rant whine 'splain espouse: Anti-porn segment gets it backwards

Monday, September 19, 2005

Anti-porn segment gets it backwards

Edit 2: No you can't...
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stld-rfp-xxx@icann.org
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Edit 1: ~~You can send comments to the email address listed here~~.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has decided to postpone a decision on the creation of a long-awaited .xxx generic top level domain (gTLD), reportedly dues to concerns raised by both the Bush administration and the porn industry.

According to a News.com article, a Commerce Department representative said they have "received nearly 6,000 letters and e-mails from individuals expressing concern about the impact of pornography on families and children."

Apparently the brilliant neocons swung into action to ? imagine this ? oppose pornography on the Internet. What a surprise.

So they organized a campaign and got the talk show hosts blithering and got Hank and Phyllis and Jimmy-Bob to fire off letters to the White House saying "We dont like no nekkid peoples on the interweb! Save are chillen from the Evil Satan-Loving Porn Perveyors of California!"

Um, did anyone actually think about the point of having a separate domain for porn?

No, they didn't. Because these people aren't opposed to a new gTLD for porn. They're opposed to porn. Period.

I've supported the idea of a .xxx domain for something like seven years (yes, ICANN can take a loooong time on a lot of these decisions). The whole benefit of a .xxx domain is that you can put all the porn in one place and then it would be very easy for parents to filter the .xxx domain out on their computers.

The problem is, the current proposal for creating .xxx doesn't actually require all the porn sites to switch their sites to .xxx. It's entirely optional. Dumb.

And ICANN apparently doesn't even have a plan that would transition porn sites to .xxx over time. You could make it optional for two years, and required after two, and then it wouldn't be a burden for porn sites to transition (after all, it can be technically done in a couple days; it's more the burden of having to change your site's branding and advertising). After two years, you could levy fines for sites that don't comply, increasing the fine each month for a year, and then shut them down if they don't comply by the time the third year ends.

What needs to happen here is this:

1) ICANN needs to grow some...spine...and stand up to the porn industry. They need to adopt my brilliant plan, which I will gladly let them do at no charge ; )

1a) The lawyers who will come running to sue ICANN for relegating the porn industry to some sort of "ghetto on the Internet" need to drop dead.

2) ICANN then needs to grow some more spine and stand up to the noisy conservatives and politely tell them to shut the fuck up you don't know what you're talking about let us handle it you twits.

2a) The anti-porn conservatives need to get a life and accept that they're never, ever, I repeat, ever, going to get rid of porn.

As an aside, I should note that I'm a member of the ICANN's At-Large Chapter, which ostensibly allows anyone in the world to participate in these sorts of decisions, but in reality has become over the years more of a smokescreen that acts merely to give the impression that individuals who aren't aligned with any powerful special interest group or corporation still have a say in the decisions that affect the namespace. So people like me have to resort to blogging about these issues to hopefully rattle a cage or two, since no one at ALAC takes any notice or even solicits our opinions anymore.