Pressure Mounts On ICANN To Approve .xxx Domain
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An anonymous reader writes "An application for the.xxx domain was first submitted six years ago. ICANN approved the application in 2005, and entered into an agreement with ICM Registry regarding technical and commercial terms. However, ICANN reversed its decision in March 2007. An independent review panel was called to look into why ICANN had changed its mind, and concluded that the body had been under pressure from the US government. Now the registry that submitted that application, ICM Registry, is pushing for .xxx to be approved. The company has argued that the .xxx internet domain should be approved for porn site use, allowing parents and businesses to easily configure browsers or filters to automatically block sites that carry the domain."
Re:Yay ignorance. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yay ignorance. (Score:2, Insightful)
it's because we "bring freedom and democracy" (Score:3, Insightful)
Problem is.. (Score:3, Insightful)
One person's pr0n is another person's art.
They seem to have forgotten(or are ignoring)... (Score:4, Insightful)
At best, if the prices are low enough, smut peddlers with high quality
Its analogous to the number of oddball applications and protocols that have moved toward port 80, by default or as a common option, because that port is generally minimally restricted compared to the more special-purpose ports.
Retarded bible belt morons (Score:5, Insightful)
I love America, I really do ... but god ... we can make complete asses of ourselves sometimes ... I mean on a whole new level ...
The porn industry is saying:
HEY! We want to make it REALLY easy for you to classify us so we don't bother you. We're giving you an instant 'adults only' part of the URL so you don't have to even think twice about it! We'll make it easy for you to avoid us and then we won't have to deal with your complaints and you won't have to deal with our sites! Everyone wins! We'll just stay over here in our corner and not bother anyone who doesn't come looking for us specifically!
America says:
No, we're rather make it hard to block you from our children who will be emotionally scared for life if they see tits and ass.
Porn Industry: ...
Emotionally scared? WTF, the first thing most babies see is their moms asshole, the second thing his her tits for breakfast
America: ...
Thats different
Porn Industry: ...
America:
You're in contempt of court!
Porn Industry:
Oh fuck off, we'll just keep doing what we do and you idiots can continue to deal with it in an incredibly retarded way while we keep making a fortune off of you because you have some sort of retarded cultural thing that makes sex dirty and somehow different than every other normal type of social interaction.
My question to my country:
WHEN THE FUCK ARE WE GOING TO STOP TREATING SEX AS SPECIAL?
Its just sex for fucks sake. Everyone does it and our species has relied on it for longer than our species has actually existed! (Chick and the egg) Stop treating it as different. Stop teaching women to be so emotionally tied to their vaginas, its nothing more than a convenient hole for fucks sake. Stop treating the penis as though its the key to a mans life, it can be replaced with a $15 battery powered chunk of silicon that is more effective for every purpose except urination. (Vibrator for sexual pleasure, turkey baster to transfering sperm).
Stop freaking make sex so taboo. Stop with this 'sex crimes' crap, thats as dumb as 'hate crimes'. STOP TREATING SEX AS SOMETHING TABOO AND IT WILL STOP BEING TABOO.
Re:What Would This Change? (Score:4, Insightful)
1. It could never be mandatory, and if it was made so it would be unenforceable
2. If it wasn't mandatory, few if any sites would actually register to avoid being TLD-blocked.
Opens the door to censorship (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the next thing you know there will be government rules requiring certain content to only be located at .xxx, depending on the whims of the reigning censor-in-chief. Also, because companies will register this in addition to their .com address rather than instead of it (would NBC give up NBC.com if we have NBC.tv ?)
Re:Yay ignorance. (Score:3, Insightful)
A red light district on the internet is like a paddling pool in the ocean.
Re:Retarded bible belt morons (Score:2, Insightful)
Stop treating women like sex objects.
Incidentally, your basic argument, on the "bible belt moron" side is one that I have never, ever heard in my life. And I am someone who considers sex to be something that should be in marriage, and someone who thinks that the porn industry is immoral and highly degrading; first degrading to women, who are turned into sex objects simply to be used for pleasure, and secondly degrading to society, who turn sex into the end-goal of life.
