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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."
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Plans For .xxx Domain For p0rn Scrapped

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  • Once again, why? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by heinousjay ( 683506 )
    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. It seems more like a fun hot button to oppose the US. If that's the case, cool, enjoy tilting at that particular windmill.
    • by mopslik ( 688435 )

      I've not yet seen a reason to have the .xxx domain.

      I guess the main argument is that it should be fairly trivial to filter out any domain ending in .xxx, as opposed to trying to determine is a particular .com domain is pornographic based on domain name, copy, images, etc.

      But then, I guess it depends on whether you buy into the "existence = encouragement" argument put forth by some of the other groups.

      • Encouragement to move sites to a .xxx domain merely due to it's existence would be an ideal scenario.

        Either way, it's a moot argument to make because, as you mention, it would be trivial to filter these sites out.

        The only argument against .xxx I can think of is that it wouldn't really encourage porn sites to move at all. Just look at the .info and .biz domains; no serious site would be caught dead on .biz, and .info pretty much goes unused too.
      • by jmorris42 ( 1458 ) *
        > I guess the main argument is that it should be fairly trivial to filter out any domain ending in .xxx,

        Which is why it must never be allowed to be brought into existance. Listen up a second before that inflamatory slashdot article turns this thread into today's two minute hate.

        If a .xxx domain is ever created the legal climate in the US will force any content that isn't 'child safe' into it. All it would take is one threat of a lawsuit from a rapacious trial lawyer (and we have a couple million of tho
    • Re:Once again, why? (Score:5, Informative)

      by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF ( 813746 ) on Monday April 03, 2006 @11:12AM (#15050224)

      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.

      • You make the most persuasive argument for .xxx that I have heard so far. Congratulations.

        One problem I see with it is that lots of pr0n companies do in fact get paid per impression for ads. Therefore, they are likely to continue to try to get around filters. Many pr0n companies try all sorts of things to get people to "accidentally" view their site. I don't see how .xxx will stop that.

        I think that there are lots of pr0n sites that make their money off of subscriptions, etc. and I could easily imagine those
      • Re:Once again, why? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by typical ( 886006 )
        Yes, some conservative Christian groups oppose it, for the reason that they feel that it will "legitimize porn". I also oppose a .xxx TLD, for completely different reasons:

        (1) .xxx sucks from a technical standpoint. Using DNS to categorize sites allows anyone else to set up a non-.xxx address that points at the same address. .xxx is useless for blocking, for this reason. .xxx allows only a single bit of information to be encoded about a an entire domain (is it "adult", whatever that means, or not?) There a
    • 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. It seems more like a fun hot button to oppose the US. If that's the case, cool, enjoy tilting at that particular windmill.

      You're right, there's no particular reason for wanting an xxx domain other than it might seem 'cool' to some.

      And it is not the reason why people in the world oppose the US. There are many arguments why USA shouldn't have the control over the TLDs, but I susp
  • by Hellboy0101 ( 680494 ) on Monday April 03, 2006 @10:29AM (#15049823)
    I always wondered what made anyone think that this would be a success in the first place. Registering your pr0n site as a .com, etc would always be the preffered method, since you site would have a better chance of getting around filters. Just another instance of non-technical people trying to make technical decisions.
    • by G-Licious! ( 822746 ) on Monday April 03, 2006 @10:43AM (#15049931) Homepage

      Do porn sites actually make any profit out of that, though? Children that are blocked by the filters wouldn't have paid anyways. Other people that are blocked by filters are usually at places you wouldn't normally get off anyways (work, library, etc.)

      On top of that, even if there is no filter in place, I don't think they'd get many ad clicks either in any of those situations. But maybe they don't get paid per click at all?

    • by Austerity Empowers ( 669817 ) on Monday April 03, 2006 @10:43AM (#15049933)
      Because you're exactly right, it makes for a good rallying point for the non-technical or at least the non-clueful. It SOUNDS good right? "All porn in .xxx!", and then saying some conservative christian group stood against it makes it sound like some reactionary American group is holding up progress. Americans are the only Christians of course, we all know Christ was born in Cleveland and the Pope lives in Albequerque.

      In fact it's a dumb idea and that's why it's not going anywhere.
    • by Kamel Jockey ( 409856 ) on Monday April 03, 2006 @10:45AM (#15049958) Homepage

      Registering your pr0n site as a .com, etc would always be the preffered method, since you site would have a better chance of getting around filters.

