[liberationtech] gTLDs and censorship

[Miles Fidelman]

Steve Weis wrote:
> Short answer: Yes, it's trivial to filter specific TLDs, but it won't
> matter unless laws requiring their use were strictly enforced.
>
> Censorship was a motivation for the ".xxx" TLD, which went into
> operation this year. The idea is that if all the porn sites were .xxx
> domains, it would be easier to block them. In practice, porn sites may
> voluntarily register a .xxx domain, but are still going to keep their
> existing domains. Censors will add a filter to block all .xxx domains
> and business will go on as usual.
>
> Censoring .xxx will not make any difference unless porn sites are
> legally required to use it. This was proposed by US Senators Mark
> Pryor and Max Baucus in the "Cyber Safety for Kids Act", but it died
> in committee. That's not surprising since it would be hard to enforce
> and most likely challenged in court.

And then it's pretty simple to bypass DNS entirely by publishing IP 
addresses (ever notice how much spam contains links to numeric addresses?).

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In<fnord>  practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra