Back in June this year, the .xxx domain appeared to be have been cleared by ICANN (Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers), the organisation that has control of domain names with world over.
Now Michael D. Gallagher from the US Department of Commerce (DoC) has now written to ICANN asking them to delay the ICANN Board of Directors wait for a week in what was to be a rubber-stamping of the final approval. Involvement of the US government with ICANN at this level is without precedence.
Gallagher sights nearly 6,000 letters and email from ‘concerned families’ that have been received to the DoC. In a country of over 296m people (assuming only US citizens have written in), 2.027e-5 is beyond a rounding error. It’s the rounding error of a rounding error.
We all know how easy it is to send an email – it takes seconds. And as the BBC found out when they received a flood of over 20,000 emails objecting to the showing of “Jerry Springer The Opera”. It’s no concern that very many of these mails were identical – as ‘the faithful’ from various religious groups were rounded up to form a virtual lynching posse.
The Bush administration doesn’t appear to have taken in to account any of this, and all of a sudden are interested in the views of the people. Wouldn’t it have been great if they’d listened to the view of the people before invading Iraq.
Gallagher’s letter draws to a close with, “Given the extent of the negative reaction, I request that the Board will provide process and adequate additional time for these concerns to be voiced and addresses before any additional action takes place on this issue.”
The Bush administration say that they have a concerns that the .xxx domains become a virtual red-light district, reserved exclusively for pornography.
Which way do you want it? Protecting those who don’t want to view porn, or not?
Porn on the Internet is a fact, and will not go away – just as porn in print will not vanish.
Surely it’s better to know where the porn is, rather than those not looking for it stumbling across it by accident.
Others see the creation of a separate TLD for ‘objectionable’ material as a step towards censorship of the Internet. Their concern is who becomes the arbiter of what is and isn’t ‘objectionable’, would a pencil drawing of nude be lumped in with hardcore porn, or would a slightly racy story be forced into the same category.
Is it just us, or do you feel that the steadily increasing involvement of Governments in areas which they really shouldn’t been getting involved with is a concern?
Research has revealed that two thirds of UK Internet users are deeply unchuffed about having to pay a BT line rental on top of their broadband subscription.
Vonage has demanded ‘Naked DSL’ in the UK, which would enable consumers to independently subscribe to telephone and broadband services and allow users to subscribe to a VoIP service instead of a traditional fixed-line service,
“The broadband infrastructure will support a variety of services, one of which is telephony. Customers should be able to decide what services they want to ‘plug’ into their broadband network in the same way that they choose their electricity provider,” he added.
“We are aware that applications providers that don’t contribute to the cost of building and supporting that ever improving broadband network have little appreciation of the economics involved,” said a BT spokesman. “Our customers, however, do”.
‘The Man’ in the form of the EC wants to introduce regulation to the Internet by bringing in controversial rules to cover television online, according to a report in the Times.
Internet-delivered TV is currently unregulated in the UK, so there is no compulsion for Web broadcasters to respect rules governing accuracy and impartiality or taste and decency that apply to all other analogue and digital channels.
Consumers on the move will soon be able spot websites which have been specifically designed for mobile phones courtesy of the .mobi suffix.
The companies hope that the new mobile-optimised websites will encourage consumers to upgrade their phones and access the web more while on the move – and thus generate lots of lovely lolly for their coffers.
A number of people have raised concerns as to how open an organisation Ofcom is. It’s a public corporation, set up in many ways like the BBC, but it was setup with the knowledge that the UK Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) would take effect in January 2005. This has led it to define the accessibility of the information that it produces, as it generates it.
Ofcom’s press release accompanying their response to the DCMS green paper on BBC Royal charter was my first point for comment. It initially indicated to me Ofcom were sticking to:
1. Ofcom have produced more original thinking than I gave them credit for, initially, perhaps because the introduction and summary to the document are not as robust as its contents. Read on…
This reflects the EU rules governing the use of State Aid, which require that publicly funded services such as the BBC’s must complement rather than substitute or duplicate provision by the market. Furthermore, where market developments supersede publicly funded provision, the BBC should withdraw from those services or activities and re-direct its valuable public resources to areas of activity where there is a proven market failure. While market failure should not be the only test applied to BBC services, it should provide the underpinning for all publicly funded BBC services. The absence of a market failure analysis raises significant questions as to the compatibility of the BBC’s publicly funded status with European State Aid rules.
Ofcom has today reported its quarterly figures on the rate of take-up of digital TV in the UK.
This is bad news for Sky, as it’s starting to get close to the around 7.5m homes that they have. What’s worse news for them is in the detail of the report. Sky’s all-important ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) has dropped from £386 in Q4 2004 to £382 in Q1 2005. This might not sound huge, but for an organisation that is trying to constantly increase their ARPU, it’s not encouraging. Another figure of note is their rate of churn, that’s up to 11.1% form 9.6% in the previous quarter.
The growth of aerial-delivered Freeview has been gaining more momentum of late, still spearheaded by the BBC using the Freeview channels to first-show a lot of its content.
The breakdown of the figures is as follows
Unlike the milk-snatcher Margaret Thatcher, the ICANN’s decision proves that they are definitely for turning – in November 2000, the ICANN staff rejected ICM Registry’s first application after objecting to domains such as .kids and .xxx.