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Why the .XXX Domain is a Bad Idea That Won't Die
Reader tqft tipped us to an opinion piece on the UK site The Guardian, which lays out the reasons why article writer Seth Finkelstein feels the .XXX domain is a terrible idea. You may recall that last year (being an election year and all), the concept of a triple-X ghetto was revived, considered, and then quashed all in the space of a few months. We also recently discussed the fact that the idea just won't die, as the company ICM Registry pushes ICANN to allow them to pass out the names by Summer. Finkelstein primarily argues that the new domain is a bad idea from a business point of view. Ignoring for a moment the issue that much of this content is already labeled, he sees this as primarily a means for ICM Registry to gain a monopoly on what is sure to be a hot-selling product. Speculators, pornographers, and above-board companies will all jump on the namespace in an effort to ensure that their domain is represented ... or not, as the case may be. Where do you fall on this issue? Would a .XXX domain be helpful for parents, or just a political salve/moneymaking scam?
Ignoring for a moment the issue that much of this content is already labeled
Yeah, it's labeled all right. About the time you see a writhing vulva on your screen, and a mega-penis thrusting repeatedly into it using the latest in animated gif technology, you may notice a small blurb of text that says "Please proceed only if you are 18 years of age or older".
I'm not against it, I just want new tlds to stop being approved left and right just to make profit out of basically no service.
It's starting to get very complicated to rely on URLs and the amount of money you have to spend to keep your companys name in your hands is ridiculous.
what constitutes porn? to a lot of people it's the act of sex between two people that is captured in a form of "real" media (photos or videos as opposed to paintings). however to a lot of america (or amerikkka as liberal websites would say :/) it is nudity in a medical or anatomy book when not viewed by an artist or doctor.
No. Really, stop asking.
http://outcampaign.org/
I help to run web filtering at a small primary school, and while I realise a TLD like this won't shift all the crud into an easily-blocked area of the net, it's a good start. Of course, the downside is that nanny-state governments can then instruct ISPs to block the TLD, thus protecting their good citizens. Protecting primary school kids is one thing, but 'protecting' adults is a whole different ball game.
I guess I just argued for both sides of the equation. I think I'm getting fence splinters.
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
This seems to be rooted solely in politics and the money thereof. Let's leave this one to the politicians, knowing when everything is said and done, more is said than done.
Just my $.02
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
this whole .xxx debate is about sexual repression. while having a .xxx domain won't stop the less responsible porn peddlers from invading the rest of the web as they already have done, it certainly won't hurt at all. what this debate is really about, it the religous right not being able to stand the thought of someone living a life style they consider sinful. if we let them have their way the world would be forced into a scary ned flanders world.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
No more coffee with your paper? What, did you eat a caffeinated donut?
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
Be done with what? Good luck getting the porn off of .com domains.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
Because the implied assumption is that the whole net except .XXX must be protected, that it all must be made child-safe. This eventually results in treating all adults like children. It is far better to give children their own ( such as .kid or .chd ) and retain the assumption that we adults are capable of making decisions for ourselves.
A) makes porn easier to find
B) Does not solve the problem of being able to filter it with parental control software because nobody is going to shut down the porn.com's.
The porn sites have a right to exist, who are we to force them over to .xxx domains? Forcing them all to register with some central DB so they can be black listed would also be impossible becasue there is no realistic way to keep the DB updated.
My solution for addressing the filtering software problem is very simple. We amend robots.txt to include a section for Adult content.
A simple addition on porn sites of a line like this would solve the problem.
User-agent: * Disallow: /forums/ /members/ /downloads/ /
Disallow:
Disallow:
Adult:
Sites not interested in adding the field to robots.txt are not required to by law, but many websites would be willing to accommodate something like this to assist Net Nanny etc., but would fight having to leave porn.net behind for pornforyou12341.xxx tooth and nail. On the internet your company name and your domain name are often the same. Moving them to another TLD would equate to making them shut down and start over under a new name.
This would also greatly assist Google etc. in blocking some of these sites where "safe search" is turned on thus prevent people form going to a jenny.com by mistake and finding porn.