Re:They seem to have forgotten(or are ignoring)... (Score:3, Insightful)
internet smut peddlers
Has a nice ring, that one. Good luck with it.
Me, I prefer
Purveyors of Fine Adult Entertainment ...
For the Gentleman with Discriminating Tastes
The only smut I see being peddled is in the grocery checkout aisle. I'm told people enjoy reading it, and don't have a problem with the kids seeing it.
Re:Yay ignorance. (Score:2, Insightful)
> Can anyone tell me why someone wouldn't want the .xxx domain to happen? What possible downside is there to it?
Presuming your question is genuine....
A TLD enforces a single global definition, but the definition of pornography is very much a local thing. For example, in some portions of the world (e.g. France), bare breasts are acceptable on the beach and in other portions of the world (e.g. Saudi Arabia), an uncovered face can be a crime. In the end, it is impossible to get global consensus.
This is why commercial filtering systems include more granular descriptions, such as "incidental nudity" and "provocative attire".
Re:Yay ignorance. (Score:4, Insightful)
How did your post hit +5? You've missed the point ENTIRELY. The reason the domain is a bad idea is because once you've set off a designation for "porn," the next logical steps for the puritanical minority are clear:
- demand that ALL sites with pornographic content be stored under the XXX domain. "The pornographic industry can either self-regulate using the tools we've given them or the government will have to step in and do it FOR them. You don't want that, do you?"
- demand that all work/government/public/houses-with-children computers hard-filter out XXX. "After all, it's explicitly for porn! What, do you want your kids reading porn? This just makes sense!"
- demand that any site with nudity be classified as "pornographic." Art, medical textbooks, pictures of the diagrams included with the space probe, whatever. "Adults on their own time can access these materials just fine. It's not hard to get around these things on a personal computer. If you need to see them at work, ask for a special exception."
- bad language and violence are moved into the designation. "We have an opportunity here to create a kid-safe Internet. We're not censoring these things, of course; we're just classifying them!"
- multiple heavily-conservative foreign nations ban the XXX domain entirely. "We don't feel this sort of content is appropriate for the mental well-being of our constituents. In the name of their safety, the People will block the people from viewing them."
- major websites begin to heavily censor their content to avoid being banned in entire countries and inaccessible from most terminals. "It's just a few pages cut. When we're only accessible to 10% of the computers out there, our ad revenue no longer supports the site."
- any and all content that in any way offends anyone or doesn't immediately appeal to the international lowest common denominator of "good taste" is relegated to a tiny, much-maligned red light district of the Internet.
The XXX domain is scary because it's essentially the beginning of an attempt to make the Internet look like broadcast television, only worse.
Re:Yay ignorance. (Score:3, Insightful)
1. To a very traditional mind, an XXX domain name implies that it is OK to see pictures of boobies. It is implicit approval of the fad of this whole sex thing.
2. To a less traditional mind, it is the first step along the line of censoring the boobies out of the internet. Immediately upon creation, all of the XXX domain names will be censored from basically every company on the planet. Home networks will probably remain uncensored at first, but who knows what parental moral outrage and very, very old executives will pressure Comcast, etc to do.
3. By implication, there is the messy realm of regulation. Is it freeform, with any websites going on .xxx for any reason? Does .com then become non-porn? Does violence and drugs become XXX?
4. It is potentially pointless. To the website operators, xxx domain names were set to cost 10x as much as normal .com names, and the only advantage was that they're easier to filter out. You might get people randomly appending .xxx to common words in an attempt to find dirty bits, but chances are people will just keep searching through google.
Personally, I still think it's worth doing. But I can understand why people wouldn't want to bother. The new wave of alternative TLD's have basically been failures. 6 years in, and everyone is still a .com. Add in the controversial aspects, and it becomes less attractive.
