Two Porn Companies Take ICANN and .xxx Registrar To Court

SharkLaser writes "Two of the largest porn companies on the internet, Manwin and Digital Playground, yesterday sued both ICANN and ICM Registry, which runs the .xxx TLD, over extorting defensive registrations with ICANN's blessing. 'The complaint focuses on ICM's recently concluded "sunrise" period, during which porn companies, for about $200, could apply to own a .xxx address matching their trademark or .com domain.' Schools also felt the same way, and had to reserve domains under their name so that no porn content could be put up on them. The .xxx TLD has also previously been subject to criticism by both religious groups and adult industry, but for different reasons. Religious groups believe the .xxx TLD legitimizes pornography, while the adult industry believes it could lead to censorship."

Re:ICANN's Authority

[tomhudson]

I know that XXX domains are $200 a year - that wasn't the question I was replying to. The OP asked why there was any justification to charge ANY fee to register a domain name in ANY .TLD (since it used to be free, until Network Solutions got a monopoly and then started gouging at $100 per name, and finally it was opened up to competition and the price dropped to $50, then $35, then $25, then $20, then $12.50, and now under $10).

Re:why can everyone be happy.

[bmo]

Who defines what is porn?

This.

We have Hasidic Jews in NYC that are upset at bicyclists going through their neighborhood on a Saturday wearing shorts and teeshirts. Especially if they are women.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/08/hipsters-hasidic-jews-fig_n_384579.html [huffingtonpost.com]

And that's just the US. I just read a story about how women in Saudi Arabia, that if they have "sexy eyes" while otherwise clothed head-to-toe must also cover up their eyes, or face the beatings by the Religious Police.

http://jezebel.com/5860660/helpful-saudi-arabian-committee-suggests-women-cover-their-sexy-eyes [jezebel.com]

People don't tell control freaks and prudes to fuck-off nearly as much as they need to.

--
BMO

Re:why can everyone be happy.

[Sir_Sri]

Let me guess, you are an american?

Those of us outside the US pay a lot more attention to TLD's than the US does. Because the difference between .com, and .ca or .uk can be substantial.

Lets say you're making a display, and you want to call yourself 'vivid' because well, you make displays that are vivid. (Or maybe you're HTC making a phone you want to brand that way, same deal) and someone else wants to equally correctly, but in a completely different context brand themselves 'vivid'.

Maybe you are Apple Records, and this pair of jackass hacker dudes want to be Apple computer, and someone else who wants to do porn was given the unfortunate name of Apple.

TLD's are great for context, and they're great for blocking stuff at work that you don't want employees involved with. Around here makes a lot of sense to block .gov, because well, it's the wrong .gov, but search engines still spit out forms and stuff, and that doesn't do us a lot of favours. It's easier to keep it away from your employees than let them be stupid and waste hours trying to sort out paperwork for the wrong government. (This is somewhat more problematic between various commonwealth governments, which for example share a lot of department names, they're all "Her Majesties Government" on official paper work and so on, it's not so much of an issue with the US because for example, no one else spells defence defense, but I've had issues with NAFTA stuff like that were someone wasn't smart enough to do paperwork for the correct country and we had to do it over). It also gives you more variants on useful words so that you don't have just one monopolizing brand on a name, even when none of Apple Records, Apple Corp, or Apple Inc (Apple Computer) actually sell Apples, nor are they related to any person who has been unfortunately named Apple. Which I guess is an argument for more TLD's that are context sensitive. .com and .org at one point were supposed to mean different things potentially.

Re:just another form of censorship

[bmo]

>Seriously, Give me a tool to filter out unwanted site reliable.

Just being lazy and checking Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content-control_software [wikipedia.org]

Windows applications
Cyclope-Series (proprietary)
Green Dam Youth Escort (Mainland Chinese Government mandated software)
K9 Web Protection (proprietary, free for home use)
Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway (proprietary)
NetNanny (proprietary)
SurfWatch (proprietary)
SafeSquid (proprietary, free for up to 3 users)
Windows Live Family Safety (proprietary, free)
Secure Web SmartFilter EDU, formerly known as Bess
FB Limiter (free, paid upgrade available)
[edit]
Mac applications
K9 Web Protection (proprietary, free for home use)
SurfWatch (proprietary, free for home use)
[edit]
Hardware solutions
Lightspeed Systems (hosted or hardware, for mobile or desktop)
[edit]
Web browser
[edit]
Internet Explorer
Content Advisor (After IE 6)
[edit]
Other
CleanFeed (ISP based)
ClearOS (unix/linux and ISP based)
DansGuardian (unix/linux and ISP based)
DynDNS (DNS based, with a free plan)
Mobicip (cloud-based)
OnlineFamily.Norton (cloud-based)
OpenDNS (DNS/ISP based, free for Families and Non-commercial users)
SafeSquid (unix/linux and ISP based)
Scieno Sitter (system unknown: used exclusively by Church of Scientology members under an NDA)
SmartWeb (Parental Control for Apple iPhone and iPod Touch platforms)
Websense (system unknown: notable for use by China, Yemen, and US Governments)

Re:It IS extortion

[mysidia]

Domains really couldn't truly be free forever. When the first troll arrived on the internet, dispute resolution became necessary,

Nonsense... dispute resolution wasn't necessary, for 25 years during which the NIC was in operation, and the internet had broad commercial use for a long time with plenty of trolls, "dispute resolution" and ICANN and came long after the Network Solutions InterNic started charging outlandish prices for domains; the inception of ICANN was in 1998...

There was a very simple dispute resolution process.... file a lawsuit and let the courts sort it out, while preserving the rights of the parties involved. A much fairer, more proper process than what we have today.

There's a much simpler reason domains can't be free though -- the US government stopped funding the NIC, due to its commercial use - it was deemed the funding has to come from the private sector.

It's not free to run a domain registry, the money has to come from somewhere.

Ideally a non-profit organization would have formed to operate the registry for the benefit of the community; and the community of ISPs / DNS users would support that registry by utilizing it.

Guess what... that part didn't happen. Turns out there is so much money to be made running a domain registry, for-profit entities slipped in there first through their existing contracts, lots of money to be made by treating domain names as tangible items that "expire" or are "rented" at high price instead of community resources allocated to the registrant, with costs to be recovered from the community of users.

Instead of a "non-profit" central domain registry operated in a manner that bests benefits the entire community and all registrants.

We have a multitude of for-profit registries... that's the substitute answer. Instead of providing the community as a whole a single central DNS service that bests serves the community, a strange idea one out that if we have enough for-profit organizations competing, and all selling the same registry-operator service with their own markup that is remarkably similar across all registrars (with special discounts to certain orgs that register hundreds of thousands of superfluous domains), that somehow makes it "OK".