Comment period for .xxx is getting out of control
At first it was silly. Then it got annoying. Now it’s ridiculous.
The comment period for what ICANN should do about an independent review board’s finding in favor of ICM Registry to operate .xxx has become a mockery. You can mostly thank conservative organizations for creating robo forms for their constituents to send mindless comments.
If you see a comment like this:
I support Option #3 of the March 26, 2010 process options submitted by ICANN for public comment.
ICANN should vote to adopt the dissenting opinion of the Panel’s Declaration on the basis that the Board thinks that the Panel’s majority opinion was wrong and that the Board’s conduct was consistent with ICANN’s Bylaws and Articles of Incorporation.
then you can bet it came from here. Especially if it has a title like this:
The good news for ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom as his staff filters through all these comments? American Family Association’s form for submitting a comment includes a handy way to to show support for Mr. Beckstrom:
All this does is take us exactly back to the position from August 2005- March 2007, same players, same messages, nothing new added.
And thats EXACTLY why we invoked the IRP in the first place, as Milton Mueller sums it up. Groundhog Day.
This is now all about ICANN’s accountability. Nothing more, nothing less
Actually, wouldn’t moving all porn and adult themed sites over to a dot XXX make the Internet cleaner and safer for kids?
I could see households blocking .XXX allowing kids to surf freely and not have to worry about them landing on an inappropriate site.
Lobbying to get adult sites off the net will probably be a losing battle…adult sites will always be online… but having an adult only extention makes sense.
Aron
@ Aron – that’s why some adult sites are opposed to it. But I doubt that would happen.
Andrew, most of us are one piece of legislation away from being jobless 😉
True, I’m sure the adult industry doesn’t want to fight bills to do just what you’re saying, which is why they’re opposed to it.
But regardless of whether ICANN grants ICM .xxx, the same thing is upcoming with .sex et al
If all they have to do is pray for it to happen, then why do they need to send in the letters. God should answer their prayers, and they should save Beckstroms staff from filtering in the first place. The first line of this post sums it all up perfectly. “At first it was silly. Then it got annoying. Now it’s ridiculous.”
Anyone else find it amusing that ICANN’s forum software converts the hostname part of all email addresses in comments to x’s?
@ Jeremy – hadn’t thought about that until you pointed it out. That is amusing.
@Aron
Actually passage of dotXXX would make it less “safer” for kids. All of the parents who think their children will go blind from viewing naked women will probably believe their children won’t see any porn if they simply filter out dotXXX. I know, it sounds ridiculous, but a lot of the people in these “family values” groups do not inhabit the top of the mental food chain (as evidenced by their email campaign). Most porn is on dotCom and it will stay that way for a long time. Only an idiot porn publisher would start using dotXXX and set himself up to be filtered.
As an adult webmaster (been in the industry for over 9 years), I can only see disadvantages.
First of all the proposed .xxx tld will do NOTHING to keep children safe. The only effective way to control what your children get to see on the web is white-listing, not black-listing. So creating a .xxx tld in the hopes you can block it to protect your children doesn’t make sense.
There are 1000s established adult sites out there using .com domains. As long as those exist, it will be impossible to block porn by blocking sites in the .xxx tld.
And no one in the adult industry has any intention to abandon their established sites. Why would we destroy our own investments?
If you really want to protect children, you might want to consider setting up a .kids tld, with nothing but sites aimed at children. That way, parents can block everything except the .kids sites.
Second, The adult industry never asked for the .xxx tld. In fact, adult webmaster have been and still are fighting AGAINST it. The .xxx tld was proposed by the ICM, a private organization with no ties to the adult industry and with only one goal: making money off of adult webmasters.
@ Chris – you’re making many of the same arguments that’s a lot of people are making against new TLDs in general. Regardless of what happens with the .xxx application now, it’s only a matter of time before .xxx and .sex make it to the web.
“Only an idiot porn publisher would start using dotXXX and set himself up to be filtered.”
I am not a business person, but it would seem to me that paying for bandwidth to distribute adult content to people – i.e. kids – who don’t have credit cards in the first place is a poor ROI strategy.
There are those that believe the various requirements in .xxx would increase consumer confidence among those that are going to pay for the content. Right or wrong, I don’t see a problem with allowing people to test that theory.
The proposition is whether you want to distribute content to 1 million people, out of which 100 are going to pay; or do you want to distribute content to 100,000 people, out of which 500 are going to pay.
Again, I don’t have a crystal ball, but that’s the theory.
One tangential observation that comes to mind is that it’s pretty common for various promoters of religion to try to stop publication of porn, but I can’t recall a single instance of porn publishers trying to shut down a religion.
Some beneficiaries of the First Amendment have a disturbing tendency to want to be the only beneficiaries of it.
The James Dobson / Focus on the Family / Family Research Council crowd has a point.
For example. would it have been easier for George Alan Rekers to find his male companion on rentboy.COM or rentboy.XXX?
The truth is this is nothing but a money grap by Stuart Lawley and ICM Registry. Nobody wants it and nobody sane thinks it will do anything to protect children from adult content. It wont.
If ICNRegistry REALLY want to protect children they would be pushing the .kids domain, but there’s not much money in that since kids don’t pay for content.
The poster who commented there was no ROI in marketing adult to people with no credit cards is dead on the money, as an industry we would like nothing better than to to get the free adult content off the net but we havent yet reached that level of technical sophistication, which we will.
When the adult industry, George Bush, and the religious right ALL agree on something…it’s probably a bad idea.
The one thing ICMRegistry will not address is the fact that we, as an industry do NOT want this and according to ICANNs own rules, that is the main requirement for a new tld.
Yes they slipped it by at first, they even tried bribing industry people to support it and they have failed.
IF ICANN does the right thing this will be put to bed once and for all as an epic FAIL on the part of ICMRegistry
“The one thing ICMRegistry will not address is the fact that we, as an industry do NOT want this”
Then it will fail.
But here is the point I don’t understand, and have never seen addressed:
Why oppose the creation of a TLD which “nobody” wants and thus “nobody” will use? Isn’t that sort of like lobbying for legislation requiring the sun to come up?
It’s like getting upset that someone wants to sell dirt-flavored soft drinks. I doubt I’d get very worked up over it.
John,
The problem is it will create a situation where webmasters like myself will feel compelled to buy the domains to protect our trademarks. Even if we don’t use them.
ICMRegistry will also begin lobbying government to force all sites onto this domain, creating even more expense and believe me there is no shortage of idiot US politicians that think they have the authority to legislate the internet worldwide.
This is nothing but a field day for attorneys, nobody wants this except Lawley and the people he is bribing (like he has tried to bribe people in adult) for support.
How and who will decide what is considered adult anyway.
Never going to happen.
I don’t think the government regulation idea is realistic. Efforts like that are doomed to run aground on definitional issues.
You might want to look at some of the policies for the tld. Registrant identity has to be verified, so it’s not going to be a haven for fake names hiding behind privacy services. The URS idea of non-resolving names and rapid takedown came out of ICM proposals. The cost/risk ratio for cybersquatting is relatively higher than in the gTLD’s.
The non-adult brand owners drove a lot of the policy thinking and weren’t going to put up with a “ransom” play in this TLD, and their broader concerns were inclusive of adult brands. Nobody was going to tolerate or pay for something like Disney.xxx. It was about the time that the intellectual property interests were satisfied that the government interests started agitating on this thing.