The history of the .xxx TLD goes back a decade to when Jason Hendeles formed the ICM registry and made application to ICANN in 2000. Hendeles originally requested that .xxx be approved as a generic Top Level Domain (ie. .com, .net,..org, etc). ICANN denied the .xxx gTLD shortly after it was submitted, as ICANN noted at the time:

ICM Registry’s application for an .xxx TLD does not appear to meet unmet needs. Adult content is readily available on the Internet. To the extent that some believe that an .xxx TLD would segregate adult content, no mechanism (technical or non-technical) exists to require adult content to migrate from existing TLDs to an .xxx TLD.

Of course, this statement is truer today then it was in 2000, but ICM persisted.

In 2005 ICM returned to ICANN and requested that .xxx be accepted as a sponsored Top Level Domain. sTLDs require significant support from the sponsoring business and the professional community they represent (ie. the .travel sTLD is supported by various travel agencies and associations). ICM had started the International Foundation for Online Responsibility to act as a sponsoring business. ICANN drafted a registry agreement at that point a sought public comment. It became very apparent, shortly afterward, however, that ICM had no support from the larger industry, adult content providers. Finally, ICANN’s Government Advisory Committee (which coordinated Internet name and number policies with world governments) reported that several governments from around the world opposed the .xxx sTLD. This should have been the end of the .xxx domain. It had no support within the industry it was suppose to serve, and governments around the world opposed it. But in 2007 ICM pushed ICANN again for a registry agreement, and again ICANN found little sponsorship support, government opposition, and rising opposition among Internet users. In 2008 ICM appealed, under ICANN’s bylaws, to an Independent Review Panel, which met in 2009. During the review process ICM accused ICANN of political motives and collusion with religious groups in its rejection of the domain and threatened legal action. In the IRP’s final report, issued in February, a majority (2-1) found that ICANN had technically approved ICM’s application in 2005, and should pay $475K to ICM in reimbursements. The dissenting panel member made it clear that he felt that ICM’s application still lacked community support, and that ICANN was well within its rights to deny the application. In March the ICANN board decided to accept public comment on the situation to determine a course of action, as it had no process to deal with an application that was six years old. The public comment, again, overwhelmingly opposed the creation of the .xxx domain. Of the over 12,000 public comments received by ICANN, 95% opposed the creation of the domain. Opposition came from disparate groups ranging from free speech advocates, family values and Christian organizations, to adult content providers and ISPs. Yet, with the IRP report ostensibly against them, and fearing legal action by ICM, the ICANN board begrudgingly voted to allow .xxx to move forward.

So a Top Level Domain that Internet users don’t want, international governments are against, and the industry it’s suppose to represent opposes is now on it’s way to deployment. Why? and Why should we care? In the short term, ICM will rake in hundreds of millions of dollars as intellectual property owners rush to register their .com names with the .xxx suffix. Domain squatters will rush to register cars.xxx, macdonalds.xxx, etc.creating a huge ramp up in prices which will benefit ICM’s bottom line.

From an operational perspective, .xxx is going to wreak havoc as security software makers, ISPs, and other potential content filters struggle between demands to block the suffix, from anti-porn organizations, and demands to leave the Internet open. Providers of Adult content will avoid the TLD for primary use, knowing that anti-porn forces will campaign strongly for major ISPs to block the domain suffix. In the public policy arena, advocacy groups and politicians will call for adult content to be limited to the .xxx domain. In 2006 Senators Bauchus and Pryor introduced a bill which would have required sites with sexually charged content to be removed from .org, .net, and .com domains and relegated to only .xxx. The fallout from such a idea would be monumental: aside from defining what sexually charged or sexually explicit content is, and determining who would police such a rule, there is the issue of domains or sites hosted outside of the US, which would not be subject to a US law. Nevertheless, we can be certain that such a proposal will be made, and that ICM will support it, even if its surreptitiously.

The overall problem with the .xxx TLD, as I have stated over the years, is that if further politicizes Internet operations and draws operating groups and committes into disputes about Internet content. The Internet should, and does, serve as a conduit for information, ideas, and general content from all over the world. It performs this function well because the people who work together to develop the standards, perform the operations, and design the overall systems do so for the improvement of the Internet and its technology. Discussions of general content never, or rarely, enter into the discussion. This is the way it should be. By folding to ICM, ICANN has put itself, and the future of the Internet, in a dangerous position. It has laid a path for a segregation of content. We don’t know exactly where this will lead, but we can be certain that it will not be towards more open and free Internet.