I have made this suggestion a number of time in the past. Maybe I should look into what it would take to get it drafted into an RFC?
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Be done with what? The arguing over whether or not we should have the domain. Once we get it, I'd bet most of the pr0n will move there for "prestige" reasons, and most new adult sites will be there. In the long run, I can't see what possible harm it can do to let them have their tld.
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I don't really get why this is such a bad idea. Especially if they make it so that any site that sells/features nudity/porn has to move to such an extension.
.xxx domains if that was the only place they could be. And all these damn library filters and crap could be made easier. Block blatant porn, and anything else is fair game. I don't see them putting the Anatomy books behind locked doors so kids can't see a drawing of a nude human, and they don't do it with National Geographic, either. This makes it easy to block porn, and keep everything else open.
Let's face it. www.whitehouse.com was one of the all-time great name squatting done. For the longest time, that was a porn site. How many kids and unsuspecting adults stumbled onto that one in the early days?
I'm no screaming conservative by any stretch of the imagination. I lean a lot further towards liberalism than I ever though I would, mostly because I am tired of religion affecting our laws so much, and personal freedoms being stripped from us left and right.
But I don't see any harm in setting these websites up in a much easier to control/block segment of the websphere. And many of these webmasters would love it if it was that much easier to block content by parents. Just think of all the credit card charges to crap companies that supposedly verify age because a person has a CC #? Sheesh, I had one at 16!
At the very least, I could see killing 50% of the pop-ups I run into, simply by blocking all
Besides, think of all the business that it would stir up for a while. All those porn banners having to be redone! hehehe
In some countries it is considered wrong for women to lift their veils so other men can see their faces, and in some women walk around with no shits on like men. Sure there are obvious cases, but who has the final word on what is and isn't sexually explicit content? Who is going to pay to enforce these new morals and who's morals?
Do the American tax payers launch a multi billion dollar crusade to purge the internet of porn and bring our Christian morals to the internationally based Internet?
Early proposals for .xx were to mandate that all porn sites use some form of age verification (ie credit card). With all the fraud on the internet do you honestly believe entering your credit card number and personal into on every porn site you see is a good idea? What age constitutes a "minor" anyway? 18 y/o like in the US? How many people here have never seen any porn before the age of 18? How did you turn out?
To me this only sounds like a pathway for rampant fraud. I don't want to complain without offering up my own solution, so I think if anything is to be done then appending robots.txt to include a line for "Adult: /" where the webmaster of the site sees fit is a much better idea. I posted more on this suggestion here
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Why would you ever move to .xxx? Prestige or not, it's just too easy to block .xxx. Access is everything to the porn industry.
.xxx, and they obviously only want to make a big shiny penny (just like every other stupid specialized domain, e.g., .mobi).
While a few of the large-profile sites can afford to move (the subscription-based ones), the smaller sites that are based on the shared subscription model (you pay $XX/year for access to all member sites, those member sites take a portion of profit) will just multiply, compounding any filtering problems.
Has anyone actually investigated whether the XXX industry actually WANTS the tld? The only thing I've seen personally is the company that is pushing
The basic issue of porn, etc, isn't gonna go away: a significant proportion of people think that sex is bad/dirty etc. In the US we now have a fairly zealous set of laws prohibiting various sexual action/production (just look at the ESPN.com headline yesterday about the 17 year old who's in prison 10 year mandatory for getting a blow job from a 15 year old). With people that are willing to agitate for these beliefs around, I think in terms of technology we should work to make things like porn as clearly classed as possible, like the xxx domain. I would much rather fight over these issues in the .xxx domain, rather than having my freedoms circumscribed in misguided efforts to attain the approval of the zealous because porn is 'hard to filter.'
While I can't speak much about the registry part of a .xxx name, I believe that it would be useful in the long run.
.xxx name for sites that are looking for a purely adult audience. Not just porn, but maybe places like adultfriendfinder, discussions involving less pleasent ideas, and so forth.
