Group calls for rally outside ICANN meeting.
Adult industry lobbying group Free Speech Coalition is calling for a rally outside the ICANN meeting at the Westin in San Francisco next week.
Citing “a time when rallies are changing the world around us”, evoking images I suppose of unions in Wisconsin and (say it ain’t so) uprisings in Northern Africa, Free Speech Coalition is calling for “all industry professionals to rally in San Francisco against .XXX!!”
The group says a shortened public comment period before next week’s board vote is specifically designed to limit Free Speech Coalition’s ability to speak out against the approval of .xxx. So it wants to rally outside the Union Square Westin from 12:30-2 pm. It also suggests that .xxx registry ICM Registry has “bought” ICANN favor and its Chairman of the Board. (That’s probably not a good thing to suggest if you want to get the Chair on your side.)
If .xxx gets the green light anyway, Free Speech Coalition is calling for a boycott of .xxx. That would be difficult; surely competitors would snap up each others domain names.
In case there’s any doubt what the group thinks about .xxx, it concludes its release with:
“we think .XXX is…BULLSHIT!”
jp says
I feel like this would be a fun rally to attend 🙂
Gotta love America. You’d expect there to be a rally about parents wanting to keep porn from their children, but instead it’s the porn industry rallying. Awesome.
alan kiernan says
Why does the “Free Speech Coalition” oppose “speech” in the form of opposition to the proposed .XXX extension? If anything, it will
create competition for the porn dollar.
Adam says
I truly can’t wait to see this !
John B says
…the ‘porn again’ crowd.
Adriaan says
The proposed .xxx tld is nothing but a scam. It does nothing to protect children. First, the ICM Registry is hoping to make a lot of money from defensive registrations, secondly they are already planning to lobby to make the use of a .xxx domain mandatory for sites with adult content (Lawley admitted to this on the xbiz board).
Mandatory use of a .xxx domain for adult content would open up a pandora’s box of censorship.
And let’s not forget about all the promises the ICM has broken and all the times they’ve simply lied to the FSC, to Xbiz, to ICANN.
Carlos Martins says
Of course this has nothing to do with free speech but with the lobyist pressures of some corporations linked to the big registrars. Adult domains also has nothing to do with God because sex was also created by the same divine entity.
What domainers like me (with only a few of adult domains), have to do is leaving the registrars that sell .xxx domains and transfer their portfolios to one or two of the others. It´s not censorship as they are doing with this decision in favor of big ones.
Raj Alla says
This .xxx domains are good to long term for my kids than putting content all over the internet as we are right now.
It is amazing how governments are being quite on this ….we need some thing like this to protect kids.
Batfan says
I guess I’m a little confused. Why exactly is the adult industry against this? It’s not like the government is forcing their sites onto this TLD.
Andrew Allemann says
@ Batfan – they’re afraid that some governments will try to force this.
Carlos Martins says
In western most of the fathers dismiss their obligations to hide the adults sites. According Raj Alla now when kids see the xxx extension they know exactly where adult sites are, don´t need to be clever and learn any other language (like french or german) as they simply know what XXX means. This is a rights violation according democratic values as the problem with kids viewing adult or porn sites is a fathers duty to explain them what they need to see and don´t.
What about fathers that bring their childrens to the middle of fanatic hooligans in soccer games? Sex and nudity (don´t mean violent perversions), are human and natural and this was created by the same God that some like to quote.
luis says
.xxx domain should have been approved long time ago,it will stop our kids coming across contents that they don’t need to see. this is one step in the right direction.
Adriaan says
The .xxx tld will do nothing to protect children. To filter content based on the .xxx tld, all adult content would have to be hosted on a site using a .xxx domain. For this to happen all adult content would have to be removed from sites using a .com or .net or .info etc domain. This would create the need for ICANN, Verisign etc to actively police the non.xxx tlds. This would undoubtedly raise the cost of a .com, .net etc domain.
This would also result in a segmentation of the internet based on content. Who gets to decide what content should be located under what tld? Isn’t it the responsibility of the parents to decide what their children get to see and what not?