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Dot-XXX Decision Exposes Cracks in Net Governance System

My weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, BBC version, homepage version) looks at the recent ICANN decision to reject the creation of a new dot-xxx domain name extension. The year-long debate over whether to approve the adult-oriented domain may have long-term implications for Internet governance since it sparked enormous controversy and provided ample evidence of U.S. government intervention into ICANN matters.

With millions of dollars at stake, the Internet community has relied on ICANN to establish a transparent system for creating new domain name extensions.  The resulting process has left many observers unhappy.  They argue that it is too expensive (application costs alone are now estimated at US$250,000), too cumbersome (creation of the domain name extension may require months of negotiation after preliminary approval is granted), and too subjective (rather than establishing objective criteria, the decisions are fraught with subjective policy choices). 

The prospect of a dot-xxx domain name extension created an immediate firestorm in the United States. 
According to U.S. government documents released last week under a Freedom to Information Act request, U.S. officials quickly recognized the sensitivity associated with the new extension and considered whether it could influence the process.  Those concerns grew as several groups actively opposed the new domain extension with letter writing campaigns that generated thousands of critical letters and emails.

Faced with a brewing domestic political issue, the U.S. government urged ICANN to delay final approval to allow for an extensive global consultation.  In the months that followed, several other countries voiced opposition to the new domain extension.  The ICANN board raised several concerns with the dot-xxx backers, who repeatedly adjusted their proposal in response.

Despite the changes, a divided ICANN board ultimately voted nine to five against the establishment of the dot-xxx domain.  In caving to U.S. pressure, ICANN may have traded short-term gain for long-term pain.  In the short-term, ICANN has staved off immediate government pressure and has likely ensured continuing support from the U.S. government.  In fact, late last week the U.S. government announced that it planned to renew one of its ICANN agreements for an additional five years. 

Looking ahead, however, proponents of a multi-lateral Internet governance framework will cite this case as a classic illustration of why the ICANN approach must be altered to ensure transparency, independence, and to better reflect the needs of the global community.

16 Comments

  1. Suzanne Cook says:

    Wife and Mother of 3 Children
    I regret that you are upset with ICANN’s Board for withholding endorsement of the dot-XXX domain. You apparently think that approval for this should have been granted to “better reflect the needs of the global community”. If the global community needs a pornographic domain for its health and well-being, then it is in much worse shape than I thought!
    You seem to forget that the whole internet was a “made in the USA” product, financed by US taxpayers! So if there has been political pressure brought to bear on the ICANN Board, congratulations to us! Shame on you for supporting pornography, in which so many of the films’ stars are certainly unwilling, or under the influence of drugs, or worse, while making these flicks! What I can’t believe is that a majority of Canadians aren’t against pornography, too! But, hopefully, perhaps they are, and your opinion doesn’t represent them!

  2. Feel free to create a .xxx.ca domain.

    The US provided the vast majority of the funds and technology for the devlopment of the internet.

    Don’t like us having control? Get yer own!

  3. Strange Bedfellows…
    I find it somewhat entertaining that the main opponents of the .xxx TLD are opponents of pornographic material and purveyors and producers of the same. The latter were strongly opposed to the move on the grounds that it would, if effective, ghettoize pornographic material on the ‘Net.

    If pornographic sites were only allowed on .xxx, blocking such material would be far easier and more accurate. Establishing this sort of clear boundary, however, would be something of a challenge, and any attempt to do so probably would have run afoul of any free speech laws. In the end, I’m not sure it would have accomplished anything anyways.

  4. I like the idea in general of the .xxx domain, but only if all porn was forced there by law. That enables easy filtering for anyone who wants to temporarily or permanently avoid pornography has a generalized mechanism to do so.

    Ideally, setting your browser to filter out any references to a .xxx site would do a decent job of that. The problem is the porn people don’t want to be isolated to that sphere, and people like Suzanne Cook don’t want the .xxx realm to exist at all. Hence, there will be no filtering on internet at all, and we just live with porn being interlaced with normal sites, and popups to porn that are hard to filter. You have no choice but to see that it is porn, and close it.

    The .xxx would have removed it, but the religious groups and the pornographers clearly prefer to work together to enhance our internet experience for us and our children.

