One other thing.
This is exactly the point. A country can relegate certain addresses to .xxx. The countries already have control of what happens with their own domains.
No, you got it. That’s all there is. As I said, sound and fury.
I honestly don’t know exactly what to make of all this. I tend to agree with the sentiment that it is working well don’t screw it up.
A couple things in the Guardian article that troubled me a bit.
"But will this move mean, as the US ambassador David Gross argued, that “even on technical details, the industry will have to follow government-set policies, UN-set policies”?
No, according to Nitin Desai, the UN’s special adviser on internet governance. “There is clearly an acceptance here that governments are not concerned with the technical and operational management of the internet. Standards are set by the users.”
This part came after this -
“A number of countries represented in Geneva, including Brazil, China, Cuba, Iran and several African states, insisted the US give up control, but it refused.”
.xxx , if implemented, would as a gTLD necessarily be an international affair. .xxx.us would not concern the non-US world, but that’s not what is being proposed.
Says ITU is operating within the United Nations System right there on the link you provided, and a trip to the United Nations Systems shows the UN logo and everything. I’m not sure exactly what ITU’s relationship to the UN is, but I guess the real issue is where does their money come from?
Thanks for the link. Ah, FFS. Who needs to actually do work, anyway? The “issues” identified by the WGIG (pdf report found here), ordered (by WGIG) by importance:
[ol]
[li]Administration of the root zone files and system[/li][li]Interconnection costs[/li][li]Internet stability, security and cybercrime[/li][li]Spam[/li][li]Meaningful participation in global policy development[/li][li]Capacity-building[/li][li]Allocation of domain names[/li][li]IP addressing[/li][li]Intellectual property rights (IPR)[/li][li]Freedom of expression[/li][li]Data protection and privacy rights[/li][li]Consumer rights[/li][li]Multilingualism[/li][/ol]
As far as I can tell, numbers 1, 5, 7, 8, and 13 come down to “yes, it works, but we’re indignant that we can’t control it ourselves”.
Numbers 2, 6, are “we don’t have the money to do it ourselves”.
Numbers 3, 4, 9, 10, 11, and 12 are “we’re not sure what the problem is (if there really is one at all), but we’re indignant that we can’t control it ourselves”.
The only ones I think have merit (and this is purely personal opinion that could be changed) are at the bottom of the list – numbers 11 and 13. Essentially, I think Dr. Geist has at least the first part of his closing sentence correct:
Right. But, as I read it, that’s not really the issue. Who cares if there’s another TLD, so long as it doesn’t pre-empt another one? What country is going to have a .xxx extension? The great people’s republic of Xxxanistan?
The issue (from the link provided earlier) is “One worry is that some nations may force sites dealing with sensitive topics like homosexuality or birth control into the .XXX zone, where they can be easily blocked.” Yeah, and? As I said, the countries themselves have control.
The ITU, formerly the CCITT, has a long history of being a politicized disaster area. It does not represent the interests of users, researchers, or private/commercial networks. The only people with power are representatives of governments. Even AT&T, back when it was “Ma Bell”, was only an observer. Many of its standards were designed to further the political and economic agendas of government-owned telecommunications monopolies. Their standards have also often been baroque, expensive, vague, and poorly written. Ask an engineer about X.25, X.400 and other examples of their work.
The IETF was largely a reaction to the incompetence and uselessness of the ITU.
Too bad Neal Boortz stopped reading after §29. 'Cause §30 says:
I don’t think you need to fear the blue helmets kicking in your door just yet, Oslo.
You have a point, mks57. At least, I remember X.400 as a rather bulky protocol. Would you mind mention briefly what was wrong with X.25? Feel free to be technical – it’s not my core field, but close enough that I ought to understand the lingo. Do you see the same problems in ITU now that the government-owned monopolies mostly are history?
Your comments illustrate an important point: Choices about technology are seldom only about tech, it is a political, ideological, and economical area. I do agree that a forum that’s dominated by only one kind of actors is ill suited for staking out the course for all of us. Ideally, these decisions should be influenced by governments, operators, vendors, and (perhaps most of all) users. It could well be that ITU isn’t the best forum for this. However, a forum that’s dominated by different actors from one nation is at least as biased as one that’s dominated by one kind of actors, but from all nations.
Digital Stimulus, you are right in that different nations are free to use the .XXX domain how they like. But the point you are missing is that the creation of the .XXX domain is in itself a political and ideological choice. The domain is a tool that’s useful for censoring. Period. (Admittedly, it’s also useful in helping people to find porn on the Internet, but I’ve never heard anyone complaing that porn’s too hard to find…) Now, you might argue that “protecting our kids from … awful, awful filth” is a noble and worthwhile goal, and that .XXX is therefore a good thing. My point is that whether we should incorporate tools for censoring in the fabric of Internet is an issue that concerns everybody who use the net, and therefore it’s not a good thing that such choices are made by one single nation on behalf of us all.
Wow. Can you cross-patch all that to the main deflector dish, running it through the tachyonic resonating buffer first, to provide a temporal quantum inverted flux cascade? 
My big question is this: if control of the internet were to be turned over to the U.N., is there any way they could control what they consider “politically unacceptable” websites in any given country? Like anti-U.N. web-sites?