      Most adult websites though do not want to bypass Internet content filters that parents set up for their children. Many voluntarily list themselves with filtering companies expressly for the purpose of trying to keep porn away from those who should not be seeing it. Of course, they don't do this out of moral reasons but rather to save themselves. Anyone who complains about "too much porn" on the Internet can be directed to use the latest available filtering technology to their heart's content with no government involvement needed.

    • Actually i disagree. If this is implemented correctly, then they should force all *legal* porn sites to use an .xxx domain, and thus, allowing filters to work where is the need for such things, but if you want to avoid filters, then you are either one of this options:
      1) a minor,
      2) an adult on a protected (as in not yours) pc or public place,
      3) someone not willing to pay.

      Neither of this options fall into the target of legal, credit card or cash based (as in not-publicity-based) porn sites.
      So, in my op
    • by foniksonik ( 573572 ) on Monday April 03, 2006 @10:49AM (#15049993) Homepage Journal
      Getting around filters... suddenly that porn outlet is the target of an investigation into selling porn to underage... which is the whole point. It's like the red light district... it makes it easier for patrons to find and harder for underage would be patrons to access without drawing attention to themselves, either from their parents or the authorities (which would only get involved if the business were actually soliciting to minors).

      Morality nazis just don't want to appear to be giving their support to something that legitimizes pornography. SO instead we have porn abolition, which is much the same as alcohol abolition in that the suppliers still sell their product and people still buy, but there is no regulation of quality and no means of officially monitoring or regulating product access to minors.

      I'd like to be able to block ads from .xxx and emails from .xxx and if i wanted to see some fat titties I'd like to go to google and do a search on .xxx and not see this: fat titties [drinksmixer.com].

    • by abb3w ( 696381 ) on Monday April 03, 2006 @01:07PM (#15051435) Journal
      Registering your pr0n site as a .com, etc would always be the preffered method, since you site would have a better chance of getting around filters.

      Actually, I expect the preferred method would be much similar to the online casinos that use a .net [goldenpalace.net] for the legal-in-the-US no-money online poker, and a .com [goldenpalace.com] for the not-legal-in-the-US real-money online poker [cornell.edu].

      Porn sites would probably register (or maintain) their .com address, and keep the "clean" content there — probably a "WARNING: ADULT CONTENT" page, and maybe a copy of the TOS page. The main site with the adult content would then be on a .xxx address.

      As others have noted, most porn sites want those who choose to do so to be able to filter them. They also want those who DON'T chose to filter them to be able to see them unfiltered. Of course, there are some bad apples out there — the sort of "gallery" metasites that only point to other metasites, or which attempt to install various trojans. The scammers and crooks probably won't care (nor move), but the bad apples are the minority.

      No, the real bane in this effort is the Religious Conservatives who don't want ANYONE to be able to see smut, regardless of the individual's age or personal preference. Which, in the present US (or globabl) political climate, isn't a complete obstacle, but is a non-trivial problem.

  • Trolling Post (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Serapth ( 643581 ) on Monday April 03, 2006 @10:29AM (#15049826)
    Are you all ready for the barrage of thousands of comments about how much fundamentalist Christians suck. This obviously leads to conversations about how evil the Bush administration is. Naturally this will lead to a number of non-Americans saying how the States has too much power and is too conceited. And finally, this will be followed up by comments from Americans claiming to be the core of the world anyways so the rest of the world can go stuff it.
    BR> Paint by numbers, brought to you by Slashdot.
    • by sgant ( 178166 ) on Monday April 03, 2006 @10:39AM (#15049894) Homepage Journal
      A psychological phenomenon that refers to the bad feeling one gets when a discrepancy between what you already know or believe, and new information or interpretation from someone else. Religion usually falls in this framework when two people who are on opposite positions begin discussing and get further and further away from true understanding one another.

      This doesn't fall under religion exclusively either, almost any aspects of life can become deeply held beliefs that we don't want to let go of when something new comes along to upset the apple-cart.
    • Thanks for the great timesaver, I shall now proceed to the next story.