  5. ICANN
    Look you little communist idiot, You go out and create the internet, You go and Develop it, You make it work so well that others want to use it – Then you just give it all away to the UN and all of the other communist and dictatorship based governments!

    Shut The Fuck Up!

    Oh and stay out of my country we have our own communists here – they’re called Democrats and you and them both sing the same tune!

  6. XXX domain – excellent idea
    I agree with this move, all porn sites and all adult content sites on this xxx domain, great idea, easier to block popups, and so on. The sooner the better.

  7. Darryl Moore says:

    Crazy Yanks
    Wow, I’m sort of amazed at the number of angry opinions coming from U.S. readers about this. Why do they feel so strongly that a global resource should remain forever under the complete control of the US government? Why do they see fit to hurl insults at people who even suggest that the rest of the world should have any say in the governance of that global resource? Typical.

    [sigh] and they probably wonder why there is so much violence in the world against Americans.

  8. Abel Diaz says:

    Network Administrator
    I wish there were a .xxx top level domain. I would like all xxx rated sites to be moved to that domain. I would then filter my childrens PC to block *.xxx

  9. You have got to be kidding me. Some of the posters in this article are HILARIOUS! So because people asked to have an .xxx domain, that ultimatly means that there is going to be MORE porn out there? AGAINST PORNOGRAPHY?? Thats such a JOKE! Sex and nudity is a PART OF HUMAN NATURE! Get over it. Its just naked people doing things that are arousing to others. If you dont like it dont watch it…..wait…no, you would prefer it intermingled with all the other stuff that your CHILDREN can see. I understand. Ya….ok there.

    Your internet?? The US internet? No. No Im afraid not. Not anymore, has not been that way for A VERY LONG TIME. Get over yourselves. The internet is a global village that EVERY nation can share in. Thus, they should all have a say. Mind you I am more of the mind that the net should NEVER be censored at all. It is there to be a free domain. For all to see and share in.

    You, america, have no idea what you would be missing if every nation got its own intranet. No idea. You would be so cut off from everyone else that you would HAVE to beleive the propoganda your government sells you!

    In short. Get over it. The net belongs no NO ONE. It is the global village that we all should have a helping hand in.

  10. interesting study
    A statistical sample of 9 responses does not make a valid trend, but I can’t help but notice a few patterns in the responses. I wonder if these patterns provide insight into the general US opposition to rational processes.

    1. Misconception: The US invented the internet. Wrong, the internet as we know it today was conceived by Sir Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in the Switzerland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berners-Lee) for more info. While the US was one of the first nations to invest in Internet infrastructure, using and expanding on the methods devised by Berners-Lee, other nations also built their own.
    – The writers seem to have a fear that .xxx will create porn. The fact is that the internet is full of porn. It’s important to seperate the creation and consumption of porn, with the creation of a single domain to aggregate porn so that it’s easier to filter.

    It seems that the opponents to the .xxx domain are in denial of basic facts and are unable to get past their hangups about porn to deal with the real issues.

    If the moral majority wants to deal with porn, go after the producers, distributors, actors, theatres, retailers etc. While most of moral majority feels that they have the personal strength to avoid porn, they judge others as inferior for their perceived weaknesses. Oops, did I mention Jimmy Swaggart, Marvin Gorman and Jim Bakker … no one is perfect.

    I wonder if the majority of letters to congress include the threatening tone of Doc, or the innocent misconceptions of Suzanne Cook leading the government to realize that there is too much education required to prepare the population for rational regulations , so let this one remain unchanged and let the next government deal with it.

    The general populance of America could do with a little more education and a little less myopic furvour.

    Michael, you’ve done it again, by stirring up a hornets nest. I’m certain that you were surprised by the responses to this one.

  11. Yeah, right…
    I somehow can’t picture all the porn sites walking away from their .com and .net domains. Plus, there’s no way all porn could be forced off of those .com or .net domains the world over, so the system is flawed in as much as .org domains are hardly just used by organizations, etc, etc.

  12. dot XXX was a nice idea
    but it doesn’t work without international law enforcement. The problem is that some people think that porn interlaced randomly with other valid websites is better than separation. I simply don’t understand why people who want porn separated to their own section would be attacked as “communists”.

    It makes you laugh when you realize the general level of comprehension of the American public. Its not about discussion, its about forcing an opinion on everyone else for no other reason than they are American … and that is the problem under discussion, is it not?

