The responsiveness problem is with the industry, who sat on their hands when the application went through, isn't it? Just like the GAC they missed the boat. A learning moment for all.

Indeed. ICANN is so broken that they expect everyone in the world is supposed to pay close attention to everything they do, just in case ICANN should do something stupid that affects them directly. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly

If you think that .xxx is to be banned then I suggest that there is an argument that could be made for banning something that many consider worse than sexual porn - and that would be images of murder and torture of human beings. Yet consider how that would denude the internet of great works of Christian art or books on the lives of saints.

If you'd bothered to read the article describing the protest, you'd know that it has nothing whatsoever to do with anyone who wants to ban or outlaw porn. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly

On 03/17/2011 08:02 AM, John R. Levine wrote:

...

If you think that .xxx is to be banned then I suggest that there is an argument that could be made for banning something that many consider worse than sexual porn - and that would be images of murder and torture of human beings. Yet consider how that would denude the internet of great works of Christian art or books on the lives of saints.

If you'd bothered to read the article describing the protest, you'd know that it has nothing whatsoever to do with anyone who wants to ban or outlaw porn.

It has everything to do with it. .pro represented the same idea of corralling "professionals" into a top level domain, presenting the same concern that "professionals" would have to ante up $$ to buy an expensive name in .pro. Of course, .pro, became a total flop because people realized that "professionals" could happily live without a .pro name. (I put "professional" in quotes because .xxx, rather than .pro, might be of use to the worlds oldest professionals.) Similarly TNA people have a choice to not buy a .xxx name; ICANN is not coercing anyone or creating a ghetto - unless the TNA people voluntarily chose to paste the a .xxx patch onto themselves. Nearly every TLD represents an intent to categorize - yet it is only .xxx that is being singled out and characterized as a ghetto or placed for forced buying. And why is that? Because of the concern that .xxx would be a vehicle for censorship or coerced labeling of material that some people would like to censor. It simply is not any of ICANN's concern what kind of material people may chose to represent with a proposed TLD - that way leads to a giant, bloated, and dangerous ICANN. --karl--

On 2011-03-17, at 2:15 PM, Carlton Samuels wrote:

On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 1:28 PM, Karl Auerbach <karl@cavebear.com> wrote:

...

Nearly every TLD represents an intent to categorize - yet it is only .xxx that is being singled out and characterized as a ghetto or placed for forced buying.

It is said consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. But I've often wondered the kind of intellectual dishonesty which allows some truly decent people to not accept this as past the point of being a 'notion'!

Let 'em have their ghetto!!!

The .xxx proposal strikes me as nothing more than a cash-grab to milk money out of the adult industry, one playing on the smirky reactions most people have to porn. At a previous job, I had several clients who were in the adult industry and I can say unreservedly that if more marketers approached their craft with the professionalism, and respect to industry practices those people do, I would have quickly been out of a job. But that is an aside. What is wrong with this proposed ghetto is a) that no purchasers of the product will use it and b) to protect their brand integrity and copyright every porn site on the planet will presumably have to fork over hard-won dollars to make sure somebody doesn't usurp their fame and fortune. Yes, I know, this is counterintuitive to my argument that no end-user will use .xxx, but for safety's sake, adult site owenrs will purchase it. Let's say, for the sake of argument, I own welikeballs.com (which I happen to), and I ran an adult site (which I don't happen to do). Would I then be, if not obligated, fairly encouraged from a business point of view to protect my interests by buying, for whatever cost it is, welikeballs.xxx ? You bet. For no other reason than I want to protect it from the other guys over at wedontlikeballs.com who might grab it, and have their way with my good name. As to ghettos, as I understand them, they are generally set up by forcibly pushing people, in one way or another, into them. Unless the rest of the registrar world refuses to sell adult sites a .com/.net et all, this won't be a ghetto so much as a gated community, with no-one actually living in the over-priced homes. I agree with Karl on one point. Protect kids from violence? yes, absolutely. Far more of an issue, in my opinion. -- Neil Schwartzman Executive Director CAUCE The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, North America Inc. http://cauce.org http://twitter.com/cauce IM: caucecanada Tel.: +1 (303) 800 6345

Neil, Question: Wouldn't what you are saying mean that you don't want any more gTLDs at all? Do you register your site on all gTLDs? If not, then what would be the problem with .xxx? You can choose to register your site on any or all gTLDs that you choose. D Darlene A. Thompson CAP Administrator N-CAP/Department of Education P.O. Box 1000, Station 910 Iqaluit, NU X0A 0H0 Phone: (867) 975-5631 Fax: (867) 975-5610 dthompson@gov.nu.ca ________________________________________ From: at-large-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org [at-large-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org] on behalf of Neil Schwartzman [neil@cauce.org] Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2011 2:43 PM To: At-Large Worldwide Subject: Re: [At-Large] Protest at tomorrow's ICANN meeting On 2011-03-17, at 2:15 PM, Carlton Samuels wrote:

On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 1:28 PM, Karl Auerbach <karl@cavebear.com> wrote:

...

Nearly every TLD represents an intent to categorize - yet it is only .xxx that is being singled out and characterized as a ghetto or placed for forced buying.

It is said consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. But I've often wondered the kind of intellectual dishonesty which allows some truly decent people to not accept this as past the point of being a 'notion'!

Let 'em have their ghetto!!!

