Governments mull net censorship grab

.notgay

I'd find it odd if we lived in a world where we had to group gay people into one corner of the internet. As a heterosexual man, can I request the .notgay TLD please - in the interest of fairness that is...

Campaign

Does this mean that my campaign to have a .gobblersknob TLD in honour of Groundhog day will be blocked. Oh well I'm of to www.gobblersknob.us instead.

.sad

pretty much says it all ... if we're going to worry about this sort of stupidity heaven help us when someone hijacks other existing TLDs.

.com in my pants - a clothing retailer?

.org asm - assembly coding instructions?

.mil lady - high class hookers ?

Anarchy - it's looking better every day.

This I Like for All the Wrong Reasons

I'm no fan of censorship but I'm in favor of this just because it will prevent a proliferation of new TLDs. Domain names are a hierarchical organization. The more random TLDs are added, the less organized the whole system becomes. And when companies are essentially forced to buy up their name and all their product names to prevent squatters its just a cash cow for the registrars.

Don't call me shirley

Surely it would be easier for these repressive governments to block all sites from a particular TLD than have to inspect every potentially offensive site to see if it should be censored?

Am I missing something?

This way lies madness

The DNS does not need, nor even benefit from, a TLD for every niche, interest and societal sector. Technically, the system would work fine with no TLDs at all. They were conceived to help organize the DNS around the purpose and function of the domains under them, but aside from .GOV and .EDU, for which you still have to provably qualify (and setting aside the country-code domains for the moment), the rest have been stripped of their meaning entirely.

Remember when .com, .net and .org meant something? To get a domain you had to include a short written justification (and $100 USD) wth the application, and that had to match up with the TLD you requested. Strictly, you got .NET if you were a part of the Internet itself, .ORG if you were a non-profit or .COM otherwise (granted, the was a lot of play in the system, but that was the goal). If .com, .org and .net were merged into a single TLD there would be no harm in that at all; they mean nothing any more. Even USENET's top-level groups are more meaningful.

TLDs are not directories; they are not browseable; being part of .autopartsdealers* isn't going to get anyone to your store's site any faster than if it's www.south-booswah-autoparts.com--in fact, less so. I see no reason to waste time and trouble over this; it's headed in the wrong direction. These new "niche" TLDs will soon be full of inappropriate domains just as .COM .NET and .ORG are now, if we imagine for a moment that those old standards still existed. It's just complicating the DNS and creating illusory significance to the domains under them.

(I was going to say .hamster-duct-tape, but that would be lost on most people.)

Just a thought...

So rather than having nations-with-issues block content they don't like, ICANN wants to consider this like a precrime and block it on behalf of a nation that might not like it. WTF? This seems to me, to be about as useful to society as those certain people (who were not Islamic) wanting to ban Christmas celebrations lest it "offend" somebody who isn't a Christian. ICANN really ought to keep their noses out of politics lest it start to piss people off (upon which basis would a domain name be rejected? don't you think if you place a Jewish elder, a fundamentalist Muslim, a monk, a capitalist banker, an imporverised Mexican, and an athiest in the same room to vote on this you would ever EVER *E*V*E*R* have agreement? you can't please everybody). This isn't to mention that there may be sites that would appear to fail the basic moral test, such as the heavy-duty how-to-kill-yourself-in-a-blaze-of-glory that is www.suicide.co.uk... actually, as bad as that might sound, it does end up somewhere logical. Try it. I know that's not a TLD, but what's to say www.sui.cide ? How about words that are rude in one place but not so rude elsewhere, www.my.old.bint or non-English words that are obvious but not exactly an obscenity - www.life.is.shite ? Or given we can have non-Latin, how about жизнь.дерьмо ?

Do they even understand the sheer scale of the minefield they're freefalling into? It would be better to keep control of TLDs for administrative purposes, lest they spiral out of control, and 'censor' TLDs by the long long boring approval/consultation process. But NOT because something somewhere *may* upset somebody. For if they do, they really ought to rename themselves ICANT...

Thoughtful title needed

1. I agree that we don't need niche TLDs. Though I suppose if we have lots and lots it will have essentially got rid of the TLD concept. I'm not sure if this is technically a good thing or not.

2. DNS domains are pointers not content. Introducing .xxx doesn't create more porn content.

3. "a nation like Uganda, again for example, could decide to block the entire TLD for not complying with its rather outdated notions of personal morality."

Well there's a statement of breath-taking arrogance. Who exactly decides what is "outdated" and what is not? Surely if the beliefs are currently held, they are "current" and not outdated at all. Certainly they may not coincide with our own but to dismiss them by implying they are a bit primitive is just crass. I suspect you'd find that there are plenty of Islamists who think the Western experiment with freedom of speech is an idea whose time is over. Does that mean we should abandon freedom of speech?

If you're going to have a clash of cultures. Let's not make it about imposing my will or belief system (whatever it is) on them. We need to be better than them, not just different. Tolerance is about agreeing to disagree, not forcing others to accept your viewpoint. I forget who said that (if you use coercion), "you become like that which you fight."

Globalization and the Law

You can't globalize regulation,and particularly you can't globalize telecoms regulation.

At least; not without pandering to the lowest common denominator of censorship, fascism, and social control.

Its a measure of intellectual strength that we tolerate freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and open and free exchange of ideas.