    I still wish someone would have stuck “Be Polite” into the American constitution.

  13. Someone should let Sir Tim Berners-Lee know that he inadvertantly preinvented an American internet. The United Kingdom appears to believe it was his invention, and knighted him for it.

    Of course, they probably know a lot less about it than the open minded and educated american’s who posted here.

    Feel free to read the BBC for their complete “inaccuracies” regarding technology. Perhaps all of these americans could go there and let them know how wrong they are regarding history. Even the British enjoy a good hearty laugh.

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5009250.stm

  14. Craig Hubley says:

    “If pornographic sites were only allowed on .xxx, blocking such material would be far easier and more accurate.” Also, registration could be paid for by traffic levels rather than fixed fees, generating a great deal of money that could be spent to offset any negative effects of pornography on society. Billions, possibly, for women’s shelters, for stay-in-school programs focusing on girls, to investigate social ills and child sexual abuse, for scholarships, for refugees from countries where women are oppressed. A win all around.

    I proposed this in 1994 at a meeting at the Brookings Institution, and specifically proposed a “.xxx” domain.

    Everyone present agreed that it was the right solution. But also that the US Commerce Department, Congress, or one of its proxies would block it for ideological reasons, and thus permit pornographic material to spread everywhere on the net with no limit or countervailing cashflow to make up for the problems created by that. That is of course exactly what happened.

    The only problem with the “.xxx” domain is that it is not strictly controlled and steering all its revenues to such programs.

    We tax alcohol heavily. We should do the same with porn, and a “.xxx” domain is the easiest place to do it. But not if it falls to private opportunists.

    Sadly, even though many people are better qualified to run ICANN and deal with issues like this, they can’t run in any election to take over the place. There’s no way to make rational arguments like mine in 1994, or those above.

    As for the US creating the Internet, well, that’s just nonsense. What ARPA created was a good system to debate protocols, and a very minimal protocol called IP. It was a stone soup sort of thing. The value added via the IETF RFC process and Interop show floor demos (“talk IP or we throw you off, and we don’t care if you’re IBM”) was added by people from all over the world. No one owns the net now. But if anyone SHOULD own it, it should be the victims or potential victims of it, not the inventors or operators. It’s a commons like the atmosphere (which likewise should be owned by those who have had it hijacked from them). Read Peter Barnes’ excellent book “Capitalism 3.0” for the details.

  15. Lala
    I think we should create a .xxx, because then if that was censored, child porn could be monitered and deleted, don’t you think watching children being forced into those situations is terrible? Would you want that to be your child? Wouldn’t it be nice if porn could be blocked easier? And then there would be no worries about accidently going to a site that has degrading material when all you typed in a .com website.

    I mean HELLO, it is not like porn will disappear, that is almost impossible but it will be more monitered and then maybe society could focus more on the future that doesn’t worry about your child beating off instead of writing a physics report.

  16. Teana, english e-commerce law student en
    I have read some of the comments and would like to add the following:

    Sex is a fact of life. If you are against pornography then you should really lament the fact .XXX was refused as the idea is to place pornographic sites under a clear name, so that it is kept seperate. This is not an endorsement of pornography, but rather a way in which to keep it out of the ways of those who are easily offended such as’Wife and Mother of 3 Children’ (off the topic – please don’t comment on porn stars, most view it as a job, so why should we degrade them by patronising them on their choice of career and making false assumptions about their choices).

    And secondly ‘made in the USA’, the world accepts that the internet was created as a military device but has since evolved. The internet is borderless, and as such many people around the world have contributed to it’s evolution. It’s like saying all interpretations of Shakespear should stay with the english alone…or that americans shouldn’t use english…

    The internet wouldn’t be as rich as it is without the contribution of other nations – in fact it would disintergrate.

    If we don’t have one global body dealing with the internet on an international basis the internet would fragment and lose all the wealth of information it does have.

    If ICANN was to go beyond a merely technical role and start pandering to U.S governmental influence it would be no better than a dictatorship. A true democracy does not restrict freedom of speech and expression – which the US claims to hold so dear.

    The internet in essence relies on the entire globe for its sucess – and as such requires global/international rule – perhaps under the umbrella of the UN.