      Typical of those conceited americans... ;)

      Doesn't everyone know that *Usenet* is for pron anyway ? What do they learn at school nowadays ?
  • It's just as well... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BakaHoushi ( 786009 ) <Goss DOT Sean AT gmail DOT com> on Monday April 03, 2006 @10:30AM (#15049830) Homepage
    While I admit, in theory, it sounded like a great idea, helping to keep a lot of unwanted images out of my google searches, there were just too many holes in the idea and too many ways it could be abused for it to seriously work. Defining what constitutes as pr0n, whether it should be manadatory or merely encouraged, and the fact that not all pr0n sites are here in America.

    Nothing else to see here, move along...
  • 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.

    I'm sure there was pressure from some Christian organizations, but if I remember it correctly, the real pressure was from countries that didn't like the idea (China is one that comes to mind). Anyone else remember it that way?
    • Er...maybe I'm appearing to be an uninformed dumbass here, but I'd really like to know who these "conservative Christian groups" who opposed this might be. The moment I read that, some red flags went up:

      1. The original story is published in the Financial Times (London). A nice publication, but this stiry is lacking on the details. It's not likely the NY Times or WaPo would get away with that too frequently. Name names.

      2. In today's political and media environment, it frequently appears that tossing up "cons
  • Huh (Score:2, Interesting)

    by romka1 ( 891990 )
    What do "conservative Christian groups" have to do with internet domain names...
    EU has full right to complain about us control over the domains
    • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday April 03, 2006 @10:42AM (#15049925)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Re:Huh (Score:2, Informative)

        by JanneM ( 7445 )
        The fact remains though that the EU should continue to have no say. They dont fund it, they never created it

        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
      • Re:Huh (Score:2, Insightful)

        Ok, for me this brings up a question and a couple points:

        Where did the submitter get this "Christian Veto" thing if they don't (And I certainly hope they don't!) have one.

        I find your arguments against the EU are completely unfair. The US doesn't WANT other countries to fund it, because that would take away from the absolute control the US currently has.

        You also complaining about the EU "already admitted that they would allow countrys to limit control by their own people, exactly what they accuse the US of
    • by TopSpin ( 753 ) *
      What do "conservative Christian groups" have to do...

      Little or nothing. The MSNBC wording is suspiciously ambiguous:

      Pressure from conservative Christian groups in the US, which has a veto over the internet addressing system, led the organisation last year...

      Reading this quickly leads one to think ICANN must get sign-off from Jerry Falwell or somesuch. In fact, the veto power belongs to the US government, not a US church.

      It isn't necessary to rely on religious zealots to provide reasons for opposing .xxx,
  • V is for Veto (Score:5, Insightful)

    by digitaldc ( 879047 ) * on Monday April 03, 2006 @10:32AM (#15049845)
    Pressure from conservative Christian groups in the US, which has a veto over the internet addressing system, led the organisation last year

    So, please tell me why they have a veto, and the progressive Buddhists do not?
    • Re:V is for Veto (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hal9000(jr) ( 316943 ) on Monday April 03, 2006 @10:45AM (#15049952)
      Pressure from conservative Christian groups in the US, which has a veto over the internet addressing system, led the organisation last year

      I think this is poor use of Englitsch. I think what the author was trying to say was, "The US, which has veto over the internet addressing system, was pressured by conservative Christian groups ...."
      • Pressure from conservative Christian groups in the US, which has a veto over the internet addressing system, led the organisation last year

        I think this is poor use of Englitsch. I think what the author was trying to say was, "The US, which has veto over the internet addressing system, was pressured by conservative Christian groups ...."

        That is what the author said. "which has" can't refer to "groups" because "groups" is plural.

      • The english was correct though, if it had said "have" instead of "has", then it would have been referring to the plural "groups". It says "has" though, which means it could only have been referring to the singular "US".
  • 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.

    This I don't understand. Can somebody help me out? Why wouldn't they want to keep all of the porn sites in one domain, where a very simple filter could eliminate all of it from view? I would think it would be the other way around--the porn companies should be against this as it would make filteri

    • by Stanislav_J ( 947290 ) on Monday April 03, 2006 @10:50AM (#15050000)
      This I don't understand. Can somebody help me out? Why wouldn't they want to keep all of the porn sites in one domain, where a very simple filter could eliminate all of it from view? It's very simple -- Christian groups don't want porn "segregated" -- they want it to disappear entirely. Providing a special domain is an admission that porn has a legitimate place on the Net, and that concept is anathema to the folks who don't just want to avoid it themselves, but deny anyone else the choice to view it.
    • I don't quite understand it, either, but for other reasons.
      About the conservative groups, my guess is that they would prefer to ban porn alltogether, and a .xxx TLD would make it more difficult to demand this because filtering, if wished, would be easy. I don't think porn companies -- at least the serious ones -- even want to get around filters (minors don't have credit cards, and office workers... I don't want to go there, really...). If you look at their sites (uhm... not that I have... a friend told me.
  • by neoshroom ( 324937 ) on Monday April 03, 2006 @10:36AM (#15049872)
    A plan for a new internet "domain" for pornography has once again been shelved, dealing another blow to the US-backed addressing system that acts as the glue holding together the unified global internet.

