Plans For .xxx Domain For p0rn Scrapped 361
William Robinson writes "ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has once again scrapped the plan for a new internet "domain" .xxx for pornography. Supporters of the .xxx address suffix argued that it would have helped to protect children and others from accidental exposure to internet pornography, particularly if stronger filters were used to screen out explicit material from other internet domains. Pressure from conservative Christian groups in the US, which has a veto over the internet addressing system, led the organisation last year to put off introducing a new ".xxx" domain for pornography on the internet. That drew international complaints that the US exercised too much power over the internet and added to a European-backed movement to shift control of the online medium to an international group."
For God.COM's sake ? (Score:2, Informative)
And you guys wonder why the rest of the world doesn't trust the US to run the internet
Tell me the above is a late April fools joke.
For those who haven't been keeping up... (Score:2, Informative)
Overall, a very interesting battle: should we place man's vices (it's true, admit it) in one desolate, but convenient group, or leave them interspersed with everything else?
Re:For those who haven't been keeping up... (Score:2, Informative)
Why blame the religious right? (Score:5, Informative)
The only justification for new TLDs that I've seen is that it makes companies have to buy them to protect their trademark, thereby making profit for the new registrar.
Re:Huh (Score:2, Informative)
A bit of a misconception. "The Internet" is a bunch of national networks (funded by their respective countries, with Arpanet being the US network, SUNET being the Swedish one and so on) interconnected and with common rules to make them work together seamlessly. The US funds the US networks and part of the transnational links; the EU countries fund their parts and part of the links and so on.
So the EU already has "their own network" just like the US, and it's the EU part of the Internet. Having a say on it is perfectly reasonable.
DNS isn't a content label (Score:3, Informative)
What happens when a company publishes both pornographic and non-pornographic content? Do they now have to split up into two DNS domains?
We already have content labels today: PICS and ratings bureaus like ICRA [icra.org] (which actually uses RDF instead of PICS lately).
If you want a kids-safe browsing experience, get the kids-safe web sites to start labeling their content. IE, at least, can be configured to only display pages that meet certain minimum requirements defined by the type of label you use.
If you merely want a safe-from-porn browsing experience, get the porn sites to label their content and indicate that the content is porn. They're just as likely to do this as they are to voluntarily move to
Unless this move is made mandatory, many (most?) porn site operators are not going to move to
Re:He who funds, controls (Score:3, Informative)
Choice quote from Wikipedia article: Many of his inventions were not completely original, but improvements which allowed for mass production. For example, contrary to public perception, Edison did not invent the electric light bulb. Several designs had already been developed by earlier inventors including the patent he purchased from Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans, Moses G. Farmer,[2] Joseph Swan, James Bowman Lindsay, William Sawyer, Humphry Davy, and Heinrich Göbel. In 1878, Edison applied the term filament to the element of glowing wire carrying the current, although English inventor Joseph Swan used the term prior to this. Edison took the features of these earlier designs and set his workers to the task of creating longer-lasting bulbs. By 1879, he had produced a new concept: a high resistance lamp in a very high vacuum, which would burn for hundreds of hours. While the earlier inventors had produced electric lighting in laboratory conditions, Edison concentrated on commercial application and was able to sell the concept to homes and businesses by mass-producing relatively long-lasting light bulbs and creating a system for the generation and distribution of electricity.
More info: Thomas Edison [wikipedia.org] and Light Bulbs [wikipedia.org] from Wikipedia
Re:Once again, why? (Score:5, Informative)
I've not yet seen a reason to have the .xxx domain. I'm not opposed, per se, but I have a hard time understanding the point to it.
Why do we have any TLDs? We can just shove everything into .com right? The point is to organize the internet into usable chunks both for content providers and consumers. Now I don't know about you, but I'd say porn makes up a significant chunk of the internet. Porn providers want consumers to easily be able to find them. They don't want young children to find them since kids generally don't have credit cards and if they do their parents look at the bills and likely will complain. They don't want people who don't like porn visiting them since it costs them bandwidth and is more likely to result in outrage/persecution of them.
Having an XXX domain gives porn purveyors a place to go where no one can complain they "accidentally" stumbled upon them. It will stop all of the "please think of the children" emotive pleas, since anyone concerned can just filter the XXX domain. This is the whole reason the domain system exists.
As to the reason some people oppose it. Certain religious wackos and the con-men who prey upon religious wackos like having an enemy. Most of them say that "porn is evil" and needs to be stopped. They aren't interested in letting everyone make up their own minds, or easily have a choice. Their concern is in telling each and every one of us what we can and can't do based upon their weird religious interpretations. As a result, they want to increase, not decrease outrage. This means they want children and other people who might accidentally access porn to do so as much as possible. They hope that by making it more difficult for people to find what they want, more difficult to avoid what they don't want, and more difficult to filter based upon easy categorization that they can outright ban porn in the entire world, rather than just let those who to see it do so and avoid it themselves.
Since a lot of these religious wackos and con-men are involved in the US government, which in holds ICANN's leash, they are using ICANN to push this agenda upon the world. That, understandably, makes much of the rest of the world less confident that the US will not use ICANN to push other agendas that conflict with global interests.
The following links paint a fuzzier picture (Score:2, Informative)
I did a search on ICAN for .xxx and what I found seems different that what the crowd says (that evil forces are trying to have xxx approuved or actually the opposite :-)
The proposal for .xxx is here [icann.org] apparently it is quite old since we are talking of 1994
Then there is a descritpion of the registry that should actually handling it, something called ICM [icann.org]
Apparently there is a further stage of the "test", you can find the announcement here [icann.org] it is June 05
And finally one of the many comments [icann.org], of various type, basically it seems to me that there is not a clear cut idea if this is good or bad...
What I cannot find is a reference to what the article under scrutiny says, maybe it is just rumors ?
The EU created the WWW (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Cognitive Dissonance (Score:2, Informative)
This really isn't cognitive dissonance. It's more like the polarization effect.