.xxx, ICANN, ICM, Internet Policies

The past few weeks have been filled with consternation for those of us involved in telecommunications and civil liberties issues. This week, two of the major issues came to a head: FISA reform and Telecom Immunity. Senator Reid (D) announced last week that he would violate Senate traditions, ignoring Senator Dodd’s hold, and bring the highly flawed Bush administration FISA bill, S.2248, to a vote. Aside from expanding warrantless, unsupervised, surveillance, the bill would grant retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies which may have broken the law repeatedly over the past six years. Senator Dodd vowed he would filibuster the bill.

While numerous Democrats claimed they opposed the bill and telecom immunity — including Sen. Reid– few actually stood to oppose it. Sens. Clinton, Biden and Obama found they could not leave the diners and palm pressing of Iowa to return to Washington to perform the job they were elected to do. My own Senator, Durbin (D), refused to answer my inquires or discuss his position on the bill. But Senator Dodd sped from the campaign trail to defend the principles of the fourth amendment and equality under the law. While I listened to the floor debate on Monday, I was both infuriated, by the obvious mendacity of those standing for the bill, and inspired by the integrity of Sen. Dodd and those few who stood with him. In the end, Senator Reid was forced to withdraw the bill until next year. For those of us involved in this issue, it was as close to a moment of true democracy that we have seen in ages. Nearly magical.

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The whole thing began about a month ago when the AP reported that Comcast was blocking traffic associated with BitTorrent, GNUtella, and other file-sharing applications. In a semantic parsing that would please even the most jaded pentagon technocrat, Comcast denied that they were blocking any traffic. In actuality, Comcast wasn’t really blocking traffic; they were simply imitating traffic in order to get the sharing computers to ignore the data sent between them. This approach is quite a bit sleazier then actually blocking the traffic, as it forces the hosts to keep establishing their connections to one another. Nonetheless, the die was cast, and consumer groups filed a complaint with the FCC and called for congress to impose Net Neutrality regulations. Meanwhile, hordes of libertarian network operators began complaining about how the government shouldn’t interfere with how they run their networks. Three days ago the story got bigger when a California resident filed suite against Comcast for breach of contract, arguing that Comcast does not deliver the promised Internet speeds it advertises, and actively interferes with the performance of certain applications.

The issues and problems surrounding this debacle are an outgrowth of the severely flawed telecommunications policies of the FCC and the federal government’s failure to deal with those bad policy choices. Comcast should to have the right to regulate traffic allocation on their own network. The nature of the HFC architecture employed by cable Internet providers means that limited bandwidth is shared within local distribution areas. This means that if your neighbor is using huge amounts of bandwidth to download an episode of Lost, there is less overall available bandwidth for you. Cable operators want to ensure that burst bandwidth is available to users, so they set the cable modem’s overall limiting quite high (usually between 4 Mb/s & 8 Mb/s); however, this leads to the problem of active users consuming large amounts of bandwidth for extended periods. In the case of peer-to-peer applications, Comcast was trying to ensure that there was excess burst bandwidth available to more casual users of common Internet applications. However, Comcast should have informed their customers that they were limiting specific traffic and applications. By not doing so, they operated in duplicitous and deceitful manner. This is a clear case of Comcast wanting to have it all: they want to pick up subscribers by touting high bandwidth numbers and then limit the users who actually use the bandwidth they’re paying for.

To allow the federal government, however, to dictate what is valid network traffic could lead to disastrous consequences. To be adaptable to the ever changing applications and protocols on the Internet any legislation would need to be written broadly. This could easily lead to situations in which it becomes technically illegal for service providers to mitigate spam, intervene in a virus outbreak, or prioritize voice or video traffic. For many years the Internet community of operators and developers have done an exceptional job of regulating and expanding the applications and data on the Internet. This was primarily due to the need of numerous network operators being forced to work together to exchange data and adhere to standards. Recently this has started to change; however, as the number of autonomous carriers has begun to shrink. This has placed business pressures on the remaining networks to try to keep more traffic and services on their networks and worry less about exchanging data with others.

The overall problem is that there is a lack of competition in the marketplace. If subscribers had multiple choices of broadband providers they could choose a provider based upon their application needs. Network Neutrality only becomes an issue because last mile monopolies have been encouraged by the FCC. With the loss of data line sharing requirements for copper, coax, and fiber, consumers are left with very few choices between Internet providers. Additionally, the deregulation of last mile data facilities means that no company can enter into the market to satisfy customer demands. For instance, a service provider who wishes to target peer-to-peer users cannot, economically, gain access to the copper or coax wire entering your home. This means that consumers will always be tied to one or two service providers and their policies. If competition was encouraged in this market, questions of Network Neutrality would not even arise. Consumers would simply change providers from those who do not satisfy their needs to those which do. The FCC, with their unique brand of logic, keeps insisting that fewer providers means more competition and better products for consumers. In any other market this logic would be dismissed as laughable: do we really believe we would have better automobiles if there were only two or three manufacturers? But in the world of telecommunications this ass-backwards logic seems to be accepted as gospel –proselytized with massive political contributions.

