ICANN Finally Rejects .xxx Domain

stalebread writes "Faced with opposition from conservative groups and some pornography Web sites, the Internet's key oversight agency voted Wednesday to reject a proposal to create a red-light district on the Internet." From the article: "In a split 9-5 board decision, the organisation acted ruthlessly, against its own previous position, in order to put an end to an increasingly difficult and controversial issue - the approval of a .xxx top-level domain. The .xxx registry application has been the focus of enormous political pressure on ICANN for the past six months and was used at one point as a political football in a wider tussle for power within the internet."

Wrong solution to the right problem

[KlaymenDK]

Tripmaster, I often agree with you, but not this time. I would, but for this one thing:

Creating a 'red light district' would be a fine idea IF that could limit the 'red light' business to that district. But of course it doesn't -- Joe Boobmaster will have one more domain to register, but will keep right on doing business in the existing TLDs -- so this can't be used to protect minors from exposure (one might even argue an extra (obvious) domain would INCREASE exposure).

If you can come up with a way to effectively force 'red light business' to stay within their designated TLD, I'd be all for it. Really.

Conservatives vs. liberals?

[jopet]

In many discussions it seems that this is getting turned into a "conservatives vs. liberals" discussion or similar. I do not really see why.

It seems there are both good sides and bad sides to having a XXX domain, but many of them do not have to do anything with the question of whether one hates or not pornographic web sites.

My main reason for not finding the .xxx tld domain a good idea after all is that I cannot see how one would ever be able to come up with rules about what should or should not belong there, in a world with such diverse opinions about what is sexual/inappropriate/pronographic/etc and in a world with such diverse laws about pornography.

So remind me: what *good* was this TLD supposed to be again?

Re:Well, done, fundies, well done.

[TripMaster Monkey]

I think you're misinterpreting me here...I myself am in no way in favor of the .xxx domain proposal, but I'm just pointing out that by opposing it for their own myopic reasons, the fundies shot themselves in the foot.

I'm actually very grateful the initiative is dead, because of the slippery-slope argument. Sure, we can all agree that the hardcore stuff can be legitimately classified as 'porn', but what about the nude photo you mentioned above? What about nudes in art? What about nudes in medical texts?

No, the .xxx domain is better off dead, but the reasons against it I cited are not the reasons it was killed. It was killed because the fundies were upset that its creation would legitimize smut, seemingly not aware that it was the killing of said initiative that really did the legitimization.

Re:Good

[dreamt]

My question is this. Why wouldn't a company who knowingly agrees that they are selling adult content NOT want to store their adult content in a .xxx domain. Have some sort of front end-page at their current site, then have that link to .xxx (which parental filtering software would trivially block)?

As it is, their sites have an enterance page which asks if you are 18 or older, so they acknowledge that they have adult content. This way, it would be easier to filter out the people that they want filtered out. I would imagine that their lives would be easier if they didn't have to worry as much about filtering, just for easier credit-card processing and less worry about people complaining about their children making purchases which they should not have made.

Hmmm

[Sv-Manowar]

It's a shame that some of the biggest influences who were lobbying against it from inside the adult industry were domain owners who did not want to lose their most valuable .com assets. That's the problem with business being done over the internet, it seems as if there is no real loyalty to others in the same business as you, more of a dog-eat-dog and selfish attitude, which one day may well contribute to the downfall of the current widespread availability of porn on the net which makes so many people money.

Maybe this is a good thing...

[Lazarian]

Although an .xxx domain would help with the blocking of adult content to minors or the easily offended, would the creation of it eventually lead to even slightly provocative content banned to a wasteland awash with garish porn? For example, if one had a website with an image of a woman with a bared breast or fiction with a passage describing an erotic scene, would a complaint from a fundie group lead to the owner of that domain having to remove the content to a .xxx domain or perhaps having the .com one shut down? And depending on where, some places may outright decide to block all .xxx domains completely (for the children, of course). Although having porn so prevalent on the net can sometimes be annoying, it's trivial to avoid it. And I think it'd be awful to have my or someone elses website to be forced to use a .xxx domain just because it contained some content which may be mature in nature, just because some prude can't be forced to read a disclaimer or use filtering software. I'll take my internet with its imperfections, instead of something sanitized and scrubbed into nothingness by people who dont mind letting their kids see violence and degredation but scream bloody murder over a glimpse of a breast.

You're actually a liberal.

[Lendrick]

No, each adult has to work on their own morality and forcing them won't make the right moral changes to fix society.

That says it all. The hallmark of liberalism isn't that we lack moral values, it's that we just don't feel right about shoving them down everyone's throat.

Re:Unacceptable?

[BodhiCat]

Yes, for a country that was founded, in part, by puritains, America is one of the most sexually obsessed countries in the world. Fundies (as you call them) are just as obsessed with sex as the pervs who surf the net looking for new thrills. The Republicans in America have discovered what the Catholic Church has known for centuries, that people are driven by their sexual desires and by repression and sublimation of their sexual desires. Freud knew this. Unfortuately sex has now become a large part of the political debate in this country and an incompetent power hungry president was re-elected by playing on peoples fears of homosexuals, which is really their fears of their own sexuality. The debate over the .xxx domain is just another example of the represseded desires of white bread conservatives being carried over into the political and now the technological arenas. It wouldn't have changed anything. A search for your favorite body part on Google will bring up plenty of sites, regardless of the what is after the "."

Re:I'm a fundie and a social conservative

[prichardson]

"Pornography is only art if you consider a picture of the virgin Mary painted in elephant dung to be art."

In Africa, there are many tribes whose livelihood depended on elephant dung. They would build their houses with it, and it moved into the realm of a holy substance. The concept behind the virgin Mary painted in elephant dung is the merging of two religious icons that clash horribly. It could be a commentary on missionary work. It's conceptual art, so the idea behind it is a very large part of the experience. Don't be so quick to judge.