Posted on 05/11/2006 6:07:25 AM PDT by ShadowAce
NEW YORK (AP) - 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.
The decision from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers reverses its preliminary approval last June to create a ".xxx" domain name for voluntary use by the adult entertainment industry.
ICANN had postponed making a final decision in August after the U.S. government stepped in just days before a scheduled meeting to underscore objections it had received, an intervention that had led some ICANN critics to question the organization's independence.
"The board was certainly very conscious of that (the controversy) ... but the heart of the decision today was not driven by a political consideration," ICANN Chief Executive Paul Twomey said in an interview that followed more than an hour of discussion in a closed teleconference meeting.
Twomey said the decision largely came down to whether the creation of "xxx" might put ICANN in a difficult position of having to enforce all of the world's laws governing pornography, including ones that might require porn sites to use the domain. Speech-related laws, he noted, often conflict with one another.
He said concerns raised by various governments around the world did prompt the company proposing the domain, ICM Registry Inc. of Jupiter, Fla., to make changes in its bid, but the changes did not address all of the questions concerning enforcement.
ICANN's rejection of ".xxx" in a 9-5 vote ends, for now, a 6-year-old effort by ICM to establish a domain for the porn industry. ICANN first tabled its bid in 2000 out of fear it would be getting into content control.
ICM resubmitted its bid in 2004, this time structuring it with a policy-setting organization to free ICANN of that task. But the language of the proposed contract was vague, Twomey said, and a majority of the board felt that one interpretation could kick the task back to ICANN.
When the board initially voted last year to move forward with ".xxx," the contract details had yet to be written.
ICM argued the domain would help the $12 billion online porn industry clean up its act. Those using the domain would have to abide by yet-to-be-written rules designed to bar such trickery as spamming and malicious scripts.
Anti-porn advocates, however, countered that sites would be free to keep their current ".com" address, in effect making porn more easily accessible by creating yet another channel to house it.
And they say such a domain name would legitimize adults sites, which 2 in 5 Internet users visit each month, according to tracking by comScore Media Metrix.
Many porn sites also objected, fearing that such a domain would pave the way for governments - the United States or repressive regimes abroad - or even private industry to filter speech that is protected here under the First Amendment.
Democratic Sens. Max Baucus of Montana and Mark Pryor of Arkansas have introduced legislation that would create a mandatory ".xxx."
The porn industry trade group Free Speech Coalition believes a domain name for kids-friendly sites would be more appropriate.
Twomey said the board took the porn sites' concerns as a sign ICM did not fully represent the industry, a criteria required in the current round of domains.
Meanwhile, ICANN approved the creation of a domain name designed to help people manage their contact information online.
As envisioned, Internet users could buy a ".tel" name and set up a Web site with their latest digits - home, cell and work phone numbers, home and work e-mail addresses, instant messaging handles and perhaps even a MySpace profile.
The ".tel" domain could appear in use as early as this year.
I smell a red herring... "conservative" groups? I doubt that. Conservatives should welcome such a clear and easy way to distinguish (and therefore filter) porn sites. I'm guessing that it is the latter site owners that are really the operators here.
.tel is useless, .xxx would have been great for people with kids..
That's a lot of people with too much time on their hands.
That ain't all... sorry I couldn't resist a cheap joke.
I would have been surprised if someone hadn't. ;)
That's my thinking too...
You may be right. However, I expect there actually were some "conservative" groups who simplistically thought that such a domain shouldn't be "condoned" on principle. How many people still think marijuanna should continue to be illegal despite the huge numbers who have smoked it, currently smoke it and will continue to smoke it. The same argument...we have enough problems already, we'll just make things worse, etc, etc.
This has been hashed out before on FR. .xxx would not help at all. There's nothing that would have required porn sites to give up their .com addresses. So you'd have playboy.com and playboy.xxx.
It would be easy to filter out playboy.xxx, but playboy.com is still there. So nothing is accomplished, except giving another path to get to that web site.
And there is really no way to force the porn sites to give up their .com address - who would enforce it? The US government? What about sites outside of the US?
Well... and in thinking about it some more, I'm not sure why porn site operators would resist it either. It gives them cover, inasmuch as they can sluff off charges that they are too easy for kids to find.
I don't atually believe porn site operators are interested in attracting kids. They're after people with money, and that's pretty much just adults anyway. They ought to welcome such a thing.
It's not about forcing them to give up .com addresses. It's about creating something that they would prefer to use because it gives them cover.
No it doesn't guarantee anything, but it isn't pointless, either.
You have to remember - the porn industry has introduced many of the features on the Internet (encryption, online billing, etc) that you take for granted now.
Agreed. But then I don't understand SPAM either. It is so annoying, do people actually fall for that stuff? Any company that tricks me somehow into going to their site, I'm sure as heck not going to do business with. But, hey, that's just me.
And even if you FORCED them to move to .XXX, it STILL wouldn't work.
I wouldn't bet that a teenager can't figure out how domains map to IP numbers.
Within two days, somebody's blog would have a list:
123.123.123.101 = Playboy.xxx
123.123.123.102 = NakedJanitor.xxx
123.123.123.103 = HillarysPeepShow.xxx
etc...
For some it does seem to be about forcing them to give up their .com addresses, and then shutting them down.
You are correct Ramius. I would be very easy to set a filter for ".xxx" sites. It should be mandatory that porn sites use such an addressing scheme. Right now porn can be anywhere.
I remember a few years back when I was searching for some industrial totes made by RubberMaid. Doing a search for "RubberMaid" yielded some rather unique (to be kind) sites.
There probably are a few who subscribe to that asinine way of thinking. They remind me of the story about why nineteenth-century Britain had a law against male homosexuality but no law against lesbianism -- Queen Victoria struck out any references to the latter from the bill because the whole concept offended her so.
I wonder what she'd think of some of the porn sites these days. :-)
The attraction of spam, at least for the "marketer", is that's its practically free.
Even if 1/100% of the recipients responds/reacts/clicks, it has paid for itself.
The fact that it annoys the other 99 99/100% of the population (and actually costs the recipients or their ISP money to deal with) is irrelevant to the spammers.
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