Posted by Calixte Pictet | 0 comments
ICANN, Porn, and Chinese Literature
What do China and porn have in common?
It’s been making the news recently, or at least the tech news. ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, voted to allow the .xxx top-level domain (TLD). As you may have guessed, .xxx is to be the address of “adult oriented” (aka pornographic) websites. That is good news for some, bad news for others.
Registrations cost $60 per year (many times more than .com domains do), and of that $10 will go to an NGO that will support “responsible business practices” for the porn industry. Don’t look at me, I have no idea what this means either.
The New York times reports that 100,000+ domains have already been sold. Success? Barely. Most of these domains are primarily defensive, which means that these reservations merely represent leading Internet porn brands registering the domains with the same name as their .com counterpart so as not to create confusion.
Of course, the plight for a porn-oriented TLD is not completely new. ICANN had already rejected .xxx in 2006 and 2007. Now it’s turning around, supposedly because the Bush administration had pressured their decision (a common interpretation at the time).
The opposition’s views are obvious. Pornographic material is bad (immoral, evil, unproductive or whatever else you want to call it) and should simply be banned from the internet. The “pro-.xxx” camp sees this new TLD as a way to warn users (or alternatively web browsers or parental control software) that they are entering a porn website. My opinion could not be clearer.
Christopher Dawson from ZDNet compares this new “Internet Red-Light District” to Amsterdams equivalent. He notes that the news are irrelevant; nothing will change.
Guess what? It’s just a name. [...]
So here’s what this development boils down to for schools, parents, and anyone else who wants to regulate how much pornography kids see online: nothing.
So that’s the news. Nothing.
The X-rated TLD wasn’t the only thing that ICANN gave it’s green light to this month.
[...] The Board of Directors approved a set of Chinese language internationalized domain names. Millions of Chinese language users will soon be able to access the Internet entirely in Chinese script.
One fifth of the world speaks Chinese and today’s decision increases the potential online accessibility for roughly a billion people.
That’s news. The Internet finally became multi-lingual, accepting that other cultures can use other writing systems to communicate.
The Internet belongs to anyone, be it the Westboro Baptist Church (godhatesfags.com), the porn industry (sorry, no link here) or the the 20% of our planet’s population that speaks Chinese (“Chinese writing” on Wikipedia).
Contact the author via email
Is the .xxx TLD a “good thing”?Market Research
