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The Internet

ICANN Approves .XXX 259

Posted by timothy from the not-to-say-they-approve-of-xxx dept.
lothos writes "Pornography will have its own top-level domain, dot-XXX, the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers decided today." Ars Technica has a short but thoroughly-linked article tracing some of the long history (in Internet time) behind the push for .xxx. See also ICANN's announcement of the approval, and — for all the juicy details — the rationale behind the decision (PDF).
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ICANN Approves .XXX More

ICANN Approves .XXX

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  • 5..4...3... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 18, 2011 @06:05PM (#35537546)

    Countdown to criminalization of all non-.xxx porn.

    • Re:5..4...3... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 18, 2011 @06:21PM (#35537702)

      So what if someone were to use some .xxx sites for non-porn? Will this to be illegal too?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *

      Countdown to criminalization of all non-.xxx porn.

      Well I agree that soft porn SHOULD be criminal... oh wait

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by thue ( 121682 )

      Not just porn. How long will it be before somebody insists that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_penis [wikipedia.org] only be available from .xxx?

    • Countdown to criminalization of all non-.xxx porn.

      All you'd have to do first is define "porn" (and by that, I mean defining it a whole lot more objectively than a former Supreme Court Justice when his answer was: "I'll know it when I see it!")

      Oh, and then you'd have to get that definition ratified across a zillion countries (and by that, I mean countries ranging from Saudi Arabia to Holland).

      And, once you manage to get all that in place, and manage to actually get some sort of universal "criminalization" going, you and I both know full well that approximat

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Gerzel ( 240421 )

        not really. You don't have to have an international effort. The TLD servers really are controlled from the US. Yes some would slip around but more likely the ones that actually are worth while and do a service, such as education, or provide a community for people of differing sexuality will not.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by blair1q ( 305137 )

        All you'd have to do first is define "porn" (and by that, I mean defining it a whole lot more objectively than a former Supreme Court Justice when his answer was: "I'll know it when I see it!")

        Well, no, you don't.

        Before the Internet, porn was confined to stores specializing in it, and to controlled locations in stores. Everyone knew what not to put out on the magazine rack where the nanny-squad could imagine a child getting his hands on it. And the definition was pretty much what you quoted there.

        They still do it that way out in brick-and-mortar land. Just nobody notices the porn out there any more, because we're all inured to it by the mass quantities available in plain sight on the Interwebs

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Kjella ( 173770 )

          Yes, but internationally the definition varies and is .xxx really .xxx.us? Of course we agree on certain things but let's take this BluRay [amazon.de] as example. In Germany that's ok for 16+ year olds, it's not pornography which has an 18yo limit. Would you sell this to a 16yo in the US? My impression would be no.

    • Followed by the .xxx registry charging 100s of bucks for domain registration and renewal.

  • At last! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 18, 2011 @06:06PM (#35537552)

    I always had trouble finding porn on the internet before, what with there being so little of it out there. This will make it so much easier to find now! Thanks Internet!

  • Fucking stupid morons (Score:5, Insightful)

    by h4rm0ny ( 722443 ) on Friday March 18, 2011 @06:11PM (#35537606) Journal
    This accomplishes only a few things that I can see:
    1. Puts pressure on all sorts of sites to operate only under a .xxx domain whenever a loud enough moral group insist that it should be categorised as dirty.
    2. Falsely creates a sense of safety amongst idiots who think they can block .xxx and filter out "the bad stuff".
    3. Creates a sense of unjustified expectation amongst a different set of idiots who immediately decide that just because ICANN has created this TLD, that any site they deem improper that operates outside the hierarchy is engaged in some terrible underhandedness for daring to do so, trying to expose innocent people to their content.
    4. Instantly tars anyone who visits a site in .xxx domain in the eyes of moralisers and authority groups, regardless of whether the site is donkeyporn.xxx or just some site that was pushed to register under .xxx because it deals with mature topics.
    5. Creates artificial segregation along lines decided by minority moral bodies. I.e. sexual content has to be treated differently. We don't have a separate TLD for religion, or science - why must sex be so treated?
    6. Make pot loads of money for ICANN and registrars everywhere.

    I'll leave it to the reader to consider how that last consequence was balanced against the others...

    • Re:Fucking stupid morons (Score:5, Funny)

      by blair1q ( 305137 ) on Friday March 18, 2011 @07:13PM (#35538172) Journal

      It does one more thing.

      7. You can finally spell goatse.xxx right

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kosi ( 589267 )

      While I understand most of the points you want to make:

      1. Puts pressure on all sorts of sites to operate only under a .xxx domain whenever a loud enough moral group insist that it should be categorised as dirty.