Re:Yay ignorance. (Score:4, Insightful)
If I remember right from the last Slashdot discussion we had on this:
1. Some organizations (mostly religious ones) don't want porn to exist at all. They pray (literally) for the day when it is legislated out of existence. a .xxx domain would legitimize it further than it already is.
2. Many porn sites already have a large vested interest in their .com domains. They don't want to have to move to .xxx domains.
3. The porn industry doesn't want some quick/easy way to block them. Sure, you as a parent would like to just block www.*.xxx and be done with it but what if your ISP decides to do the same? Then you can't look at this no matter what. To say nothing of the false sense of security (i.e., just blocking www.*.xxx doesn't really block all porn)
4. How would it be enforced? Anyone can have a .xxx domain? Does it have to be a porn site? Would porn sites have to move to .xxx domains instead of .com domains?
5. Who decides what is porn? An example was given of a stunt to raise awareness for breast cancer or something wherein a thousand women got naked and laid down to pose in a large shape. The photo was carried on a lot of news sites, including Yahoo. Would it be considered porn? It's not video footage of people having sex but it is a photo of a thousand naked women. If it is considered porn, would Yahoo have to host it on www.yahoo.xxx instead of www.yahoo.com? And wouldn't Yahoo get into a shitstorm by even registering www.yahoo.xxx in the first place?
Basically when both the porn industry and the religious movements are agreeing on something, you know it's messed up. Yeah, on its surface it's not a bad idea, it's just one not thought through very well.
Re:Yay ignorance. (Score:1, Insightful)
Yours. The issue isn't about porn sites as much as it is about what your government defines as porn. Worst case scenario, the law might be written so you can't say "fuck the President" or post Pedobear shops without having an .xxx domain. And the government will enforce it and take you to court, or license the power to do so to for-profit third parties the way the RIAA does. And .xxx domains will be regulated so you have to pay extra $$$ to have one and jump through bureaucratic hoops to get to them such as mandatory registration as a porn viewer. And viewing some other country's porn that is hosted outside of an .xxx domain will be illegal, as will be having open routes to it or attempting to access it through a proxy. If it sounds outrageous, I did say "worst case scenario" but an .xxx domain opens up the possibility of this all happening.
And it will happen to some degree. How can pornography opponents accept pornography to be all over the internet when there is one established place for pornography? And when that is solved, how can pornography opponents accept that pornography is easily accessible when so much of it is concentrated in one place? And what is going to be shunted into the .xxx ghetto? I've seen stuff on BoingBoing that would be considered X-rated pornography by the loose standards of the 1970s.
All the talk about the Internet enabling unbreakable freedom dates back to the time when the government did not regulate what went on on the Internet. It is not coincidental that most spam, warez, and kiddie porn traces back to places where the government does not regulate what goes on on the Internet. Do it in the West and you go to jail. The government has been very effective at suppressing things on the internet. Porn will not be any different.
No more TLDs! (Score:5, Insightful)
We have too many TLDs already. Additional TLDs are just a racket for registrars. As Abacus wrote to ICANN [icann.org] when they applied for ".biz", ".fam", ".cool", and a few other TLDs back in 2000, "The more TLDs we are allowed to operate, and the better quality of those TLDs, the greater the total sales will be."
".biz" ended up as the "bad neighborhood" TLD. When you see a ".biz" domain, you visualize a storefront in a half-empty strip mall with trash in the parking lot. We have two vacant TLDs, ".aero" and ".museum". ".aero" is basically a collection of redirects from airport codes to the actual site. See JFK.aero [jfk.aero], etc., most of which were created by the promoters of .aero, not the airports.) The ".museum" TLD has so few domains that the entire list fits on one page. [index.museum]
We have the redundant TLD, ".info". What was that for, anyway?
All those TLDs could be closed to new registrations and phased out with no great loss.
Porno belongs in ".com", with other commercial enterprises.
Re:Yay ignorance. (Score:4, Insightful)
most porn is exploitative of women
No, rape is exploitative to women. Women being presented in an "only an object" light, however, is not. While it can be viewed as a form of prostitution, marrying rich men is legal as well, yet nobody complains about that.
