ICANN puts Pornography Fans on Hold

[Danny]

The internet corporation for assigned names and numbers, a non profit group that oversees the assignment of domain names, top level domains, and other addresses, has caved into pressure from “ignoramuses – and delayed the approval of the .XXX top level domain. ICANN’s new TLD was designed to semi-regulate the online porno industry.

It seems that conservative Christian groups, the Bush administration, and generally clueless housewives, have been bitching at the United States commerce department about the issue. The commerce department, in following the food chain, bitched at ICANN.

In response, ICANN postponed a hearing for the porno TLD until September 15, giving the commerce department more time to get public input.

The thought process of the religious right on this one really baffles me. Even though .XXX probably will never take off, its creation would give pornography opponents a chance to regulate, control, and prevent access to adult sites. It also would allow non-profit groups aimed at keeping children away from porn a much easier method of doing so. Internet filters would only need to block access to domains that end in .XXX.

Why are conservatives so hostile toward the online porn industry? After all, it’s obvious they are part of it and are funding it. Some reports indicate that nearly half of all internet users access porn sites, and the industry is a 12 billion dollar a year business. Hypocrisy at its best!

I think of pornography as one of those things that, as long as procreation exists, will always be popular. It’s one of those things that has been around for thousands of years, and will probably never go away. Rightfully so.

Most of us can agree that child porn does not fall into this category, because there are victims of its production. Did I mention it was highly illegal to create? Part of the idea of the new .XXX TLD is that all webmasters would be forced to abide by a “code of ethics – which if not followed, could result in revocation of the domain.

This move would allow the US government, and ICANN, to crack down on Illegal porn, and to focus on keeping children safe.

Stupidity really irks me. It begs the question: Have you ever looked at porn?

[jwenting]

Strangely the most violent opponents of porn are communists. Where in the US people look at you strange maybe when they see you with a porn mag, in the USSR it would get you arrested and sent to jail or a "reeducation" camp for several years (and they classed swimsuit calendars as porn...).
Other communist countries have similar laws.

[benna]

As a communist sympathizer this seems silly to me. Marx would never have supported such a policy. This strikes me more as stalinist than commnist propper.

Anyway, this .xxx domain thing will never work, because nothing prevents porn sites from simply registering .com domain names. Since the vast majority of sites already have a .com domain, I think it is unlikely that they would switch. Maybe new sites would register with .xxx, but not if they feared some sort of restrictions.

As for the conservatives, they just don't like porn in general, and don't understand harm reduction. They never have, and they never will. Its all are nothing for them. What they really would like to do is ban it all togeather, but the supreme court wouldn't allow that (yet). Americans in general are just do fucking prude.

[jwenting]

Of course it won't work, I never said it would :)

Communists in general are extremely conservative, wanting everything to be tightly controlled and governed by the State.
As pornography doesn't really lend itself to that, they're opposed to it. At the same time they WILL use prostitution as a means to control the population. Of course the system is different, with women being forcibly given to men who please the Party as rewards.

Marx was extremely conservative. His ideas included the murder of everyone who didn't agree with those ideas, and the enslaving of the entire population (effectively prostituting the population to his own greater glory), except for those parts of the population he didn't like (like Jews and other ethnic minorities) which people were to be annihillated (yes, Hitler got his ideas about racial purity from Marx).

Of course religious extremists are against pornography. That's the same for any religion.
Take Islam for example. It bans the portrayal of the human form in art (which porn falls under in this context) completely.
So do several Christian factions (though not catholisism).
That's why they are opposed to it (as well as the depiction of the act of procreation as entertainment which is a waste of the Seed and therefore a sin).
This isn't an American thing, it's a religious thing.

Americans as a people are hardly more prude than others, they're just more vocal about it.

[benna]

Marx was not an anti-semite. This is a myth. Marx came from a Jewish family, though his father converted to lutheranism for professional reasons before Karl's birth. While it is true that Marx was at times critical of Jews, he was not so much criticizing the Jewish religion as he was their role in Banking and other such business. He wrote that his comments were directed at, "not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew." This everyday Jew he was even somewhat sympathetic to. He believed Jews were not inherrently bad, but that a thousand years of anti-semitism during the middle ages had forced the jews in to capitalistic enterprises (because the Catholic Church banned Usery). This is in stark contrast to Hitler, who saw the Jewish people as an inherrently inferior race. I hope this clears things up for you.

P.S. "Marx was extremly conservative," may be the funniest thing I've heard all week.

[jwenting]

Marx WAS an anti-semite. While true that he had Jewish ancestry, that means little.
In fact it could well be an indicator, the worst enemies of a group are usually those who once belonged to that group themselves but abandoned it.

He was ultra conservative in many areas. What he wanted was in fact a return to the feudal era, except instead of a King or Emperor there'd be him at the helm with absolute power.
No more of this newfangled democracy and free enterprise, but a system of slavery and submission to absolute authority (him...).

[benna]

I don't really want to get into an argument about marxism in general, thought suffice it to say that Marx himself never held such a view, just many of those that have tried to put his ideas into practice.

The fact that he had Jewish herritage is indeed not sufficient to show that he was not an anti-semite, but if you had read what I wrote you'd know that wasn't the only evidence I provided. What evidence do you have that he was an anti-semite?

[Ancient Dragon]

Who the hell came up with that XXX thing anyway? It's a good idea, but one that will never work -- like trying to make prostitution illegal :D :D

As for Marks/communism -- don't know and don't really care. They're pretty much irrelevent in today's world, unless of course you live in China or Cuba.