.xxx and helping the government look better at "protecting children", the FBI and what not leans off them a little. Yes, there are filters in place for porn, but they aren't always the best- it can be hard to teach a basic filter the difference between HOT NAKED BOOBIES and a page about breast cancer. Along with blocking out content that shouldn't be, it means that content that shouldn't get through does. A .xxx domain would ensure that the filter knows what to and not to pick out. (Hell, some crappy ones might now mark this page as pornographic since I mentioned "boobies".)
.xxx, and thus bringing us into the realm of "what exactly defines porn", but if it can stay as optional as choosing a .com or .net domain, then I don't see a large downfall. I'm sure others will disagree with me, though, and reply as such. (I welcome this, as someone may talk about a point I haven't thought of.)
While porn ad sites don't care about age, regular pay-for-porn sites would probably prefer those with access to a credit card, meaning those who can likely be there legally. Basically, market the
The government could work off this, too. They allow it to pass, and encourage its adoption by the "less scrupulous businesses", and in return for them moving to a
I can understand the fear of governments forcing porn sites to move to
If you mean PORN, why not say PORN? What is this p0rn shit?
Here is the direct quote:
"Any commercial Internet site or online service that "has as its principal or primary business the making available of material that is harmful to minors" would be required to move its site to that domain. Failure to comply with those requirements would result in civil penalties as determined by the Commerce Department."
Please do not blindly support the bill without first understanding just what exactly it proposes.
I had another post covering why I think this is bad here and proposed an alternate solution here
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
The idea that the Internet should be made "safe" is offensive to me on so many levels. If parents would do their job and not let their kids roam the Internet unsupervised, this entire argument would disappear. I, for one, want the puritans the hell away from technology legislation. What about you?
The Internet is not a playground for children. It's not a fun Christian diversion. It's a network for anyone and everyone to connect to one another electronically. Let's not turn it into Disneyland or Utah. The last thing society needs is FCC-like regulations on everything they do online. Besides, the responsibility in raising children shouldn't fall into the hands of people than don't have any. Parents need to police this issue, not parents AND single individuals.
The "save the children" argument is just a cheap way to achieve the anti-porn agenda. Don't be fooled. It has nothing to do with kids. Trust me, they'll have pre-marital sex and get each other pregnant without online porn. It's been happening for 1,000's of years and will happen for a thousand more. Humans will do what they're biologically designed to do. Legislation can't stop that.
It CAN, however, open the door for more censorship-inspired legislation. How long until the FCC steps in and begins to fine people that use profanity online? I don't think I'm exaggerating my fears. It's already ridiculous that you can't say "Shit" on the radio. After all, how many kids listen to Larry King Live?
Censorship of any kind is fascism. It doesn't matter what cause it's attached to. Today it's porn. Tomorrow it's anti-Americanism. Just because you may not agree with porn, doesn't mean that laws should be passed to control it. Look away. Install commercially available filtering products. Don't let your kids surf unsupervised. For that matter, don't leave your kids unsupervised near ANYTHING you don't want them around. Just don't ask big brother to watch over you. That fucks us all.
What if it's strictly voluntary? If you have an adult site, you can have it under .xxx or not as you see fit. Then, those who don't want to be exposed to adult content can avoid it if that's what makes them happy and those who are interested in it can find it easier. So what if some countries block it at the routers? Isn't the Internet designed to work around damage?
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With a .xxx TLD I'd finally be able to distinguish between fullofspunk.net as a motivational business website and fullofspunk.xxx as a site featuring pictures and videos of semen.
It will also allow us to distinguish between sites run by Landover Baptist Church, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
At first glance, the .xxx idea seems fine to me. Right now the .com domain space is cluttered with random domain names that will bring up porn. It's not so much the children, as just the sanity of it all. The probability that you can type in a random URL and likely pull up porn says that the usefulness of the domain name is diminishing.
.xxx TLD ends up being a small subset of a larger problem, and doesn't even fix the subset problem. As many people have suggested, it's not going to force porn companies from using .com. It may act as a magnet for children, though I'll suspect most browsers will block .xxx by default (think of the children!). Making the entire venture, a method to get lots of money for some TLD company.
The domain name is supposed to be some type of mapping between a company's name, general interest, etc. to a specific web page. This was great when the web was small, but even without all the porn, it still mostly fails. Thus the search engine.