Supply and Demand. Make your own porn with more romance and love stories in it, and see how it sells.
Why porn? (Score:3, Insightful)
Can somebody tell me why images of people having sex, or naked, unique among all categories of images, deserves a special classification?
Why shouldn't images of people eating, or military propaganda, or lions killing buffalo, or even birds having sex, get special treatment? What is it about porn that makes everyone care so damn much?
Re:Yay ignorance. (Score:4, Insightful)
So long as there aren't any requirements that porn must use .xxx then this isn't a problem. Most porn sites will use both.
Which kind of invalidates the argument that we should approve .xxx because it will make filtering porn easier.....
Re:Yay ignorance. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, let's all regulate things we don't personally approve of, I'm sure that will turn out to be a wonderful idea.
So what's next? All companies must use .com or .biz? All personal websites should be in .person? How about forcing national registrars to institute .xxx.cc and force all services with porn onto those domains?
This is a trick, the first part is to come up with a useless but at first glance harmless "protect the childrun!" action and once this is in place it is used for step two, which in this case would be to force porn onto .xxx.
Did I mention that my dangerous dissenting mind was let onto the Internet back as a 12 year-old back in the first half of the 90s? completely unsupervised and yet I, like all of my friends who shared this horrible fate, survived and came out of it just fine. Isn't it amazing, how lucky we must consider ourselves. After all, the Internet is just a cesspool of filth and naughty bits!
How about you either trust your children or You, their parent, take actions to supervise them, don't force all of the world to conform to your prudish standards just because you're too lazy to pay attention to your children.
.kid (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yay ignorance. (Score:4, Insightful)
So long as there aren't any requirements that porn must use .xxx then this isn't a problem.
They will be required. Not explicitly, but laws will be drafted that make porn sites liable for minors viewing their material unless it's through the .xxx domain. Sites will comply out of financial reasons. Honestly, I can't figure out why the moralists are against this.
Re:Retarded bible belt morons (Score:3, Insightful)
When that turkey baster can actually produce sperm
The penis doesn't produce sperm either, so what you'd really need is a pair of testicles attached to your turkey baster.... ;)
Re:Yay ignorance. (Score:5, Insightful)
That is EXACTLY the other part of the problem.
Once there is a designated place for porn, anyone who doesn't conform to the designated sense of decency will be compelled to stay there. Creating a .xxx ghetto for porn also invites the Disneyfication of everywhere else.
If the lawyers get into the act, suing for "too much" pornlike content, it will be a race to the bottom. Just think how first they got Playboy and Penthouse to put covers on their magazines. Then it was required by law in many places. Then other mags, like Maxim and even GQ and Vogue, got pushed into the gray zone of questionable for public viewing. .xxx is an invitation to do it on the web.
Re:Yay ignorance. (Score:1, Insightful)
Remember that, for some reason, they don't seem to have any issue with violence or bad language.
Re:Yay ignorance. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm going to preregister microsoft.xxx right now!
Actually that raises another valid concern. Do non-porn enterprises have to register their .xxx domains to protect their copyright/trademarks? If they don't register them will a mechanism exist to keep others from using them? If they do register them then what's the point of an 'exclusive' .xxx domain?
Re:.kid (Score:3, Insightful)
Good idea, but who screens the content? Really, any site in .kid would literally need the Good Housekeeping seal of approval.
And can you imagine the uproar when the NRA decides to open the EddieEagle.kid Gun Safety site, or Larry Flynt opens a SafeHealthySex.kid site?
Re:Yay ignorance. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yay ignorance. (Score:2, Insightful)
If there's an easy way for me to allow my son to browse the net with little supervision
You couldn't keep it in your pants, so step up and parent.
Idiots in Congress (Score:3, Insightful)
It bothers me when I hear people in Congress oppose this, saying it endorses pornography and will create more of it. We need to keep the web "safe" for our children.