Only as much as the .com or .biz TLDs are. This would fall into the “we’re not sure what the problem is (if there really is one at all), but we’re indignant that we can’t control it ourselves” category I mentioned earlier.
At this point, there’s nothing broke about it and it doesn’t need fixing. When there are signs that some egregious action might be taken, then I’ll be as up in arms about it as anyone else.
No more than the US can control politically unacceptable or anti-US sites in other countries today.
They could perhaps shut down the DNS for an entire top-level domain (meaning that, say, you wouldn’t be able to access an Iranian site by typing www.foo.ir, you’d have to know the numeric IP address), but shutting it down for a particular web site would be much more complicated and would have negative effects on other sites in that TLD. In any case, if that were to happen, the rest of the world would probably be shaken up for a while, but soon enough someone would set up their own alternative root servers and everyone would switch.
In fact, I’d say the types of attacks that are easy to implement (like shutting down the DNS for an entire country) are more likely to be launched by an individual nation, not the UN.
Not really. First because .com isn’t some closet that businesses are swept into–anyone can get a .com domain whether they’re an individual, a business, or any other organization, and a business can get a domain in .net, .org, .cx, .tv, or most other domains–but mainly because no one is going to block all .com addresses; that would be insane. The whole purpose of .xxx, on the other hand, is to force all adult sites into one easily-blocked domain.
No, it’s voluntary. A country/ISP/individual can do what they like with addresses in the domain, but no one is being forced into it.
Unless you’re arguing that anyone should be able to get an address in any domain (including a .mil or .gov)? Certain domains have criteria for their use; that’s a good thing. There should probably be more of them, not less. But even if not a single one more is established, or ICANN goes on a TLD assigning rampage – so what? As I’ve said, I think it’s just a “we don’t control it but we want to” mindset.
You’re still missing the point, Digital Stimulus. The purpose of a knife is to cut things. Noone’s forcing anyone to use knives to cutting things. I’ve got a knife in some closet that’s still in its orignal package and has never been used for cutting anything. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a tool made for cutting things. It’s not made for anything else, and it’s not useful for anything else.
The .XXX domain is a tool for censoring. Like a knife, I can choose not to use it. If I’m lucky (and I am) I live in a country where the government is unlikely to use it, too. But that doesn’t alter the fact that the only purpose of .XXX is to make censoring easier. Some nations (and ISPs, and parents, and whatever) will use it, some won’t. You may agree or disagree with the censoring goal, of course. What I’m trying to make you see is that deciding to create the .XXX domain is not an ideologically neutral choice.
I agree, that’s a good thing. But that’s not what we are discussing here. We’re looking at the opposite problem. Not everybody can get at .mil domain. But if you make a website about the military, there’s zero chance of you being forced to use a .mil domain.
Say the military was treated like porn on internet. There was a two click rule on SDMB about linking to websites with explicit military content. You might add a “not safe for work” warning if you linked to a site which had pop-ups of people in green. Politicians were talking about protecting our children from the “awful, awful filth of military websites”. In that kind of climate, wouldn’t you be the tiniest bit leery of someone who advocated a new .war domain? You wouldn’t worry that this new domain would be a godsend for those who wanted to censor military content? And if you could see no purpose to the .war domain apart from making censoring easier, would you still say that people who wanted a say in whether the .war domain was created or not were only motivated by a “we don’t control it but we want to” mindset?
If you’re going to say this, you might as well say that the existence of any TLD has the sole purpose of making censorship easier.
The TLDs were, and still are, designed to organize the hierarchy of the DNS namespace such that it can be more effectively managed by dividing up the burden of second-level domain name to nameserver mappings between various TLD nameservers throughout the world. Certain nameservers exist to provide those mappings for each of the TLDs, and the addition of more TLDs means that you can increase the number of servers over which the database is distributed easily and in logical manner.
Also, if you weren’t aware, namespace is running short. Just about every English language dictionary word has a domain attached to it at this point in time. The creation of more TLDs opens up more new namespace and furthers the growth of the Internet by allowing millions of new possibilities for domains to be created.
Clearly there are other purposes to opening a new TLD, even one that you don’t like the name of, than censorship and repression. You may not have considered them, but there they are.
No, really. I’m not.
No, really. It isn’t. From the earlier link:
In other words, another purpose is to provide a certain community the ability to exert their own standards. As I said, this is a good thing and there should probably be more of it.
If by “ideologically neutral”, you mean “there is some characteristic content that distinguishes these web pages from other web pages”, I’ll agree. I’d be happy if some group successfully petitioned for a .xtian (or .muslim, .taoist, .wiccan, etc.) TLD. (Although I guarantee that .xxx is more in demand.) But I think It’s a convenience, facilitating naming options.
Can you come up with one other (preferably more) example where this might actually be a problem that needs to be addressed?
If you do not understand that
A) A xxx domain would be a powerful weapon for censorship
B) Political forces in all countries would seize on that weapon as soon as they could
you are not paying attention.
Correction:
A) A xxx domain could be a powerful weapon for censorship if it were not voluntary.
You forgot to reverse the polarity … 