So URLs are relegated to (sometimes) brand name, (sometimes) company names, bookmarks, and printed ads. That is, all other times, it doesn't really matter what the domain name is.
The
Perhaps a better approach would be to actually put some structure on naming. A hierarchical is already somewhat in use per domain, but is not problem free. Also, name.adult.com is essentially the same as name.xxx.
Tagging is an already wide-used technique employed on the net, why not use it for names too? The tags can be done in an inclusive manner, such that an organization can allow acceptance of a particular web page to that tag. For example, 'child' could be applied to make sure there is no objectionable material. But wait, by whose standard? Well, there could be several 'child' tag organizations. For parents, they can pick the one which agrees with their standards.
Am I in favor of censorship? Definitely not. But I'm also going to have to live with the fact that some people are going to disagree with my sensibilities. Why not give them their own playground, and get them out of mine?
If it is such a good idea, then why don't webmasters use xxx instead of www in their URLs? It would allow for all the filtering that a top-level domain name would. Just label a site something like "xxx.pr0n.com" instead of "www.pr0n.com". Simple.
Or is it simply about the registrars making more money off of a new TLD?
You're not going to sell porn to people who aren't looking for it. And a TLD makes it easier to find, how is it a bad idea again?
Tluin natha Linux xxizzuss uriu olt bwael mon'tun.
I'd rather not see hillaryclinton.xxx, either!
RTFA. Or were you just gunning to get first post?
No one wants .xxx except the registrars, who would sell .xxx domains, speculators would would buy them to resell to companies defensively. Big companies would be forced to buy the .xxx rather than let one of the scumbags set up a site on yahoo.xxx, etc. Companies already buy .info, .biz, .net, .org and usually just park or redirect from them. There won't be any less porn on .com. It's just a complete scam.
At least one good thing could come out of this:
goatse.xxx
What does a TLD have to do with finding porn, or anything else? Are you gong to make a list of words, append .xxx, and type them into your address bar: aardvark.xxx,.... zygote.xxx?
If the only people who want this new tld are the registers, nobody will use it. If so, what harm is done? As far as first post, I'm not a subscriber, and I'm astonished to have gotten it. At least it's something relevant, not a comment about getting first post.
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If you can't come up with a more imaginative description of people exchanging zygote's, this domain is not for you.
This might be controversial but I think top-level domains - .com, .edu, .gov, .org, .net - are all a bad idea. It's a bad user interface. I understand the technical reasons why they exist but technology shouldn't be an excuse for a broken interface. Here are several reasons why top-levels suck.
1. They are a limited number of categories that will never satisfy everybody. The basic ones seem obvious - .org, .com, .gov, .edu, .net - but really that's not enough. In Australia we also have .asn.au and .id.au. Even that's not enough. The .xxx top-level is an attempt to corral all pornographic domains into a single top-level domain. Why stop there? Who not create .religion and .news as well? I'll tell you why not; it's a slippery slope and it'll never end. Top-level domains are attempting to use taxonomy to attach metadata to the URL and it's doomed to failure because there will never be sufficient variety.
2. It leads to cross-domain squatting. The classic example was whitehouse.com - a porn site - which caught unwary travellers who were looking for whitehouse.gov. The converse example is a company like Ebay who needs .ebay.com but what about .ebay.org? It isn't registered and Ebay is never going to be given .ebay.org, so it's stupid for the DNS to permit it as an option.
3. The geographical breakdown is equally useless. Lots of Australia companies register .com domains because it's "cooler" which means the geographical taxonomy is immediately broken. It also means an international company has to register several dozen (160+) second-level domains (.com, .co.uk, .com.au, .co.jp, .com.ca, etc). It would make much more sense to browse http://ebay/au/ because then Ebay has an international presence. Apple has the right idea here because that's exactly what they do; all their geographical top-levels redirect to http://apple.com/xy/.
4. The user shouldn't need to care. Why should a newbie to the Internet be required to type .com after the name for companies, .edu after the name for universities, etc? How would they even know? Especially given point #2 that typically there isn't going to be any variation; only one of the combinations will be valid. In fact, most browsers automatically append .com because they know the user is going to type "ebay" rather than "ebay.com". But that's fricking useless for everybody who isn't in the USA (ie, most of us).
