Tom Morris takes on xxx

[Marc Perkel]

So it's really a sin tax.

We could tax .gambling to fun probability mathematics education in high
school.
We could tax .prostitution to fund abstinence education.
Would we tax .atheist to fund religious education or tax .god to fund
science education?

I'm just raising the question if the purpose of ICANN is to be in the
morality tax business.

I personally don't like morality taxes. I used to live in San Francisco
where I committed the immoral act of owning a car. San Francisco looks
down on car owners as sinners the way non-smokers look at smokers.
That's just kind of something I find annoying, unless of course I'm the
one who gets to decide who has to pay the sin taxes. (not me!)

Getting back on track. If ICANN gets into the sin tax business then
that's mission creep. It leads to creeping into law enforcement, moral
police, things that ICANN should not be doing.

Granted someone needs to protect children from predators but .xxx has
nothing to do with it. And it's logically inconsistent.

porn.xxx - tax
porn.com - no tax

Now - if there were a TLD where to join the TLD requires special
processing - like .lawyer might require validating that you are a member
of the bar - then the cost of doing that should be included in the
domain. But in my mind he cost has to be directly connected to the TLD.

And - that is the point I'm trying to make.

On 3/22/2011 4:32 PM, Milton L Mueller wrote:
> It's supposed to donate to general foundations/organizations working on child abuse. But really that's mostly posturing of course; governments have seized on regulating the .xxx domain as if putting requirements on it really combats the more serious problems. As Perkel pointed out, the logic behind that often doesn't hold up.
>
>>
>> --
>> Professor Andrew A Adams                      aaa at meiji.ac.jp
>> 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/