    The setback is likely to add to pressure stresses that could eventually fragment the internet, breaking it into a collection of separate national systems, some internet experts warned.


    The reason for this I assume is because if users can't easily access porn, there really is no point to the internet, is there?

    __
    Elephant Essays [elephantessays.com] - Custom-created essays and research papers.
    • Though your comment is marked as Funny, this concern is a touch more legitimate than people might like to think. A lot of money is spent on Internet access specifically for this reason. I imagine ISPs are stuck between the positive PR of trying to promote a child-friendly environment, and the brutal truth about why a lot of people spend so much on their high-speed Internet access.
  • I like all the subtle little messages in this article, further reinforcing the fundamentalist Christian conservative stereotype and implying that the Christians are the ones feeding fuel to the ICANN vs. Europe dispute.

    Seriously, this debate already has enough touchy issues to keep both sides warring with each other. Looking at the situation objectively, I don't think ICANN can make any kind of intelligent decision now without sparking accusations from European protesters. So what, then, makes this .xx
    • I like all the subtle little messages in this article, further reinforcing the fundamentalist Christian conservative stereotype and implying that the Christians are the ones feeding fuel to the ICANN vs. Europe dispute.

      Well, then, who is? The pretzel bakers?

      Or (even more implausibly), has this administration suddenly started listening to expert opinion?

  • Sigh (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Zerth ( 26112 ) on Monday April 03, 2006 @10:39AM (#15049896)
    And this will keep coming up until somebody realizes we can't force everything naughty into a ghetto.

    If they want a kid safe internet, they should put their efforts behind the .kids domain registrar'ed by a US company/NGO simultaneous with a law being passed covering what kind of content was allowed in .kids . Whitelisting is the only way to keep the pr0n out.

    Not that they could agree on what falls on the "not pr0n" side of the fence.
    • A more robust solution that does not involve turning DNS into a content label would be ratings, such as what is provided by ICRA [icra.org] (formerly RSAC). Have a site rate itself as being a porn site, or being child-friendly, and get the ratings bureau to sign off on this. Browsers can then be configured only to permit access to this type of site.

      This technology exists today. It's just that nobody uses it. Perhaps people don't actually care as much about this issue as they'd like others to think?
    • That is why I generally favor .kids.us (or .kids.ca, etc) over .kids. Let each country determine what "child friendly" means in their own country.
    • "And this will keep coming up until somebody realizes we can't force everything naughty into a ghetto."

      Even the tech-savvy conservatives have their own agenda. It'll keep coming up as long as there are "for the children" conservatives (and certain liberals) keeping us safe from ourselves.
  • For God.COM's sake ? (Score:2, Informative)

    by craznar ( 710808 )
    " from conservative Christian groups in the US, which has a veto over the internet addressing system"

    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.
  • If you're unaware about the current .xxx domain battle, see these earlier Slashdot posts throughout the years: 1 [slashdot.org], 2 [slashdot.org], 3 [slashdot.org], 4 [slashdot.org], 5 [slashdot.org], 6 [slashdot.org], 7 [slashdot.org], 8 [slashdot.org], 9, and tons of news articles [google.com].

    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?
  • "Responding to the risk that the delays might lead some countries to establish their own addressing systems, effectively in effect creating rival internets, [ICANN chief executive Paul Twomey] added: "Anyone can set up an alternative root system - the difference is, our root is the one that a billion people follow.""

    This is exactly the sort of quote that will bite you on the ass in six years time.