Without re-regulation of last mile facilities the only hope consumers have is Network Neutrality legislation. Network operators and admins should work with lawmakers to try to ensure that any regulations are adaptable enough to address their concerns. If operators, and the companies they work for, simply continue to oppose Neutrality regulation they will soon find themselves having to interpret poorly written regulation and hope that no one complains when they get it wrong. This is simply a case where consumers are not going to stand for biased monopolies, and the monopolies will have to get used to operating in a more neutral fashion.

As governments and corporations extend their power and influence, their need to limit access to ideas which contradict theirs will continue to grow. The ability to bypass Internet filters or hide one’s identity will become more and more essential. This guide offers a helpful start for everyone.

AT&T may immediately terminate or suspend all or a portion of your Service, any Member ID, electronic mail address, IP address, Universal Resource Locator or domain name used by you, without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes (a) violates the Acceptable Use Policy; (b) constitutes a violation of any law, regulation or tariff (including, without limitation, copyright and intellectual property laws) or a violation of these TOS, or any applicable policies or guidelines, or (c) tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries.

The breadth of this statement is amazing. As AT&T partners with the Chinese government, would it now be a violation of an AT&T service agreement to criticize the Chinese government? Could one have their DSL connection terminated for publicly questioning their telephone bill?

The AT&T apologists and defenders immediately jumped on this change of the ToS, claiming, once again, that this is obviously an over-reaching mistake by some middle manager, and that, under common-carrier laws, the ToS is unenforceable and would be struck down in court. My response to these people, the same one’s who claimed the Pearl Jam incident was simply an over-reaction by a middle manager, is to ask: how many of these anti-consumer actions does it take constitute evidence of a subtle or general anti-consumer corporate policy? one?, three?, twelve?, twenty? Let me know an I will assemble the requisite documentation. As to the issue of common-carrier regulations, commentators are correct that under those regulations AT&T must remain neutral to general content. However, it is most likely that should push come to shove that AT&T will claim itself to be a Media Organization not held to common-carrier standards. After all, no one would expect Viacom to carry content which damaged their brands, why should AT&T?

There are a number of people whom I respect who disagree with me on the issue of Net Neutrality. Most of them believe that market forces will respond and correct any anti-consumer moves by Internet providers. I believe this would be true, if there existed diverse competition in the marketplace. The problem remains that a very few number of large carriers control last mile access to the Internet. Among these carriers there is little geographic competition, except in major urban centers. Opponents of neutrality site RF distribution as a way to alleviate this problem. However, given the FCC’s recent rulings on the spectrum auctions it seems most likely that the same large companies which control hardline distribution will end up in control of the RF spectrum as well. As congress has done very little to mitigate media and telecommunications consolidation, and will certainly not address this issue in the near future, the only solution left is to impose a Network Neutrality law upon Internet carriers. It is the only solution left for an industry which appearing more and more monopolistic every day is not afraid to flex it muscles on content control.

This is an example of the complete insanity which has come out of the copyright wars. Under Viacom’s logic, once they use someone else’s content they own it. But it is more likely that Viacom has just decided that if you are not a multi-national media company you have no copyright protection.

[t]he male and female cartoon officers, designed for the ministry by Sohu, will offer a text warning to surfers to abide by the law and tips on Internet security as they move across the screen in a virtual car, motorcycle or on foot.

The Internet in China is one of the most heavily monitored and censored in the world. Users are frequently banned from viewing material which is considered impolitic or immoral. The goal of this project is to further the specter of the all seeing and powerful government eye. But China’s Internet users have become adaptive and resourceful over the past few years, learning to circumvent and avoid their government’s controls. The AP noted that “[d]espite the controls, nudity, profanity, illegal gambling and pirated music, books and film have proliferated on Chinese Internet servers,” and a recent report on NPR highlighted the successes of Chinese online gamers in defeating government controls.

Governments, including our own, should know by now that censorship is pointless in an age where technology is plentiful. And that those citizens who are resourceful, curious, and adaptive enough to bypass government filters are the very citizens which have the necessary skills to lead their countries into the future. They should be lauded and not punished. If governments do not learn that lesson they will find themselves under siege by the best and brightest of their own citizens.