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. >