Extremist Mormons trying to ‘clean up’ port 80 again

Image of the deelishus Merrick Monroe.

Seriously: can’t CP80 just be taken out back and shot? As usual, they’re unleashing a huge cut and paste email campaign amongst their believers to control other people’s sexuality, this time aimed at ICANN. Ugh! Snip from Mormons demand ICANN plugs net smut hole:

Mormon anti-pornography activists led by SCO Group chairman Ralph Yarro III are calling on ICANN to give more political clout to those who want to kick porn off the web. Scores of Yarro’s followers have this week petitioned ICANN to OK the formation of a new “Cybersafety Constituency” which would help develop binding policies for the internet’s domain name system.

The drive is being orchestrated by Cheryl Preston, the top lawyer for CP80.org, an “Internet Zoning” censorship campaign headed by Yarrow, who is also the chairman and largest shareholder of controversial Linux vendor SCO. CP80.org wants all adult material banned from Port 80, the standard protocol port for the web, and confined to a new port. It also suggests that “ISPs could simply block all IP addresses originating from a non-compliant country”. ICANN is responsible for managing internet port and IP address allocations globally.

Preston told ICANN last December that the Cybersafety Constituency would represent “the interests of families, children, consumers, victims of cybercrime, religions and cultures”. If approved, it would have equivalent policy-making power to existing ICANN constituencies such as intellectual property interests, ISPs and non-commercial domain name owners.

While Preston had previously disclosed her affiliations to ICANN, her petition for the new constituency does not mention any of CP80.org’s radical policies concerning the internet’s fundamental architecture. ICANN has asked for comments on the proposal here. So far, the vast majority of commenters support the move, and a majority of those are identikit stock letters, written by and sent at the request of Yarrow. (…read more, theregister.co.uk, thanks cachedout!)

Update: Ars Technica has a very concrete breakdown of the way Preston’s vision of port 80 would look (read: Save the children? ICANN opens debate on CyberSafety charter), and dings it in the essential closer, saying:

As for CP80’s ICPA proposal, it’s a bad idea; there’s no way feasibly address the political and technical challenges of the project. Even if all such barriers vanished, there would still remain the age-old question of censorship—who does the censoring and writes the standards? Pretending that these issues are irrelevant because we all agree that protecting children is important is whitewashing the topic at its finest. ICANN is accepting public comment on the issue.