* paid attention to a TLD?
It also should make it MUCH easier for people who want to avoid seeing pron to not be spammed by it.
You are suggesting that all the porn providers would magically all move over to the .xxx domain by themselves, for your convenience. Gosh, you're naive and lazy.
And if you are being spammed by porn, I suggest you examine exactly which websites you are going to. I only get porn spam by visiting, you know, porn sites.
Is it censorship to not look at things I don't want to and now allow them to be seen by people using equipment I have authority over?
English, motherfucker, do you speak it?
Let me try to parse that....
Oh yeah, you can subscribe to one of the many filtering companies out there like Websense and Bluecoat. You can even set your DNS to use the filtering at OpenDNS, which is free (well, they take your demographics and such). There is no shortage of companies that will help you shield your eyes, should you want it. The fact that you are offended by stuff you see says 2 things about you: that you are thin skinned and lazy.
It seems to me .xxx meets a legitimate content labeling goal that can make everyone's life easier because we all understand what kind of 'information' should be labeled in that way and can act appropriately.
Go be a nanny somewhere else.
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BMO
Who defines what is porn? Two persons on opposite sides of the planet will have very different opinions on that. That's why there's fear of censorship. It opens the way for a law to have everything deemed pornographic to be moved under the .xxx TLD, which means that the website might as well not exist from the point of view of many networks.
This is just a racket to force many companies to pay ICANN for protection.
Unlike the uselss .biz and .co TLDs that no one care about, .xxx can be used to be actively exploit and damage the names of respected businesses and organizations.
Legitimate porn companies will probably stay away from .xxx names because it is saying that we can't afford a real TLD. It will also open themselves up to be easily censored. There is nothing advantageous to it.
Makes sense. If I had a sense of humor, made via perl I'd inflict my misery on everyone too.
Om, nomnomnom...
Porn will exist on the internet whether you want it to or not. Using a .xxx TLD makes it that much easier to identify and filter porn if you don't want to see it.
Jewish owned sites will exist on the internet whether you want them to or not. Using a .jew TLD makes it that much easier to identify and filter Jewish sites if you don't want to see them.
Jewish owned businesses will exist in Germany whether you want them to or not. Using a Star of David badge makes it that much easier to identify and filter Jewish businesses if you don't want to use them.
Jewish people will exist in Germany whether you want them to or not. Using a Star of David badge makes it that much easier to identify and filter Jewish people if you don't want to associate with them.
That chain of thought started out as seeming pretty damn reasonable in an era when, not just Germany but the US, the UK, France, Russia, you name it, all regarded Jewish people, particularly Jewish businesses, with suspicion. Why shouldn't people have the right to choose where to do business and avoid those they find morally offensive? It's just a badge, right? How badly could it get misused?
In any environment, singling out a group you regard as morally inferior, forcing them to wear badges is generally a slippery slope.
Mix in the US government's current belief that it has the right to censor websites not just within the US but globally is their registrar is US based. Now what happens when a good [religion of your choice] president gets voted in and, pandering to his voter base, promised to disable .xxx. Now you've not only handed users the ability to easily filter their own content, you've handed politicians from a single nation the ability to globally switch off porn because they feel it's "bad."
How would America's gun lobby react if we ghettoized all gun related websites to .gun or .violence? How would our moral minority respond if we pushed all religious sites over to .religion? Of course, this being the US these days, .muslim would probably be plenty. How would the politicians supporting .xxx respond if all of their campaigning was forced to .politics and a flick of a browser switch could hide their campaigns from people? A lot more people are killed in the name of guns or of religion or of politics, a lot more lives ruined, than porn achieves. Yet the same people who support .xxx would freak over their interests being treated the same way.
Who defines what is porn?
This.
We have Hasidic Jews in NYC that are upset at bicyclists going through their neighborhood on a Saturday wearing shorts and teeshirts. Especially if they are women.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/08/hipsters-hasidic-jews-fig_n_384579.html
And that's just the US. I just read a story about how women in Saudi Arabia, that if they have "sexy eyes" while otherwise clothed head-to-toe must also cover up their eyes, or face the beatings by the Religious Police.
http://jezebel.com/5860660/helpful-saudi-arabian-committee-suggests-women-cover-their-sexy-eyes
People don't tell control freaks and prudes to fuck-off nearly as much as they need to.
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BMO
.com and .org at one point were supposed to mean different things potentially.
You just nailed why TLDs no longer matter. It doesn't matter any more what you or I thought TLDs are supposed to mean. They mean nothing now. They are placeholders. You are lucky if a country code TLD actually matches where the website actually originates from or is targeted to.
Which is why you should pay attention more to what it says on the front page than it says in the TLD.
someone wasn't smart enough to do paperwork for the correct country and we had to do it over
So the "Her Majesty's Government of Australia" on the top of the page did not differentiate from "Her Majesty's Government of Northern Ireland?" I don't know about you, but I find governments to be pretty possessive about their names and make sure they're plastered all over every web page, print publication, video, film, etc.
>gov meaning explicitly US government is bad.
I agree, and it's an argument why TLDs should be done away with. We should have country codes at most.
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BMO
Has EVERYONE forgotten about .mobi and .travel? There ARE already industry specific TLD's and they failed dismally. In fact, I am in the industry and when I asked at fairly high level people why .xxx was expected to go any better then .travel and .mobi it was awfully silent.
INCLUDING about the claim "well if nobody wants it the price will just drop" with the question "But you invested a fortune in lobbying so you will then just give up instead of using your bought politicians to mandate porn sites to buy an XXX domain".
Baby steps. First you register the jews, then you make them identifiable, well you know the rest. Godwin? Yes absolutely, it is not about the eradiction of undesirables BUT the .xxx domain has some very odd supporters. Lots of politicians that would dearly love to see porn gone (and freedom of expression) supported the .xxx domain. Why? I think a phase 2 might happen maybe not by design but by the business behind it who spend a fortune getting this wanting to make sure it succeeds. Again with Godwin but do you think the census takers at IBM who recorded the faith of people in Germany knew the final solution?
Anyway, ICANN has long been thinking about launching endless TLD's. Think .gun or .apple is bad? How about .paris and .washington? Each town, their own TLD, every business their own TLD.
.xxx is an experiment. Not so much about whether their is a market but how a market can be forcible created.
A lot of people think they can get .xxx to work for them, it is sold to some porn companies as in that the .xxx domain will be more legit so they can get better deals with mainstream business for advertising... yes, they really are that stupid.
Playboy had no problem getting mainstream advertising but most porn sites are a squalid dirty mag that even the industry itself would be reluctant to advertise in.
But you can claim you read playboy.COM for the articles. Good luck doing that with playboy.xxx
For decades the industry has attempted to seem legit, that they are just a business, just like Playboy is. And now a lot of them think the best way to do that is cover their faces in the cum of the .xxx tld. Yeah, that will work. Why not wear a star and paint your face black (the only difference between Germany and the US is that you don't need to get blacks to wear anything to tell them apart. People can just tell it seems. Must be the big noses)
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