The XXX domains
I have heard a lot about the XXX domains out there. I am sad to say that my fellow Christians out there are against it. I think it is a good idea, and let me explain why I am for it. But let me first say this, I would love to see the day where porn was not on the internet, but being realistic that day may never come. But if we had a XXX domain set, we could then maybe pass laws where porn has to be on that set of domains. When that is done, it makes it easy for people like me that do not want to see porn to block on my computer all domains that end in .xxx, the nice thing here is no one has there rights violated. The porn people can keep there free speech, and I as a individual (and parents can do for there children) can exercise my free choice of not viewing such stuff. I do not like the fact that I can search for some thing innocent such a scuba and find that a link I clicked on is a porn site, and it disables the ability to go back, and when you try to close the web browser it will pop up 2 more windows. So if they were all on an xxx domain, I can then setup my computer to resolve any xxx domain to 127.0.0.1 (or some other address that will not bring up the porn). So in short I do support the xxx domain area, but I also want a law that will put all porn sites there, and prevent them on the com net org (etc) domain sets.
We are commanded as Christains to be in the world but not of it. What does this mean to me? This means we have to be realistic, we can not stop porn, but maybe we can put it in a place we can protect ourselves (and our children) from it. We have all heard the story of the father who was helping their kid do a school paper on the government, and he wants to take them to the White House’s web site, but by mistake types in www.whitehouse.com, instead of www.whitehouse.gov most people are used to typing .com on everything, so that father made an innocent mistake that has horrible consciences. Just thing of it if that porn site had to have xxx instead of com, the father probably would not have typed the xxx in the address, but lets assume for some strange reason he did type xxx instead of gov, they parents (him and his wife) could have some software on the computer to prevent such a mistake from happening.
Some are arguing that the xxx are bad ideas because it will increase the number of porn sites. I am not going to argue that point, but can we get them off of com and net and all the other ones? Next they claim that it will “normalize” the behavior. Believe me the people that do this believe it is normal already, by having this set of domains will not affect them one way or the other. They also believe this will give the impression of government approval of this. Well lets put it this way the government does not care one way or the other, if the government cared one way or the other, it is more likely that the government would want it because of tax revenue (sad but true.) Finally if every one in the US wants the porn industry to failed, I got a simple solution, don’t patronize it, if no one when no one would bother to try to sell it, sadly some one is going, and there are probably people that publicly try to fight it the loudest, probably under the cover of dark go themselves. I say we can not get rid of it, lets put it in a place where we know how to avoid it, so we don’t have to look at it at all.
Just what I think, I don’t want to see, it even by acident, so give me a way of not having to see it.
Face it – we’ll always have porn. Unless the entire planet is forced to take desire-supressing drugs, we’ll always have these desires. While I agree with your logic – that porn sites should be limited, sort of a red-light district, unfortunately that won’t happen. Here is why. Ignoring the multi-million dollar contributions to politicians, the porn industry is mimicking the television industry – by going into “reality” television. I was interested in the whole “.xxx” discussion, since I knew exactly what the next step was – moving all porn to .xxx and setting up a filter – like you mentioned. The statistics some very horny researcher pulled is that most porn site traffic is from amateur or temporary sites. There are very few sites like sex.com or whitehouse.com, etc. Most are advertised for a week, just to get people in and make them click on banners, and move on. When comparing it to the real world, it’s like saying if we create a red-light district, there won’t be any illegal activity outside of it. It just won’t happen. My real problem with “.xxx” (or any other domain name like “.ws”, etc) is that Icann is the monopoly creating these at random. When they created .ws (.website – brilliant idea from their redundant department of redundancy), they just made themselves millions of dollars from corporations like Dell and Google to scramble and register their own domain names. There is no regulation and it can do whatever it wants. Worse yet, it’s best competitor is Network Solutions, another giant corporation. Although I wouldn’t want the UN managing it, like some suggest, I feel that it should be a US/UN venture, considering most hardware is in the US and we created the thing. Or perhaps cut UN out completely and just have something like NATO for technology. Call it GTEC – Global Technology Exporting Countries (no relation to OPEC) hehe. I’ve also been hearing things about Internet 2 – currently online and being shared between universities. They know what’s wrong with the current internet – too much spam due to massive spoofing of addresses, incessant porn/adware/spyware and vulnerabilities running around, along with too much information such as, no offense, blogs. Heck, I can’t search for anything anymore without hitting a few dozen blogs on the subject. I think all those search engines should remove blogs from searches, since it’s irrelevant information (versus factual information like the library of congress). Hey, set up .blog and FORCE people to move there. So, why can’t they fix all these problems and launch Internet 2, dumping all this garbage and moving on. The other small problem I have is something you said that I keep hearing “I don’t want to see, it even by acident, so give me a way of not having to see it”. There is a way – turn off your computer and get offline! 🙂 There’s this big thing now a days that everyone must be protected and sheltered from everything. Oh no, not children looking at porn. Oh god, was that a breast? I have more trouble with the news showing, describing, and publishing graphic accounts of murder, rape, torture, and other crimes rather than having people be exposed to porn. This anti-porn drive (although it should be somewhat moderated) is really getting on my nerves. It’s like we’re degenerating into puritans. I feel that we should stop the violence first and then we’ll talk. I don’t see many grassroot campaigns to stop Fox, CNN, and all major newspaper publishers from showing, talking about, and printing graphical accounts of things children really shouldn’t be exposed to: gruesome death and violation of basic principles of other people. Sex is a beautiful thing and we shouldn’t be afraid of it – stop the damn violence instead!
