ICANN Approves .xxx Suffix For Porn Websites

An anonymous reader tips news that ICANN has officially approved the creation of a .xxx suffix for porn sites, confirming the rumors we discussed on Thursday. While this resolves a 10-year debate on the subject, the Guardian notes that "many pornography companies are unhappy with the idea of a dedicated space online because they expect that as soon as .xxx is implemented, conservative members of the US Congress will lobby to make any sex-related website re-register there and remove itself from other domains such as .com or .org." Others are more confident, like Stuart Lawley of ICM Registry, the company sponsoring the new TLD. "Mr. Lawley said more than 100,000 domains had preregistered. He said he expected that when the dot-xxx domains opened for business, nine to 12 months from now, some 500,000 domains would register, or roughly 10% of the five million to six million adult online sites."

Comments

Re:Wtf is xxx?

[Ziekheid]

Nope, xxx is actually recognised in a lot of countries. I have never heard of it meaning crossed/censored before.
I just asked people from Germany, England, Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden (IRC ftw) and they all knew what it meant.

Re:100,000 preregistered?

[nmb3000]

I'm sure that 90% of those preregistrations are by domain name squatters.

Of course they are, which is to be expected since this whole exercise is nothing more than registrars grabbing at cash.

The sad part is all the uninformed idiots posting here who support the idea -- if even a fair number of Slashdot posters still don't understand why this is such a horrible idea then it's no wonder ICANN caved. On the one hand, they look good to the morons who have been pushing for this stupid idea for years, and on the other they were probably bribed with a huge amount money. Win win!

For those wondering why .xxx is a terrible idea that is completely doomed to fail (at all the "official" goals at least, it will certainly succeed as the gravy train it's designed to be), read RFC 3675: .sex Considered Dangerous. It has all the same arguments being presented here, plus more.