If you haven't heard much about the FSC then you probably just weren't paying attention to industry activism until recently. The organization has been trying to reach out to the online industry for years. Most webmasters didn't pay attention until 2257.
You probably just didn't know this, but I am on the Board of Directors for the FSC, and have been involved in some way with the organization for a while now. There was a time when I was concerned that the FSC was not showing enough attention to the online industry, but that has certainly changed in recent years.
That said, I completely agree with you that we tend to wait longer than we should to react to industry threats. As someone who has been trying to call attention to issues like 2257, dot-xxx and obscenity laws for many years now I can tell you that part of the problem is that whenever someone DOES try to get webmasters motivated in advance of a problem, someone else accuses them of being "Chicken Little" and all efforts to get webmasters to act are lost.
Those people who have been mocking others with "The Sky is Falling!" remarks have done a lot of damage. They have encouraged many webmasters to take a casual "nothing will hurt us" attitude towards important issues, and that's one of the reasons why we're in a tough spot right now. We're stuck scrambling at the last minute, like we are now with dot-xxx and 2257, because webmasters failed to take the threat seriously until the two-minute warning.
Hopefully we'll do better in the future, but the good news is that there still is time to defend ourselves. We are facing a number of threats to our business right now. This thread is a great example of the industry doing the right thing and calling on Joan and ASACP to rescing its support of dot-xxx publicily. If ASACP would do that, it would be tremendously helpful to those of us who are doing everything we can to fight against dot-xxx becoming a reality this year. Right now, ICANN thinks that the industry's own "child protection" organization supports .XXX, and we need to change that.
Baddog, my compliments for starting this thread and keeping it going.
