I disagree with Dwi and Schombe here. The reason that the ALAC statement stressed that settled international law (UN resolutions and treaties with broad though not necessarily universal accession) should form the only basis on which objections could be made is precisely because of the vast differences in national law and culture which the Internet spans. Should .jihad be banned because the term Jihad has been misinterpreted to mean the armed struggle by Muslims against non-Muslims? Should .ira be banned from introduction as a financial services TLD because of the terrorist association with that name (and various modifiers) still in operation in Northern Ireland? Should .poppy be banned from being adopted by peace campaigners and war dead remembrance sites because the poppy is the source of opiates? So far, yes, NCSG has supported the creation of .xxx because there has been no solid argument put forward that its existence would have any significant net (sorry for the pun) effect on the amount of erotic material (or porn, or obscenity, YMMV) available online. The world is too complex for most short strings to be objectionable in anythign but a highly localised and subjective way. As far as I can tell about the only things which might reasonably be banned from creation as generics are things that can cause confusion (such as recognised country names) and a very small set which most would agree are too troubling for almost everyone (the only one of these that comes to my mind is .paedophile). Artificial scarcity is one of the things holding back the Internet from achieving its full transformative potential. Let's not collude in another attempt to re-inforce this scarcity. -- Professor Andrew A Adams [log in to unmask] Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/