They fail to realize that putting porn behind a TLD makes it easier to filter it out so children can't find it.
Re:Yay ignorance. (Score:5, Insightful)
Compelled by whom, exactly?
We don't have an international standard of decency today on the Internet. If you want to host anything, you may do so provided you host it in a country where such things are legal. Playboy, Penthouse, and the other major sites aren't giving up their .com addresses, and those are the big players you can find.
I know this is all very old news, and will probably be tagged "redundant", but the introduction of a "smut zone" on the Internet raises all sorts of issues:
1. Who defines what is "smut"? Go to some countries, and seeing a woman's face unveiled could be considered "smut". In most of Europe, breasts are perfectly OK but bush or sausage-and-veg is right out. Some countries don't care at all. Who gets to decide which sites are OK for a .com, .org, .net, .us, etc domain and which need to be on .xxx?
(several decades pass)
2. OK, we've accomplished the impossible! Bully on us, we've defined the rules on who needs to go to .xxx, and we can now compel every website that meets that criteria to.. uhh.. OK, how do we do THAT? Tuvalu is now saying that .tv URLs can contain smut if you pay a premium for a domain. Oh, we need an international treaty so all countries in the world will enforce this ban for all domains but .xxx. Sheesh.
(several more decades pass)
3. OK, now every municipality in every county in every state in every region in every nation has agreed to turn over absolute control of their domains to a centralized morality body who, as we know, is incorruptible and unbribable in any way. Now all they need to do is find the smut, contact the author, and force them to move it to .xxx.
(several more decades pass)
4. Gee, turns out that porn is profitable, and ways to bypass filters are a key to greater profits. The 12,000,000 agents we've hired at a cost of tens of billions of dollars a year aren't even beginning to scratch the surface of the hundreds of thousands of "underground" web sites that come up EVERY DAY, so we'll start automated filtering and hire more people.
(several more decades pass)
5. SHIT!!! WHO KNEW YOU COULD JUST USE A GODDAM IP ADDRESS AND BYPASS DOMAIN NAMES?!?!?!?!?!
Re:Yay ignorance. (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow... those guys have the BEST slogan EVER!
"If a child looked at 1 pornographic web page every 10 seconds, he would be 546.787 years old when he finished looking at all the internet porn that exists today".
Don't worry, that child will never live to be 546.787 years old. If he's lucky he'll only make it to 109. And when he's about 21, he's allowed to watch any porn he likes. So about 99.996% of porn isn't hurting the child. Lets just get rid of that 0.004% then.
If the child looked at a porn page every 10 seconds, the porn can't be very good. We need porn that's worth looking at for more than 10 seconds.
If a child looked at ANY web page every 10 seconds of his life, you'd have a big problem regardless of the content.
And if the child looked at 10.000 porn pages every second, he'd only need 5 and a half years; he wouldn't even care about porn when he's 5 1/2 years old so no harm done.
If an ADULT looked at a porn page every 10 seconds, would he require less or more years to watch it all?
Nonetheless, I agree with their basic premise of limiting the amount of porn to only a lifetime supply of the high quality porn. All that extraneous porn only leads us to search, and time spend searching for porn is time not spend looking at porn.
Talk about meaningless numbers.
Re:Yay ignorance. (Score:5, Insightful)
an easy way for me to allow my son to browse the net with little supervision
Yes, he'd be "protected" from the horrifying, scarring sight of a naked human body. Of course, we'll also need a ".racism", a ".gay", a ".islam", a ".republican" and a ".democrat", a ".atheism", a ".darwinism" and a ".racemixing" TLD to "protect" all the precious little children from all the horrible things that some stupid parents think they're too delicate to absorb.
Re:Yay ignorance. (Score:3, Insightful)
Easy fix to that (at least for sites willing to set it up): for any .com site if there is a corresponding .xxx version of the domain with the same SSL Certificate, then block access accordingly (I'm talking filters that are voluntarily setup here, as in by parents - not advocating any mandatory filtering).