    Patriotism is built-in to the human psyche. Pride might well force the hand of someone like the European Union.
    • Actually, the Internet was developed to combat the USSR by the decidedly American DOD. It was created by Americans, for Americans. Obviously it has since expanded into something else entirely, but America invented, developed, and spent 30+ years laying the groundwork for it starting back with ARPA in the 60's - it wasn't until CERN in 1991 that the idea of a global network was even brought up.
  • surprising (Score:2, Funny)

    by sjg ( 957424 )
    Given the predominantly republican controlled government at the moment, I figured the proper strings would get pulled to slip this through. It would have been good move in that it would have given adult companies the opportunity and an avenue to regulate themselves, something that is sorely needed. For better or worse, it would also have prompted future legislation requiring adult companies to live solely on the .xxx TLD, which was the main complaint of those in the industry. Many adult industry heavyweight
  • Pressure from conservative Christian groups in the US, which has a veto over the internet addressing system

    Who has the veto power? Christian groups or the US? This sentence is confusing, though I would hope they meant US and not Christian.

    Why are Christian groups opposed to this? I would think they would like this "great now we can just block anyone from .xxx so we don't get their heathen, unholy smut on our computers." I wouldn't mind having an .xxx domain and relegating all the pr0n sites there.
    • Pressure from conservative Christian groups in the US, which has a veto over the internet addressing system

      Who has the veto power? Christian groups or the US? This sentence is confusing, though I would hope they meant US and not Christian.

      This should be clear. "Which has" is singular, whereas "groups" is plural, so it couldn't be the antecedent. "The US" is singular, so it must have the veto.

      Now don't complain about the fact that "US" is an abbreviation for "United States". It's singular, I tell you.
  • Let's start our own. If we registered domains for already existing sites ( playboy.xxx ), etc we could possibly get everyone using it de-facto. Then ... profit!
    Bagsie the master .xxx server.
  • Having a separate .xxx domain name gives us nothing that PICS [w3.org] doesn't already give us, in a superior and more fine-grained way.
    • in a superior and more fine-grained way.

      Please explain to me how a "superior and more fine-grained way" is so difficult to manage that PRACTICALLY NOBODY uses it.
      • I didn't say it was simpler--but simpler does not mean better. Assuming that all content from a given domain is porn is so glib as to be meaningless.

        PICS allows a web author to specify exactly what objectionable content is present for each resource on his site; and it allows him to do it today. Even Internet Explorer supports it, for God's sake!

        On the technical side, implementing it is as simple as adding a PICS-Label header to the HTTP headers of the desired resource.
  • by oneiros27 ( 46144 ) on Monday April 03, 2006 @10:48AM (#15049982) Homepage
    There are plenty of technical reasons why not to do it. See RFC 3675 [faqs.org] for details.

    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.
    • Why even have a limit on TLDs? The technical reasons listed in that RFC sound like laziness to me. If someone wants to register "thisisjohnsdomain", I say, more power to John.

      The only justification for no new TLDs is the headache for someone to be able to manage them in DNS. Again, that's all laziness.

      The benefits of letting anyone register anything far outweigh the negatives. If you could type in "microsoft" in the address bar and get to microsoft's website without having to be forwarded there by wildcard
    • There are plenty of technical reasons why not to do it. See RFC 3675 for details.

      I laugh at RFC 3675 because it practically says: "Oh this and that measure won't filter the 100.00% of porn sites, therefore it's useless".

      a) There is a representative quantity of porn websites that share the same IP range, so IP filtering IS effective against them, no matter what RFC 3675 says.

      b) Unlike PICS labels, .xxx TLD's don't require the webmaster to CHANGE the website contents. So it's actually easier for porn site own
  • by tetrahedrassface ( 675645 ) on Monday April 03, 2006 @10:54AM (#15050039) Journal
    It was bound to happen again. The net is just too big to enforce something like a .xxx domain, i still think that parents should be more involved with their children. As someone whos wife is a now retired teacher (to stay home with our kids), I have seen just how BADLY a lot of parents engage their childrens minds.

    for example..

    Children coming into school smelling like meth, (ie parents cooking it off in the house)

    Children sexually abused.. A lot

    Parents that expect society to instill values and morals instead of the home.

    \ Nothing but tv and games all day/night.

    I could go on buts its just too damn depressing. BUt we have seen it all.

    If the .xxx domain was supposed to protect children well.. nothing can be better for a child than a good sound creative, loving, and supportive home, where the parents actively are a part of the childs life..

    Maybe we need a .ped domain (parental education domain)... hehe or something like it.

