[kictanet] The Real Problem with dot-XXX

[Alex Gakuru]

Absent Kenya Information and Communications Law, I am trying to relate below with a known appetite for the "pictures" and trust me, when the international fibre connects at Mombasa, they will flow in Gigabytes starting with coast tourist guest houses.

I totally agree with Walu and Muriuki Mureithi advocating passage of the Bill as  "terribly" urgent! 
A radical parent recently suggested that when you find the kids watching porn in the sitting room, just sit next to them and watch the whole show , that way they will think thrice before "borrowing" or downloading that next video. Porn "content" risks filling every PC early next year after the connect.
 
 [CircleID]

Shakespeare has Marcellus say in Act 1 of Hamlet, “Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark.” 
  Meredith Wilson, in the Music Man, sings, “Well, ya got trouble, my friend, right here, I say trouble right here in River City.” 
  Dick Darman, patron saint of Internet funding in the second Reagan Administration, said, “If it looks like a duck, if it walks like a duck, if it quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck.” 
  Milton Mueller, in his recent post to this site, would have us believe that since ICANN’s Board long ago agreed that ICM’s application for dot-xxx registry satisfied its own criteria for a sponsored TLD, then the only explanation for all the delay is, “I’m beginning to think that ICANN’s approach to TLD approval was cooked up by a demented sergeant from Abu Ghraib.” 
  Milton goes on to assert that ICM’s claim on dot-xxx is protected by the 1st Amendment. 
  If this is so, then why after more than six years of discussion, is dot-xxx still raising such a fuss? 
 Now, it’s certainly true that the porn industry, which definitely includes ICM, since it says it represents a consensus chunk of that business, has notoriously deep pockets for almost anything it fancies, from leading edge technology, to high priced lawyers, to expensive and well placed lobbyists. 
  But if this was a money issue, ICANN would have been bought, or not bought, by now and the fuss would be over. 
  No, there’s something more fundamental at stake. 
  There are limits to the First Amendment. The report of the U.S. Congressional Research Service [PDF] puts it this way: 
 "The First Amendment provides: ‘Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.’ In general, the First Amendment protects pornography, with this term being used to mean any erotic material. The Supreme Court, however, has held that the First Amendment does not protect two types of pornography: obscenity and child pornography."  Herein lies the quandary. As a long list of indictments and successful prosecutions attest, Web-based pornography frequently slides into criminality. Not only that, but the freedom and openness of the net have established new frontiers in predatory behavior across state and national lines, to the point that in the US, it takes a joint federal-state task force of lawyers, net experts, FBI agents and local police to try to keep up with the illegal behavior of a pathological fringe. 
 So what we have, stripped down to essentials, is a moral contest. On the one side are the free expression advocates, such as Milton, who see the greater good in the avoidance of any form of censorship, accompanied by a laissez faire economic conviction that markets will solve most any problem in sight. On the other side are those who wonder how ICANN could have gotten itself entangled in a tawdry business that not infrequently preys on innocent youngsters and enjoys a lot of profit at the same time. How could any amount of rational sounding registry approval process be used as insulation from the downright evil acts which seek cover under the First Amendment? 
 Six years ago, ICANN’s Initial Board told the pornographers to go away, they weren’t in the business of finding a correct moral position in an ocean of sex. Pornography is the single most profitable application on the Internet, and it hardly needs its own registry to enhance consumer choice or expand its profit horizons. 
 Is the current ICANN Board going to hide behind process, or is it going to fulfill its own pledge of transparency and take sides on the morality of dot-xxx? 

<http://www.circleid.com/posts/real_problem_with_dot_xxx/>
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If it costs up to shs 750,000/= to connect firms Nairobi-Mombasa branches for a video conference via already laid fibre, will international bandwidth be any cheaper even after Fujaira-Mombasa cable completion? 

Could we just be re-creating yesterdays equivalent of City Hall water network and billing systems - they owned the pipes so they could charge whatever they wanted, for whatever did or did not flow in "their pipes", at times chalk was good enough for chroline to Nairobians consuming the water and put all their faith in prayer! 

"Open access" remains the only way to ensure  equitable access for everyone! 

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