IANA Port blocking proposal ... ?

[Robert Guerra]

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 <rguerra at privaterra.org>
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.
>