5. Some companies straddle the line and don't fit neatly into either category. An example in Australia is Telstra - are they .com.au or .net.au? Are they .net.au when they provide network services but .com.au when they provide non-network services? In fact the distinction is as clear as mud: Telstra has both .net.au and .com.au and they mush them together as they feel like. It makes a mess of the browser security because you can be on telstra.com.au one minute and the next link will take you to telstra.net.au. User. Interface. Disaster.
Now you can disagree with some or all of those points. Hell, Slashdot seems to be full of nitpickers who delight in pointing out grammatical mistakes, so I wouldn't be surprised if somebody said "but without TLD our CEO will be OMG WTF, LOL". But ignore the technical details - they're just problems to solve - and look at the big picture: top-level domains are a broken user interface and no amount of patching will fix it. It was OK as the prototype but because it's the prototyp
The problem isn't filtering content. The problem is that domain names are a terrible way to do it (see RFC 3675), and there are better ways of doing it (see PICS).
As for a voluntary .xxx, the public and legislators will misunderstand its limitations. It's practically begging for bad law. It's better not to set it up in the first place.
http://outcampaign.org/
The biggest advantage for the porn industry is that afterward everybody typing in the address of the link or clickijng a link ending with .xxx KNOWS what he/she wants and thus can be blamed itself for what he tried to see. Whereas with the situation now, the porn industry TAKES the blame if anybody (adult or infant does not matter) accidentaly type in/click a .COM address which does show porn image. By having .xxx everyone wins : all parents or sensible person which can simply then block all .xxx domain, the porn industry because then nobody can anymore talk about being "accidentally" there. The ONLY loss for the porn industry is that then every consenting adult lose any excuse to have browsed on porn domain by accident since with .xxx it willl be obvious that you are on a porn page. ? "ho honey, no I just wanted to learn more about how to solve multiple-body physics interraction and I accidentally clicked onn that porn link" won't hold water if all link end with .xxx
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Creating a red light district would arguably make porn easier to find for children
.xxx,.net,.org, .com or .fucktit domain name. NOTHING which can be found a few click away today cannot be found by anybody older than 8.
.xxx web site but that would not hold water I guess if people pay directly to oversea account, a bit like the gambling casino stuff.
Explain me with the advent of search engine, how is it difficult for any kids to :
* type in www.google.com
* enter free porn image (or free porn video)
* clicks on "I am 18 and want to see the preview video"
I am sorry, but that argument do not hold any shred of water. Unless you are speaking of mentally disabled children, if they want to search for porn, they will find it whether it is a
Now for the rest of your argument, I agree you can't force the rest of the world onto it. You could try to force sales of subscription in the US for porn to only comes from
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
That would fix the filtering problem simply and for ever. Also the people should be informed that the numbers are just as good as, if not better than, names. Thus all the interesting numbers would get some intellectual value. Why have the General Electric Company not exploited the IP address 3.4.5.6 for example? Surely that's worth a bob or two? Wake up shareholders of the corporations which hold class A domain numbers, you can sue your corporate directors for not maximising the return on your funds! Taken to the obvious conclusion, a Class A IP number squatter should have all 16 million numbers taken off them and these numbers reserved for porn servers. How about the unused 51/8 network for a start? That would free up 4,294,967,296 numbers which could be especially reserved for porn servers. On the other hand the current user of those numbers could exploit them to provide a substantial income to the British DHSS, who are the current number squatters. Rent your porn server IP number by paying the pension of a poor Briton! Bags 51.52.53.54! The very ages when a flagging body actually needs perking up with a bit of visual stimulation. The mind boggles as to the value of that number. Surely that would keep the even most debauched users of porn happy for a while? As for a .xxx TLD! Well really!! That is just fraud pure and simple. To separate suposedly undesirable content from the rest of the HTTP traffic you just pass a worldwide law to put the all the porn servers on a port other than 80. It's a one digit change in the Apache web server config file. And creating a browser which won't work on that port so as to protect the children's parents from the embarrasment of having to explain to their little ones what the genital organs are for.
