Monday, June 20, 2005

Call me a skeptic

Here's another article on the .xxx domain. If you read the article, certain alarms should be ringing in your head. It's probably not comprehensive, but here's what irks me:
  • ICM will charge $60-$70 dollars, $10 of which would fund someone else's agenda (ICANN also gets a cut)
  • the "non-profit" will be comprised of what appears to be groups that will be most biased in the first place: adult material perveyors, privacy advocates, and "child-advocacy concerns" (what are those, exactly?).
  • the sentence "Even if it's voluntary, supporters say, adult sites will have incentives to use .xxx.". What incentives might that be? It's certainly not monitary in nature! I think the only other remotely available incentives in existence are moral and penal. Since adult web sites are already considered to be against community morals, the only other incentive is going to be fines/jail time.
  • the phrase "required to follow yet-to-be-written 'best practice' guidelines, such as prohibitions" is a triple negative. "Required to follow best practice" sounds like a law. "Prohibitions" does nothing to lessen the impression. Beside, spamming and malicious scripts (code) is already illegal.
  • domain managers have had a very spotty history of assigning domains based on qualifications. Outside of the ".mil" and ".gov" domains, chaos prevails. Now we're supposed to believe that an organization made up of members with conflicting agendas is going to be different?

Let me repeat myself: I'm quite skeptical that this situation lead to anything good.

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