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5/25/06

Worldwide Tech : Sex, Politics, and the Internet - US says no to domain names ending in XXX

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Sex, Politics, and the Internet - US says no to domain names ending in XXX

Regulation of domain names like .xxx is particularly susceptible to interference, said Tim Berners-Lee, the man who helped create the World Wide Web. "Management of the domain names is anomalous on the Internet because they are centralized," he said. "That anomaly makes the governance of domain names a much more political issue, a much more commercial issue." The head of the agency that authorizes Internet address names insists that its rejection of an address for pornography sites this month was neither politically motivated nor unduly influenced by the U.S. government, despite accusations of meddling from both the European Commission and the U.S. company hoping to manage the address.

"We see here a first clear case of political interference in ICANN," a spokesman for Viviane Reding, the EU commissioner for information society and media, said after the vote. The spokesman said correspondence between ICANN and the U.S. Department of Commerce highlighted the "interference."

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