Final Decision Deferred On ".xxx" Domains 127
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the thinking-long-and-hard dept.
from the thinking-long-and-hard dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The Associated Press reports that the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has deferred a decision until June on whether to create a '.xxx' Internet suffix as an online red-light district, beginning a 70-day process of consultations on a domain that could help parents block access to adult sites. ICM Registry LLC first proposed the '.xxx' domain in 2000, and ICANN has rejected it three times already since then, but an outside panel last month questioned the board's latest rejection in 2007, prompting the board to reopen the bid. Backers of '.xxx' have billed the proposal as a way for the adult-entertainment industry to clean up its act, though some adult sites worry that governments would wind up mandating the use of '.xxx' and that sites with the '.xxx' suffix could easily be blocked by government web filters in the future. 'I am very concerned and fearful of censoring adult material that should be made available for adults. It scares the hell out of me,' says Malcolm Day, head of AdultShop.com, adding that if adult websites weren't allowed to have '.com' domains and could only register under the '.xxx' address, then 'many governments (across the world) would try to block them.'"
The whole block/filter argument. (Score:3, Interesting)
It's already very easy to block adult sites. This is pointless to mention and the real issue is not how easy it is to block these sites but that censorship in general is never a good idea, no matter how easy or hard it is.
And it's still a horrible idea (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Only half a solution (Score:4, Interesting)
> With .xxx, expect it to become opt-in. And then people know you watch porn. They have it in written form. This would be even worse if you had to apply for accessing specific .xxx pages.
Well someone would simply start proxxxy.com... I think there is a fortune to be made there.
Re:Exactly backwards (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, having part of the hierarchy solely for kids would be a great idea, but not for the obvious reasons.
You should allocate kids.us (if you yanks are so worried about it, that's where it belongs, the rest of the world doesn't give a damn about it) for such content.
Then you could create penalties for posting "indecent" material into this subtree of DNS. Since we're talking about DNS, the penalties should go to the owner of the DNS domain. The meaning of "indecent" is irrelevant and can be anything (you'll see as I present my reasoning).
Now, when someone comes trying to do censorship "for the children", you can just point that there's a perfectly child-safe domain protected by laws, with very harsh penalties for not respecting its intended purpose. All of that would be true.
However, if you've had read the literature [rfc-archive.org] you'd know that making such guarantee is impossible. Therefore no sane person would get a subdomain of "kids.us". However any busybodies can be easily told they should stop complaining and use the tools given to them (after all, the subdomain would indeed be protected by laws, and they should really be enforced). If they balk at the prospect of having such punishments applied to them, telling them that they are obviously not that interested in the children and are clearly hypocrites (maybe they would be tempted to put something "indecent"? or maybe they just talk but aren't trully willing to take the responsibility to make a clean web for the future generations, blah, blah).
In the end, only extremists will be willing to get .kids.us domains, no sane people would be even interacting with that thing, parents would get to choose if they let their kids out of the walled garden (and if they fail to do so, when they wanted, then they're irresponsable parents), and everybody else gets to browse porn without being distracted by the think-of-the-children crowd.
I even have a slogan for the domain: "kids.us, the clean place for kids that sucks".
The most that can happen is that a few extremists get punished (or whatever) when the sites are inevitably hacked.
Problem solved.
Re:This is many separate issues (Score:2, Interesting)
they use
if someone blocks a domain you are not happy with then change ISP - there are always choices.