Aham. Planet Earth is not just the USA. There will be plenty of offshore .com porn sites to fill any void created.
And I'm kind of looking forward to slashdot.xxx - "Nudes for Nerds"
How does it make it easier to find? Well, I daresay, if you went to whitehouse.xxx you would know in advance that it's going to be naughty bits.
.com TLD that share a similar or same name as a non-porn .org TLD. So, yeah, it's possible to go to the naughty sites and not intend to. Which, of course, can lead to all kinds of trouble at home, work, wherever.
.xxx TLD exists... well, it's difficult to imagine, at least in the U.S., that someone would go to a .xxx site looking for facts on the President. (see the whitehouse.xxx example above). Basically, people would no longer have the excuse that they went to the wrong page by accident. Of course, this will mean that some people will get in trouble because they can't bullshit their way out of the fact that they were looking at llama porn, but hey... not everyone gets to be a winner.
There are plenty of porn sites that are at the
Yet, if a
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
That's perhaps a nice wish. However, assuming it will go away is another thing.
Government is not simply a world marketplace that offers ideas and if no one buys, it restocks the shelves with other ideas. We give government the special power of force that we do not give shopkeepers wherein if people disagree with the ideas it is offering, it can take action. The more vague that action, the more subject to the individual whim of an individual attempting to enforce or, just as likely, to exploit such powers.
To pick an obvious and somewhat overused example, the bad ideas of the Nazi movement were indeed rejected by the people, but it's a stretch to say "therefore one should not worry about governments getting an occasional wrong idea because these things tend to work out". It took time to notice the problem in that case, and very bad things happened in the interim. By the time a problem was noticed, it took was not easy to fix. One cannot simply fast forward to the outcome without seeing the time in between and say "it was a bad idea and eventually no one bought it".
McCarthyism in the US played out with somewhat similar shape, although fortunately far less cost in human lives. But by similar shape, I mean that it was a kind of insidious idea from the start, and it crept like a cancer with people not seeing what a bad idea it was until it was widespread and it started to impact so many people that it simply could not be ignored.
The notion that the government should be able to push things "harmful to minors" into this ghetto is like giving a big gun to anyone who has government authority to act but not telling them who to aim it at. Harmful to minors is not a statement like "boils at 100 degrees" that can be objectively tested. What protections does it offer to people who have no intent to harm minors and are simply operating in an area that raises questions.
Some things that have been classified by at least some people as harmful to minors within our lifetime include sex education, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth , and the teaching of evolution. Will we expect to find the teaching of safe sex practices only in the .xxx domain? What about climatechange.xxx or darwin.xxx?
And that's only in the US,
the supposed model of freedom. How will such a domain be construed in countries around the
world that have more conservative points of view. Will we see tjmaxx.xxx? barnesandnoble.xxx?
mit.edu.xxx?
The problem with "parental" government is that people often naively assume that it it has a brain at all, and also that the brain will be applied uniformly. In fact, what is more likely is the kind of thing you see on cop shows all the time where cops come to a restaurant owner who won't give them the info they want and they say "I'm sure you wouldn't want the health inspector in here all over you." So the guy caves and gives up the information. The public isn't served by the health code law because in the end, the law is more useful (to those TV cops, at least) or some undisclosed purpose than it is for actually making sure things get cooked right.
And the problem is that the undisclosed purpose is flexible and varying. The whole war on terror is going the same way. If the government can make "being a person" (or at least, all of its aspects) sufficiently illegal, then there's always at least some club handy for threatening to arrest a person if he gets out of hand, whatever the enforcer thinks is out of hand. And at that point, there's no freedom left. That's an analogy that Slashdotters should understand: It's like software patents. Overly broad. Overly vague. Applied inconsistently. Difficult to defend. And offering no really safe avenue of behavior. And that means no one can safely develop anything. They can just hope they aren't singled out for enforcement.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
You're now arguing a completely different proposition. It's one thing to create a domain .xxx and say it's for porn. Whatever else it does, you'll certainly get porn sites there. It's quite another to imagine that this will magically lead to all porn disappearing from .com. So you'll be no more safe from "stumbling" on porn. And as your example shows, many people would still prefer to use the .com just for a shred of deniability when their boss/wife looks through their history.
