Plan for top-level pornography domain gets reprieve A plan to create a specific area of the Internet for pornography has been given a reprieve by a distinguished panel of judges. The panelists - who included a former International Court of Justice judge - told Internet overseeing body ICANN in a majority decision that it was wrong to reject an application for the top-level …
As sayeth the Reg article: "particularly the US government, which had been the focus of a determined campaign by right-wing Christian groups".
What a bunch of morons. It's way easier to filter porn out if it ALL falls under .xxx rather than what is currently done. Of course, this would require (via law or registrar contract) to force porn to be on .xxx domains only, but in this scenario, everyone wins. Those that don't want accessible porn just block the .xxx domains and those that crave it can easily find what they are looking for.
AC
Put porn in a .xxx TLD and it becomes an easy target for filtering, whether at end-user level (a good thing) or at ISP/National level (not a good thing).
Some might still recall the Usenet fuss in the mid-nineties of the last century, when the head of the Clubs and Vice Section of the Metropolitan Police sent a letter to the British ISPs, questioning the legality of a list of newsgroups, apparently mainly on a superficial examination of their names. CI Stephen French's action was part of the buildup of threats whiuch led to the formation of the IWF.
It's not going to protect you against the politicians, not without some pretty aggressive marketing of the opportunities it gives for blocking at the household level.
... of the xxx domain WERE the adult industry. It was they who first suggested this idea to stave off the creeping idea of censorship on the web - they argued that, as the first comment points out, it is much easier for parental control or otherwise to block porn sites in situations deemed unsuitable than it currently is. It showed a degree of responsibility that the groups attacking them and their industry lacked.
Yes, the fundies are morons.
> ...those that crave it can easily find what they are looking for.
Are you for real? People that want πορν now can find it easily enough, nothing about .xxx is going to make it easier to find.
Anyone who thinks that .xxx is anything but another land grab and will somehow make things better is just fooling themselves.
No doubt we will eventually get legislation to restrict πορν to only .xxx domains -- I expect more so because our fine congress critters just can't not try to legislate morality and common sense. No need to give them any bright ideas though.
But the solution you describe isn't even on the table. It isn't an "everybody wins" result by any means either. What about all the owners of existing porn sites? Do they get kicked out of their old domains, or what? Sure they could go register the same name under .xxx but what about hotsex.com and hotsex.net, would they be forced to share or what? What about britishpornclips.co.uk? What right does ICANN have to tell an (ostensibly) sovereign nation what it can and can't put under its tld? Then there's situation of sites that are not primarily pornographic, but on occasion feature some mature content. Would it sounds like they would be forced to either move their whole site to xxx land, or else split it in two. Neither option sounds very attractive (or fair) to me.
Depends on the flexibility of the system and what people are willing to do. Some amateurish ideas follow. :-)
An easy, if not so pretty, solution would be to append .xxx to the current existing addresses, in a grandfathering system, so to speak. So, in the examples you gave, those sites would become hotsex.com.xxx and hotsex.net.xxx, but any newly registered site would not need (or be allowed?) to do that. The old addresses could redirect to the new .xxx appended ones for a while, say. After a certain period (a couple years? more?), the old addresses would stop working definitively.
People *already* don't follow the underlying logic anyway, it seems to me; why is El Reg's URL ended in .co.uk, while if the site was American it would be .com only? Brazilian sites are .com.br and so forth.
On the other hand, this could create new opportunities for scammers, typosquatters, people like that. But pornland is hardly known for being a safe corner of the interwebs to begin with, so I don't know how much worse it could get...
The modern web didn't just spring up overnight. Much of the "underlying logic" came about well after most of the infrastructure was put into place.
The grandfathering system you mention would be nice, but relies on every country in the world adding it to their legal systems and then enforcing it. In other words, it's not going to happen.