      There should be no pressure in any way, but I'd really like a TLD where I can expect that every subdomain really hosts porn.

      2. Falsely creates a sense of safety amongst idiots who think they can block .xxx and filter out "the bad stuff".

      That's like filtering .com and expecting you wont' see anything commercial. Besides: "Safety" and "idiots" in one sentence, really?

      3. Creates a sense of unjustified expectation amongst a different set of idiots who immediately decide that just because ICANN has created this TLD, that any site they deem improper that operates outside the hierarchy is engaged in some terrible underhandedness for daring to do so, trying to expose innocent people to their content.

      Noone expects that sites with commercial interest are only .com, so why should they expect porn to be only under .xxx?

      4. Instantly tars anyone who visits a site in .xxx domain in the eyes of moralisers and authority groups, regardless of whether the site is donkeyporn.xxx or just some site that was pushed to register under .xxx because it deals with mature topics.

      That's not a problem of the existence of an .xxx TLD, it's a problem of governments

    • I think consequence no 6 "Make pot loads of money for ICANN and registrars everywhere. " is what they are after.

      I cannot see effective criminalisation of porn on non-XXX domains: too many free speech issues, and there will be well funded push-back from established sites that use other TLDs.

      You are going to see all the porn sites on .xxx in the same way that all businesses use .biz or all airlines use .aero

  • For ALL the juicy details? (Score:3)

    by _0xd0ad ( 1974778 ) on Friday March 18, 2011 @06:14PM (#35537616) Journal

    and — for all the juicy details — the rationale behind the decision (PDF).

    I take it there are pictures?

  • Ban of porn web sites and e-mail senders not properly labelled under the .XXX TLD.

  • TLD for Financial Transactions (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 18, 2011 @06:17PM (#35537658)

    I'd really like to see ICANN create a TLD limited to banking sites and online stores the way .edu and .gov cannot be registered by any old scammer. I think that would do a lot in the way of preventing phishing. Few people understand the concept of security certificates and even fewer know why a self signed certificate is bad. ID theft and fraud seems to be a more important issue than preventing a 12 year old from seeing the human body due to a stigma based off 2000 year old mythology.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *

      than preventing a 12 year old from seeing the human body due to a stigma based off 2000 year old mythology.

      People have been wearing clothes for far more than 2000 years, so I would say that the "stigma" runs a lot deeper than the Juedo-Christian reference. I often wonder exactly what it was that drove people to wear clothes - women's self consciousness about their breast size, men's self consciousness about their penis size, fear of mockery of either of the above from others, the obvious deterioration evidenced by aging (only people died rather young back then), women's periods, lack of ass wiping technology or

      • Re:TLD for Financial Transactions (Score:5, Insightful)

        by mwvdlee ( 775178 ) on Friday March 18, 2011 @06:39PM (#35537912) Homepage

        I often wonder exactly what it was that drove people to wear clothes

        Run around naked through the woods and you'll quickly discover clothing is quite usefull.
        I especially recommend thornbushes for maximum educational value.
        Even if you don't want to put on shorts or a shirt, atleast get something to protect the dangling bits.

        Seriously though, I think a lot of it is down to status; clothing demonstrates wealth hence people want clothing.
        These days everybody has clothing, so we created artificial status through expensive clothing brands, and those seem to be quite popular as well.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
      What do you mean? The people who run .gov is the biggest scammers of all!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by spud603 ( 832173 )

      a stigma based off 2000 year old mythology

      In all fairness, that kind of stigma is really only about 400 years old. Puritan discomfort with sex is something way more than what existed before it.

    • Re:TLD for Financial Transactions (Score:4, Insightful)

      by blair1q ( 305137 ) on Friday March 18, 2011 @07:15PM (#35538178) Journal

      That's actually a really good idea, until I stand up my fake TLD server and steal half the internet away from their usual .bank sites, around which they no longer do any sort of shoulder-checking when they enter security information.

    • I'd really like to see ICANN create a TLD limited to banking sites and online stores

      Define "online store". The line between a "legitimate" online store and an illegitimate one is a thin one indeed. If the rules for certification are too strict, you hinder cottage industry (and their are thousands of tiny, one-man ecommerce sites out there). If the rules are too lax, scammers won't have any trouble registering domains.

