When in Rome
I had half-a-lunch with the people who submitted a bid for .sex as a sponsored top-level domain in the current sTLD round. I'm polite. The food was tolerable for a major hotel stuck wicked far from anyplace anyone would come to Rome for. The rest of my lunch was with friends.
In terms of Internet Governance, pornographers are less of a bother than the Intellectual Property Constituency, who more or less decide most of the substantive issues, and the neither-fish-nor-fowl confusion of ICANN staff and board -- are they acting selflessly in the "public interest" (and if so, according to what definition of both terms?) or are they acting in selfishly in the "interest of the public" (and if so ...).
The ontology-must-fail arguement (available at Atrios) is on tap where ever fine lable-spaces are sold. The W3C tried to make lables for website content withPICS. Engage tried to make lables for on-line clusters of interest, the bins its inference engine would scan to construct the ad-set most likely to get conversion (click-through) when shown on the side bar (unlike Google ads that put daft right-wing business props on Atrios' side bar). And so on. Computer scientists love ontologies. Formal systems, like UNO and Go Fish! and Candyland, are closed, well-defined systems. Unlike reality.
The .sex proposal is several years old, right up there with Chris Ambler's contention that he owns .web (for websites, what else?), and ICANN is just gumming things up (which it is, frequently).
I actually had a very nice time at IETF-48 (Pittsburg) with an old acquaintance from USENIX who makes a living operating for-pay network services (yes, its sex). I'm glad Duncan has this covered. God knows I don't need to write another from-under-the-skirts-of-ICANN piece.
Oh. The sTLD round isn't over, .cat hasn't been approved, though the IPU's .post has (hurray for my friends at SWITCH who operate .ch and .li), and .travel has (hurray for my friend formerly at .coop), and the ultra-mornic Nokia-and-co-conspiritors .mobi has (you can tell if a device has piss poor bandwidth, no power, and the computational capacity of a coffee cup by the suffix of the device's name? Why not .dead?), and .sex is just a missed period and a three characters trying to get a date.