Saatchis to pimp .xxx domains Renowned advertising agency M&C Saatchi is to take on the porn business, after agreeing to represent the proposed .xxx domain name operator, ICM Registry. The company is expected to launch a two-phase campaign, the first designed to help sell the purported benefits of the domain to a recalcitrant porn industry, the second to …
As a typical geek with a borderline-OCD passion for categorising anything and everything, I would like to believe that logical grouping of sites was a significant motivating factor in .xxx's proposed existence, however it's pretty obvious it's way down the list.
If logic had anything to do with it then ICANN would already be grouping every kind of commercial enterprise - not just pornography - under its own TLD, and they'd be policing it to make sure everyone was categorised correctly and no-one was abusing the system. That's not currently happening even with the limited number of TLD's (.net and .org in particular are widely misused) and it's not going to happen - nor is there, to my mind, any reason to even bother... Unless it makes someone, somewhere, a big pile of money - and therein lies the rub.
From Gutenberg to the Internet, new technology has been the beneficiary of impolite titillation. And as each technology has matured, it imposes rules to help us all better manage our, uh, urges. This is the role I see ICM Registry playing. The behavioral and transparency guidelines are not designed to promote or stamp out that which can't be stamped out, merely to prevent those who satisfy the appetite for pornography from being misused by truly bad actors.
Viruses, mal-ware, bot-net and tracking software that leads to identity theft have all piggy-backed on pornography. If ICM Registry is successful, as an adult I will be able to get a look at what I want without worrying if she -- or he -- is looking back at me.
"If ICM Registry is successful, as an adult I will be able to get a look at what I want without worrying if she -- or he -- is looking back at me.".....seriously, you won't be looking. The AU government is currently looking at ISP filters, with a push by some fundementalist groups to block all forms of adult sites. Currently this is to difficult because the adult sites are mixed with the regular sites so any content filters just fall over under the load, so what they are trying to do here is remove that roadblock. Put all pron sites on one TLD, just block that TLD, job done.
If you think this will only happen in the AU think again, its spreading. What will actually happen is that the pron companies will at best keep both going, and they will pay twice as much, more likely is they will find themselves being blocked in more and more countries and just go back to the regular TLD's and everything will be business as usual.
This is what comes of allowing governments to try and direct the direction of technology, they ALWAYS fail. if it had been a government researching computers instead of private business we would all stil be using vacuum tubes because vacuum tubes are a tried and tested technology and transistors are just a lab dream!
But equally if governments push the filters too hard then that means that the porn industry won't stick to the .xxx and jsut maintain their more usual designations. This actually (with admittedly the requirement for some political foresight) should reduce the need for governments to filter since the 'responsible' purveyors will, in a sense, be self-filtering. It should make it easier to identify the 'non responsible' in the remaining traditional TLDs.
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