      And of course, many people still won't know the difference between http://legitimate.onl [legitimate.onlinestore]

  • The Porn Industry Won't Go For It (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TheRedDuke ( 1734262 ) on Friday March 18, 2011 @06:18PM (#35537664)
    And for one simple reason: if every porn site on the planet has the same domain, every ISP/college/corporation/consumer router who doesn't want their clients/students/employees/family members viewing this material will just block it. Heck, as soon as I get to work on Monday, I'm going to update our firewall and IPS settings. No sane operation trying to make money on pornography is going to touch this domain with a 10ft [stripper] pole.
    • You're funny. One, most people who are browsing porn will not stand for a service that cuts out what they want to do and businesses will be happy to sell them service. In the end, teenagers and people at work, neither of which are paying for the service, would be the ones blocked. Two, sane operations will scoop up all the good name space they can. Domain names are cheap and something like sex.xxx will be worth millions no matter how many people try and block it. Not to mention that it doesn't have to be th

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mwvdlee ( 775178 )

      They'll touch the domain.
      They'll just keep their .com/.net/.org/.whatever domains too.

      In the worst scenario, the .xxx TLD could be a gateway to excessive government censorship.
      In the best scenario, ICANN just makes a lot of money by selling .xxx domains and nothing changes for the rest of the world.
      I can't imagine any scenario in which this .xxx TLD would have beneficial effects.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by msauve ( 701917 )

      every ISP/college/corporation/consumer router who doesn't want their clients/students/employees/family members viewing this material will just block it

      pron hosts file for sale!

      x.x.x.x site1.xxx
      y.y.y.y site2.xxx

      Yea, those blocks will work well (do you really think they'll do rDNS?).

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by blair1q ( 305137 )

        wait. you think a router gives a damn about the name of a site?

        doesn't do you any good to resolve a name to an IP address if packets containing the IP address get spilled on onan's floor

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Sabalon ( 1684 )

          The best will be when it becomes a hosting situation wherein some site that hosts evilsex.xxx also hosts academicresearch.com on the same IP.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by msauve ( 701917 )
          You don't know how blocking based on a DNS name works, do you? It is done by firewalls, not routers. The only way to know what IP addresses to block is to do an rDNS on it, or have a frequently updated list. One could also do L4-7 inspection, but that too is easily defeated.

    • I can understand colleges and corporations, but why the hell would ISPs block this? I'm sure pornography accounts for a large amount of the bandwidth they sell their customers. Doing this would be shooting themselves in the foot.

  • I can approves it too, LoLCat. Your point?

  • Enforcement? (Score:3)

    by Monoman ( 8745 ) on Friday March 18, 2011 @06:44PM (#35537950) Homepage

    They don't enforce the intended purposes of most of the other domains so what is the point besides another way to generate money?

  • ICANN has XXX? (Score:3)

    by LSD-OBS ( 183415 ) on Friday March 18, 2011 @06:45PM (#35537958)

    ICAME

  • everyfamouspersoneverknown.xxx (Score:4, Funny)

    by russ1337 ( 938915 ) on Friday March 18, 2011 @06:58PM (#35538070)

    Wait till someone registers $firstname$lastname.xxx .... of their least favorite politician. When they come along and say "hey you're domain squatting my name" you can make sure there is heaps of publicity about them wanting to register their .xxx domain.

    this will have absolutely no unintended consequences and certainly wont be abused [/sarcasm]

  • I guess ICAAN is helping put the STD in the sTLD!


    /ducks

  • I guess you could say... (Score:5, Funny)

    by chemicaldave ( 1776600 ) on Friday March 18, 2011 @07:29PM (#35538306)
    ...it's coming.

  • tl;dr: ICANN grew up, and recognized just because they don't have unanimous support on a TLD being suitable, doesn't me they should block it. Oh, and the fees collected for the domains are better than a sharp stick in the eye.

  • This is a bad decision.This is the wrong direction. Approve .kids as a TLD. .xxx only creates a percieved value that the rest of the Internet is safe. But local regulations and laws vary so much it will never be able to be enforced. And on top of that you have created a gold mine where the registrar of .xxx can charge whatever the want, domains will have conflicts registering in the one .xxx tld where in the rest of the Internet they have the same mark for different organizations in .net and .com, etc.

    By

  • The .xxx domain saga has been going longer than Duke Nukem Forever's release date. What a year this is, to see both .xxx come to fruition and an actual release date for DNF - both in the same year even!

    Suppose next we'll get a black president or something. [Imagine Doc Brown if Marty would've been from now instead of 1985. Think having an actor for a president was strange...]

  • I don't care that they're porn. I'm more interested in seeing that they're in demand. Instead of selling domains to the first person that comes along, will they do something like an auction on them?

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