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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."
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?
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!
Religious people watch just as much, if not more, porn than non-religious people.
They're just publicly obligated to speak out against it, along with all the other enjoyable things in life like smoking Marijuana and polyamory.
Porn will exist in general. 99.9% of humans past the age of 13 have sexual urges, and satisfying them through images and video causes no harm to anyone, it just makes them feel good. Its like drug prohibition. Porn doesn't hurt your neighbor in ANY WAY, but the fact it exists offends them, like they want to change the fundemental laws of the universe to make it so it can't exist. Since they don't have the education to even know how to do that, they just complain to government and the "moral" fabric of society takes over. That might sound judgmental, but having grown up in the last two decades, all I see is old people complaining about things that have no influence or effect on them and preventing everyone else from doing what they want to satisfy their own superiority complex. It gets old.
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.
Porn doesn't hurt your neighbor in ANY WAY
Ohh, I dunno about that.
I videotaped myself whacking off in the backyard a couple of times and the neighbor got pretty pissed off. Something about how it "ruined" his view from the balcony or some other crap like that.
Other than that I agree with you. Bunch of Quakers out there.
Makes sense. If I had a sense of humor, made via perl I'd inflict my misery on everyone too.
Om, nomnomnom...
Using a .xxx TLD makes it that much easier to identify and filter porn
You would have for that to force all porn to use an .xxx domain, which is impossible, be it only because nobody's able to define porn precisely.
Basically this "black-list" approach is ridiculous, unenforceable and ineffective, and was simply devised from the start as a rip-off. To achieve the goal that you're proposing, the simple solution was to standardize a white-list approach, where sites that don't contain porn would advertise this fact using a HTTP header for instance. Then any site breaking the rule could be quickly and effectively reported and prosecuted.
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.
--
BMO
Using a .xxx TLD makes it that much easier to identify and filter porn if you don't want to see it.
RFC 3675 disagrees with you.
So little problem, in fact, that parents have been prosecuted for innocent pictures of their naked children.
Or to put it another way: it's not as simple as you think it is.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
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)
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I think you significantly underestimate the number of women, especially younger ones, who watch porn. It's a market with a lot of opportunity considering that they want different niches than do men, but increasing numbers want it nonetheless.
... makes me wonder if you even know what the word means. (Nor does anybody get locked up for watching porn other than kiddie or snuff, and that's not because it's porn but because it's kiddie rape or homicide.)
Further, the vast majority of porn actresses are not being "trafficked"
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Alcohol is legal because it's been established too long to ban. Like tobacco.
I debate with anti-porn crusaders a lot, and their standard approach is to convince themselves that pornography is some super-addictive drug-like poison that'll destroy a person's life with ease. If they can't find any actual mechanism of damage, they make one up. They'll even claim it is spiritually damaging, which has the nice advantage of being impossible to disprove. Take, for example, this quote from pressure group the Family Research Council:
"Pornography is a major threat to marriages, the family, and the society at large. It is not a private choice without public consequence. Pornography alters both sexual attitudes and behavior, undermining marriage, which in turn, undermines the stability of the entire community.
It goes on to list all manner of studies which prove pornography causes all manner of health problems, but I'm not even going to bother checking into the studies myself because I know the FRC has a long history of using worthless junk studies churned out by political pressure groups and distorting the findings even of legitimate studies. But that doesn't matter. It's the confirmation bias in action. If you tell an anti-porn crusader that 'scientific studies' show that, as the FRC puts it, 'Pornography viewing and sexual offense are inextricably linked' then they'll believe the claim without actually wanting to look at the studies.