Over time though I think porn sites would start to migrate to .xxx as people got used to it being over there. Adult businesses don't typically mind being separated from mainstream stuff - the people who want it are usually more than willing to go a bit out of their way, and keeping it out of the public eye keeps criticism (and attempts at bans) to a minimum.
That's why even in places where not required strip clubs tend to open up in industrial areas and backroads. Plenty of people still attend, but the soccer mom who's likely to raise a stink at the next council meeting doesn't drive past it every day. What the puritans don't know won't hurt them.
Enumerating badness doesn't work (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem here is that creating a .xxx domain is enumerating badness. Pornography is something that people want to contain and restrict. People working in the security field have known for a long time that enumerating badness is ineffective: someone can always find a way around it. It is trivial to come up with several ways around a mandate that porn be limited to .xxx.
The secure solution is to enumerate goodness; that is, allow only certain specified things and block everything else. If people want to browse an Internet without porn, they should create a top-level domain that is "family-friendly." Basically, each application for a domain would be carefully vetted under some set of criteria and only unobjectionable content would be allowed. This, of course, would have a very small amount of content, but it would be fine for those with delicate sensibilities.
The way that is being proposed (.xxx) is trivially circumventable.
Re:Retarded bible belt morons (Score:3, Insightful)
and secondly degrading to society, who turn sex into the end-goal of life.
Sex is the end-goal of life.
Well reproduction is, but the sex part is pretty damn essential step.
first degrading to women, who are turned into sex objects simply to be used for pleasure
Whereas I think religion is degrading to all people, who are turned into idiots who believe in ridiculous fairy tails and rejoice in being slaves. But I don't try and stop churches from being easily identifiable as churches, and I don't want to try and ban people from believing in their magic stories.
Re:Yay ignorance. (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, I can't figure out why the moralists are against this.
Because if you have a certain mindset, if the government doesn't make it illegal then the government approves of it. It's even worse if there's a place specifically cordoned off for the purpose of propagating the "immorality" they despise - that makes it seem like the government approves of it even more. And, like most people, they don't like their government approving of things that they disapprove of. So you get moralist crusades against drugs, gambling, alcohol, prostitution, porn, video games, and just about anything else that the moralist doesn't like. Setting up a sanctioned area for porn is like setting up a sanctioned area for gambling or a sanctioned area for prostitution - the government is saying "it's okay to do that here" and in their minds the government should never be giving approval for "immoral" activity at all - the government should at best be criminalizing it and at worst not saying anything about it. It's the mindset that got Prohibition enacted into law in the 20s and the same mindset that keeps the "War on Drugs" going despite its consistent failure to do anything about the actual drug problems of the US. It doesn't matter that what the government is doing doesn't work - the only thing that matters is that the government is taking the "correct" moral stance.
Re:Retarded bible belt morons (Score:5, Insightful)
I think we can all pretty much agree rape is bad, right? Rape degrades women. Why are men okay with it?
I'm confused, who said men are ok with rape?
If you really respect women, you're not going to rape them.
What does that have to do with porn? If you respect your fellow human beings you aren't going to commit any crimes of violence against them. I would posit that the vast majority of people are able to differentiate between porn and the real world.
I am of the opinion that a society where women are seen as sex objects is a degrading society
it seems to me that society is putting significant pressure on girls to think of themselves as sex objects
I agree, but I don't think porn is to blame for this. Porn basically exists for one purpose -- sexual gratification. Porn is something that you have to make a deliberate attempt to obtain. I would argue that everyday TV advertisements, the entertainment and fashion industries do more to objectify woman than porn does. Our young girls are certainly influenced by them more than they are by porn. I watched my sister try to starve herself to death growing up so she could look like the women on TV. None of the women she was attempting to emulate were in a pornographic production.
If that IS the end-goal, then your view is, IMO, quite consistent.
From a biological standpoint that is the end goal of life. Human beings are one of the few animals with the higher brain functions required to set other goals for themselves but the drive to reproduce is still there.