How about a kid friendly Internet on top of the Internet? .kids or something like that. Have approved websites have a simple DNS redirect. So nickelodeon.com becomes nickelodeon.kids which seamlessly works when the kiddies type in nickelodeon.kids. It would be trivial to make a web filter proxy that only allows only .kids domains.
Then all the nanny groups can get together and decide what gets let in. All legitimate websites with content aimed at kids would scramble to get "approved".
"Then all the nanny groups can get together and decide what gets let in."
We already have that. The nanny groups couldn't agree on *anything*, so there's nothing under .kids.
Seriously, there is *no* prospect of the entire human race agreeing that *anything* is either suitable or unsuitable for either kids or adults. If you want to use DNS as an indicator of content, then the top-level names need to align with legal jurisdictions. Since we already have a TLD for every sovereign state, ICANN should be making plans to *withdraw* the others, not add to the list.
.com is now recognised internationally as commercial sites, same with .net .gov etc,
country specific agree with international country codes .us, .br .fr .uk etc
The interwebs controllers are trying to move away from being english specific therefore .kids would be a backwards step.
What we really want is an .xxx tld but cunningly named .beer or .football or .widgetcollecting or better still .stufftokeepintheshed
That would flummox them there women & leave the pr0n browsing secret. What woman, in her right mind, will follow a link to www.hotties.football or www.toptotty.widgets
:-)
This is so boring. *Obviously* whatever they decide will make no difference to the amount of smut, or evil smut, on the net and no difference to the ease or difficulty of finding it or filtering it. As others have said, the only real world result will be money in the pockets of registrars, registries, and domain squatters.
Of course, ICANN laid themselves open to this sort of crap as soon as they agreed to the first useless new gTLD back in whenever. So they deserve what they got, but it's a bit hard on today's ICANN Board members who weren't around when the nonsense started.
"...It is a question of ‘is ICANN going to do the right thing or not?’”
I think we know the answer to that one. In a lose-lose situation, whatever you do is the wrong thing.
Paris, 'cos we're *sure* she wants to be in .xxx soonest.
> ...in the past few years, now anyone can stump up $50K or whatever it is and get their own custom TLD.
not true. icann has not approved any new tlds for almost a decade now. they are still discussing a process to create new ones but discussions are likely to go on and on and on and on. anyone hoping this will reach a conclusion some time before the sun turns into a red giant is likely to be very disappointed. oh and the last time icann mentioned fees, they said an application for a new tld would be in the "low six figures". which probably means around $250K. the application fee will be small change compared to all the other start-up costs: service contracts, legal expenses, people, marketing, equipment, travel, etc.
I suppose a dose of realism is important and I understand that the sector happens to be a multi-billion Euro, ESD, GBP, ... , Yen, ... concern.
So I suppose it is reasonable to give some sort of acceptance yet at the same time I hope there are means to keep the gangstah-types out.
And hope even more still that upholding .xxx means I can ever so easily ban stuff from ever appearing on computers I manage.
Who cares what TLDs there are out there?
it just translates to a number.
Really - what does it matter what TLDs there are? An experienced user of t'interweb knows that any domain name can mean anything and resolve to any site. The name registered in DNS does not have to bear any resemblence to what the site actually does.
Would anybody reading this forum be surprised if they typed 'www.helloiamalegitimatewebsite.com' into their browser and ended up looking at a webpage listing local crack houses? Nope. DNS names mean nothing - it is a convenience.
Give em .xxx, give em whatever they want. Who cares?
I run a business making leather bondage gear. Whilst my site www.affordable-leather.co.uk has adult content (and appropriate warnings, is signed up to Net Nanny, Cyber Sitter et al) and is clearly not suitable for children, it's not "pornography", so should I be forced to dump my old domain (and have to re-do all my advertising and get all the links changed) to make it www.affordable-leather.xxx?
If not, what possible use is a .xxx TLD going to achieve except big commissions for the bidding war that will no doubt ensue for domains like sex.xxx and xxx.xxx which will probably sell for millions?
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