ICANN Meeting Puts Off XXX Domain Again 157
An anonymous reader wrote to mention an International Herald story about a recent ICANN meeting on the proposed .XXX domain. Australia, the U.S., and the EU have moved to block the idea, with most commentators surmising this will prevent the concept from ever moving forward. From the article: "Some people maintain that a triple-x domain name, and the ability to enforce rules to qualify for it, would rein in an out-of-control Internet phenomenon. In registering, a company could have to abide by ratings agency standards, require proof of age for entrants, maybe even pay for Internet filtering research. The company pushing the idea, ICM Registry, also argues that dot-xxx would be good for customers of pornography sites, assuring them of certain business benchmarks, like being free of adware or computer viruses."
free of adware or viruses? (Score:3, Insightful)
the real reason.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The invisible foot of Government (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact is, laws passed for the "common good" invariably end up harming those they were notionally intended to help and in fact end up greatly benefiting a very small group of people.
In this case, the average punter will see his prices rise, to pay for all the regulation the porn sites would bear, the number and variety of porn sites would decrease because of their extra costs and ICM Registry would do very well out of it *indeed*.
Re:why? (Score:5, Insightful)
What they should do: (Score:5, Insightful)
wont really solve anything (Score:5, Insightful)
a better solution is to create a domain that only has child-friendly material on it. Like creating a town with NO guns allowed.
Parents could choose to only allow their kids to visit this domain and be assured they wont stumble across pictures that they might not want them to see.
I don't think I would have my children live in censorland, but at least the parents afraid of letting their children see the real world would have a place to hide it from them.
Maybe, just maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
If the TLD isn't
People trust
So maybe, just maybe, these guys will be vigilant about kicking out the registrations of people with
That "guaranteed free of malware" would involve a lot of vigilance on their part, and in return the
Re:Americans are all sick degenerate perverts. (Score:3, Insightful)
Links to all this research, please?
"Americans are all sick degenerate perverts."
Also, making a generalization about roughly 300 million people is not very nice. It's like saying that all Chinese (or Indian) people wear funny shoes. There are people in every group that wear funny shoes, just as there are "sick degenerate perverts" everywhere, but that doesn't make everyone one of them.
Re:Great Idea (Score:3, Insightful)
From the mouths of babes (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, that's not quite how I put it to her. I said some people wanted a place on the Web where only adults could go.
"And a place where only kids could go, like pbskids.org?" she asked, leaping to a conclusion I hadn't considered. "That's a great idea."
My question is why are there so many people who refuse to consider the much more logical course of creating ".safe" domains? It just makes much more sense then trying to force or coerce objectionable material into a single domain and would be much more effective for those who want to censor.
Re:why? (Score:1, Insightful)
The only reason we continue hearing about
Re:From the mouths of babes (Score:3, Insightful)
Because a ".safe" domain is about controlling one's own behavior. A ".xxx" domain is about controlling other people's behavior.
And some people simply can't live with not being able to control other people's behavior.
Re:why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What they should do: (Score:3, Insightful)
No these scam artists won't have to force people into
And of course the definition of what is 'porn' will change until eventually anything that isn't 'child safe' will be forced to relocate to escape the lawyers. So no,
Because .xxx is not a good idea (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a bad idea.
If you want to rate pages, there are already standard mechanisms [icra.org] for plugging content metadata into pages. Just for a start, this is a technically-superior system -- there is absolutely no reason to need to purchase an entirely separate TLD just because you have a few pages that contain adult content. The domain name registrars would have loved this -- heck, they'd love people to have to buy a new TLD for *every* sort of content, not just adult.
In addition,
So
What else is wrong with it? The obvious point of such a TLD would be to block
Any proxy usage will bypass a
And, finally, the worst issue. It promises a long and unpleasant future of social problems, precisely because it is a TLD. Even if this were a technically good solution, it would still be better to have
The argument "more data is better than none" does have some merit, but the disadvantages of