The .xxx proposal strikes me as nothing more than a cash-grab to milk money out of the adult industry, one playing on the smirky reactions most people have to porn. At a previous job, I had several clients who were in the adult industry and I can say unreservedly that if more marketers approached their craft with the professionalism, and respect to industry practices those people do, I would have quickly been out of a job. But that is an aside. What is wrong with this proposed ghetto is a) that no purchasers of the product will use it and b) to protect their brand integrity and copyright every porn site on the planet will presumably have to fork over hard-won dollars to make sure somebody doesn't usurp their fame and fortune. Yes, I know, this is counterintuitive to my argument that no end-user will use .xxx, but for safety's sake, adult site owenrs will purchase it. Let's say, for the sake of argument, I own welikeballs.com (which I happen to), and I ran an adult site (which I don't happen to do). Would I then be, if not obligated, fairly encouraged from a business point of view to protect my interests by buying, for whatever cost it is, welikeballs.xxx ? You bet. For no other reason than I want to protect it from the other guys over at wedontlikeballs.com who might grab it, and have their way with my good name. As to ghettos, as I understand them, they are generally set up by forcibly pushing people, in one way or another, into them. Unless the rest of the registrar world refuses to sell adult sites a .com/.net et all, this won't be a ghetto so much as a gated community, with no-one actually living in the over-priced homes. I agree with Karl on one point. Protect kids from violence? yes, absolutely. Far more of an issue, in my opinion. -- Neil Schwartzman Executive Director CAUCE The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, North America Inc. http://cauce.org http://twitter.com/cauce IM: caucecanada Tel.: +1 (303) 800 6345 _______________________________________________ At-Large mailing list At-Large@atlarge-lists.icann.org https://atlarge-lists.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/at-large At-Large Official Site: http://atlarge.icann.org

I see no reason to believe that .xxx is an assumed commercial success. If demand doesn't exist -- if the industry indeed does not want it, then it will fail. Then the industry gets what it wants -- a failed TLD -- without putting ICANN in the position of making content-related TLD judgments.

Part of the application process for a sTLD is to show that it is supported by the community it intends to serve. Looking at the history of every sTLD, I think we can fairly say that whatever process ICANN used to verify the alleged support was completely incompetent. So the right thing to do would be to say, "oh, sorry, you actually never qualified for an sTLD, here's your money back and an extra million that you'd otherwise get more expensively by suing us." Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly

Well the fact is they did qualify, and there was a lengthy investigatory finding that confirms that.

You're confusing ICANN's process with reality. The process purported to confirm that the porn industry supports .XXX. In reality, there are pornographers picketing the ICANN meeting because they so very much do not.

ICANN has to respect its own processes or it's a joke.

One can criticize the process, work to do better in future, but that doesn't invalidate it. ICANN should just let it go through and move on.

The process is 100% completely broken. A process that broken needs to stop. I used to think that ICANN should shrug, approve .XXX, and go on. Now I think that the best thing we can do for the good of the Internet is to throw sand in the gears wherever possible, since the less ICANN does, the better. This specifically includes all of the new TLDs that (despite what they claim) nobody but their promoters want. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly

For better or worse, the applicant demonstrated sufficient sponsorship to ICANN's satisfaction. That FSC demonstrates that THEIR community doesn't buy in, doesn't necessarily negate the validity of the claim. Even the existence of a supportive sponsoring community does not guarantee success. (see ".aero")

As I said, ICANN's process is broken. In every case, the community that was allegedly supporting the gTLDs has voted with their feet and stayed away in droves, so the "support" does not in fact exist. Look at .AERO and .TRAVEL and .PRO and .JOBS and .COOP and poor old .MUSEUM. People hold up .CAT as a success, but Catalonia has about 7 million people, and .CAT has about 47,000 registrations. That's about the same population as Switzerland (about a million domains in .CH) or Hongkong (about 200,000 in .HK.) I presume we all know Einstein's quote about doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly

My god, what a stick-in-the-mud! As was pointed out above, if the communities don't want them they will likely fail. There are plenty of communities that are chomping at the bit. As the number of tld's increases there will come a certain theshold when they'll become arbitrary, anyway. j On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 2:44 PM, John R. Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:

...

It simply is not any of ICANN's concern what kind of material people may chose to represent with a proposed TLD - that way leads to a giant, bloated, and dangerous ICANN.

It does show that the best thing to do would be to forget about new TLDs, since the track record is abundantly clear that the alleged beneficiaries (not just in .XXX) uniformly don't want them.

Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly _______________________________________________ At-Large mailing list At-Large@atlarge-lists.icann.org https://atlarge-lists.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/at-large

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On 2011-03-17, at 2:02 AM, Karl Auerbach wrote:

The reason that ICANN has become more bloated than Jabba the Hutt is that ICANN rarely says "that is not our job".

With one major exception, of course. Security. And fraudulent spammers and mobilephone slammers getting to be registrars. http://www.icann.org/en/transparency/krebs-response-22dec08-en.pdf Take a look at that document, and poke around for Dynamic Dolphin, owned by infamous net-abuse Scott Richter, his father Steve, and apparently, a former directi employee, who signed off on it while she was there, Manisha Mani. In which case, they adopt the more unionized view of 'it's not my job'. "Response to Documentary Information Disclosure Policy Request To: Mr. Brian Krebs Date: 22 December 2008 Re: Request No. 20081121-1 __________________________________________________________________ Thank you for your Request for Information dated 21 November 2008, which we understand was submitted pursuant to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers’ (ICANN) Documentary Information Disclosure Policy (DIDP). For reference, attached to this letter is a copy of your request. There is no information responsive to your request as there is no listing of officers on the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA). We can inform you, however, that Manisha Mani signed the RAA with Dynamic Dolphin, Inc. as the CEO, and was the only officer listed on the registrar accreditation application. We hope this information is helpful. If you have any further inquiries, please forward them to didp@icann.org." -- Neil Schwartzman Executive Director CAUCE The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, North America Inc. http://cauce.org http://twitter.com/cauce IM: caucecanada Tel.: +1 (303) 800 6345