A colleague of mine attended the McGeorge conference on ICANN and  
domain names last week in Sacramento (California) and reported back  
that a proposal to use port numbers  to regulate adult content was  
floated. If confirmed, it is a worrisome development as it would  
indicate IANA being involved in the area of  content control and/or  
filtering.

Does anyone know more about this?


regards,

Robert
---
Robert Guerra <[log in to unmask]>
Managing Director, Privaterra
Tel +1 416 893 0377



On 2-Mar-07, at 2:29 AM, Todd Davies wrote:


> Thanks, Robert. I was aware of the .xxx issue before. What was  
> raised at the sacramento symposium was a proposal to assign port  
> numbers to content (i.e. a porn-free port), and then use ICANN's  
> authority to yank domain names to enforce it on registrants.  Seems  
> like it would have a snowball's chance in hell, but I was alarmed  
> by the hints of support for regulative measures to combat porn and  
> spam coming from the likes of Clark Kelso, California's Chief  
> Information Officer.
>
> My comment on the porn regulation proposal was that giving parents,  
> companies, etc. the power to control what pages can be accessed on  
> a particular machine can be done entirely through commercial means,  
> via client-server protocols that require certification or a filter  
> pass for every resource loaded onto a machine, including even the  
> production of special hardware that could be sold for this purpose.  
> No regulation is necessary.
>
> Both Eric Goldman of Santa Clara Law School and I proposed  
> essentially abandonment of domain names and ICANN, and we got a  
> serious hearing (see my slides at http://www.stanford.edu/~davies/ 
> ICANN-McGeorge.pdf and Eric's at http://blog.ericgoldman.org/ 
> archives/2007/02/domain_name_reg.htm). Global domain name mapping  
> is unnecessary and ICANN is becoming a behemoth that we would be  
> better off without.
>