Hay I like that .blog idea, I would move my blog. I do find it anoying at times, when I go searching for something, my blog is in the top 10 hits at times, I would reather not see my own blog show up, there are already search engins for blogs. And you are right the violance on the news is bad, but remember I am not saying we have to get rid of porn, I just want to move it, just like we should move the violance on the TV so that people can not watch it if they wish.
Yes, like I said, it should be moderated. The devil is in the details 🙁
The other problem is people using this as a precedent to crack down on other issues, which will eventually find its way to freedom of speech.
Agreed some people will try to use it to prevent people from putting the stuff up. I would say that I would like to see it categorized, so that people can decide what not to see, and they can block it if they wish. There are times when I do a search I don’t want to see blogs, but there are other times where I am looking for blog entries. So I do believe the power should be given to the people ability to look for or exclude from searches. I don’t like government censorship, but I am proponent of self censorship, I can blog myself from seeing things I don’t want.
Also to the people that don’t want this stuff on the net, well it is time to work on peoples minds, if people did not go there then those sites (stores) would not make money, They will stay in existence along as they can make money off of it. fit there was no profit for them, they would not bother with setting them up. And you are right that maybe we should not have the government involved in the domain names area, but I can not stand the thought of the UN controlling it. I personally have no respect for the UN at all.
oh my god, we agree. Yes, sad how peoples behavior supports things like freaky porn, extremist views, heck, even regular spam! But before we go condemming everything, I agree that it should be clearly separated. We should all have a meeting and say “you know, the first iteration had some problems… here’s the new plan”, which is why I think Internet 2 can really fix a lot of these issues. Put porn, extremist views, anything, into its category. Look at your blog entries, you keyword them, perhaps similar technology for the rest of the content. No more than 5 keywords or so and any extreme sites such as porn, extreme views (nazi, kkk, racists, ultra liberal/conservatives, religious zealots) would be classified separate from regular content such as news reports, history, entertainment (by that I mean CDs, DVDs, Movies, Theater, not hardcore porn shows). Eh, it won’t happen, why bother thinking about it. As far as the UN, I agree, it shouldn’t exist. I think WTO has enough power, since everything revolves around money anyway, why not give it more power and disband things like CAFNA, NAFTA, NATO, UN, etc. Have a global trade infrastructure with individual trade rules. It won’t happen either though, since the US is trying to get more poor central/south american countries on board to try to compete with China – won’t happen though, China is too poor to be underbid and considering how poor an average american is, as sad as it is, the american companies will go bankrupt so the american consumer will save money on socks. I guess we’ll be the leader in ideas, but that seems to be fading away. Instead of upgrading our school systems (and I’m not talking about throwing more money/technology at it), we’re debating evolution vs creationism instead of teaching chemistry, biology, math, etc, anything to create a competing edge. When countries like China with their massive cheap labor force begin to create novel ideas, why would they need anyone? They would do nothing but export all their products and services around the globe. Stay tuned for a China/Indian alliance of cheap labor and high technology. Whoa, how did we get from .xxx domains to global trade practices??? I must have ADD.