The implications already are that .com is commerce, .org is nonprofits, .gov is government, and .net is for networks (for instance, ISPs).
.gov is actually enforced.
.XXX domain is like having one of those "You must be 18 to enter" things. It's a way of self-censorship, of saying "I know this is pornography, and not safe for children."
.XXX, but I think having your filtering software be a line in a host file is really, really nice.
As far as I know, only
So, basically, registering a
There have been technical arguments against
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It's insanely easy to block a whole TLD, but no one's forcing you to block it, and no one's forcing pornographers to use it. Hell, plenty of them already have "You must be 18 or over" links, and even banner ads for things like NetNanny.
.com name. You are not required to have any kind of network, or be related to any kind of network, to own a .net name. You are not required to be a nonprofit, officially or unofficially, to own a .org name.
.gov, but the only thing similar that could happen here is the .XXX registrar(s) refusing to accept registrations from anyone who won't use it for porn.
And you aren't exaggerating your fears, really, but you are having a knee-jerk reaction to one immediate assumption. It's true, this article makes that assumption, but you can still stop frothing at the mouth and try to look at this sanely. You are not required to be a corporation, or participate in any kind of commerce (other than your registration fees) to own a
The only one I know of that's actually enforced is
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Has anyone actually investigated whether the XXX industry actually WANTS the tld?
.com and other domains like it is now.
/rant
First, TLDs are a good idea that simply do not work in reality. Proof of this is that slashdot.com and slashdot.org are exactly the same even though they have different TLDs. OK, that was a bad example, because a counter to that would be a few years ago with whitehouse.com vs whitehouse.gov.
The deal with the XXX domain is that it will be yet another gold rush for the "good ones" if it comes into existence, but then nothing will change. Porn will be typosquatted and littered all over the
My point is that TLDs are ineffective in reality (but great in theory), and the XXX TLD would be great to help save the children (in theory), but the poor kids will see people fucking and sucking even if there is a XXX domain.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
For example, to get a list of
http://www.google.co.uk/search?as_sitesearch=.org
to get a list of
http://www.google.co.uk/search?as_sitesearch=.mus
To get a list of
http://www.google.co.uk/search?as_sitesearch=.xxx
"But", you say, "of what use is a mssive list of all domains? You could never click them all!" The truth is that we can go EVEN FURTHER and search for key words within sites in those domains, but I fear the culture shock from showing you this would be too much for you to bear.
This may all sound like science fiction in your primitive era but one day this technology will seem almost common place.
The real Ralph Yarro posts as Anonymous Coward. Anyone else is an impostor.
I fear that once we start going down that path, then other forms of partitioning will become more palatable. One can construct an argument that political speech should be in a seperate TLD so that domain registrants can register as potential lobbyists. To make it more attractive you make the domain registration free for "non-lobbyists" (however that gets defined) and a sliding fee scale for "lobbyists."
I think the whole expansion of the DNS TLD's was a bad idea.
I'm sure the original architects, users, and maintainers of the WWW in the government and educational realms felt the exact same way about the .COM moniker being created in order to open the floodgate of commercialism into their tiny, intellectual ecosystem. And they were right for thinking so. They probably had more reason to be upset about THAT change than ANYONE has to be upset about THIS change.
.XXX on top of .COM is like going to a guy with 90% burns all over his body and holding his hand over a lighter. Yeah, sure you may do a LITTLE damage, but in comparison to what's already been done its meaningless.
Adding
The 'net was raped when corporations were allowed to turn it into a vast wasteland of advertising, marketing, and surveillance.
Adding a designated porn area is just the natural progression of things.
Every time this comes up, and people go "This isn't such a bad idea...", they dont stop to think, who decides what is porn?!? We cant even legally define it, "I know it when i see it." is not a valid system for this kind of thing. Other posters have touched on this. A whitelisted .kid TLD is a much better idea.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."