    Ive even seen crack/coke babies with all types of physical defects, while mommie is still out on the streets.

    Ive seen a so much of the crazy stuff with regards to bad parenting that i think its about 75% of the problem. The children + porn thing just comes from turning Johnny loose on the net because it shuts him up so the parents can forget about him for a while..

    Thats my 2$

    • The general decline in parenting has depressed me, too, and has made me not want to have kids. However, recently I've been turning around on the whole issue. In fact, now I love it. Do you know how easy it is going to be for me to get my kids into a good school and a successful life with all the fuck-ups out there raising their kids on TV and day care? Hell, I used to think raising a kid would be difficult. Now that the bar is so unbefuckingleivably low, I'm not really worried. You actually give a shit abou
    • Maybe you should move? Everywhere can be pretty rough, but I certainly wouldn't want to raise children in the environment you're describing.
  • by Fastolfe ( 1470 ) on Monday April 03, 2006 @11:03AM (#15050117)
    Both .xxx and .kids are bad ideas because the Internet is not "teh interweb". DNS domains are not "web sites" and it's dangerous to say you want to standardize on "web site content labels" by way of DNS.

    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 .xxx.

    Unless this move is made mandatory, many (most?) porn site operators are not going to move to .xxx because they'll look at it the same way that businesses look at .biz: it's for low-budget operations.
  • by Citizen of Earth ( 569446 ) on Monday April 03, 2006 @11:08AM (#15050166)
    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.

    This reminds me of far-left types who demand world peace and the end to world hunger but vehemently object to the only credible means of achieving either. War isn't going away without the removal of all tinpot dictators; hunger isn't going away without pervasive globalization of all commodity production and the removal of all tinpot dictators; and Internet porn isn't going away without the marshalling of all material into a single TLD and the eradication of all human males.
  • The Internet Evangelical-Theological Force (IETF) has published their own objection: .sex Considered Dangerous (RFC 3675) [rfc-editor.org] in 2004, when ".xxx" was still called ".sex".

    I'm appalled by the way those Christian Conservatives shape the Internet!
  • 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,

  • But where will they put the porn?!1
  • XXX is the logo of the Dutch capital [fotw.net]. You can see it very boldly on the Amsterdam flag if you follow the link.
  • Now I won't be able to prioritize traffic from web servers at .xxx TLD as I had hoped.
  • I was hoping to snag hot.sex, - dang it.
  • by AeroIllini ( 726211 ) <aeroillini&gmail,com> on Monday April 03, 2006 @12:46PM (#15051223)
    The creation of a .xxx TLD is a good idea, but not because of censorship.

    If we tried to force all pornographic sites to move to .xxx names, then we would by necessity need to define "porn" to decide who has to move. Is the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition porn? What about the Victoria's Secret or Abercrombie catalogs? What about National Geographic's images of tribes in the Amazon who don't wear much clothing because it's frikkin' hot there, and don't worry about modesty? Is that porn? Defining porn is a difficult task at best, and defining it and moving it to .xxx wouldn't guarantee that suddenly, magically, .com is free of it.

    However, internet porn is a very popular vector for the delivery of spyware, malware, and phishing attacks, because of its popularity and taboo nature in our society. If the company that registers .xxx domain names can guarantee that the sites who buy .xxx domain names are reputable and free of [spy|ad|mal|phish]ware, then people would probably be willing to pay a premium for access to that site. (If I recall correctly, .edu does this type of thing already.) It would not take the malware out of porn sites, but it will take reputable porn sites away from the disreputable ones, and generate some trust between merchants and customers. After all, a reputable porn site is just a business, and they don't want to hurt their customer base. Ask yourself, would you be more willing to give your credit card to a .com site, a .biz site, or a .edu site? If that same high level of trust was created for the .xxx domain, everyone would benefit: the reputable porn sites get a good name and distance themselves from the malware-ridden experience that is online porn, the customers get a better porn-browsing experience and don't compromise their computer's security just by looking at naked people, and the registrars get to make money. The .xxx TLD could become a sort of Better Business Bureau for online pornography sites.

    If we really wanted to make censorship easy, let's create a .kid TLD, which is porn-free. Block everything but .kid, and maybe a few select whitelisted .com or .edu sites, and let your kids run wild and free on the internet without encountering a single filthy, traumatizing boobie.

"If I do not want others to quote me, I do not speak." -- Phil Wayne

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