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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."
I'm sure that 90% of those preregistrations are by domain name squatters.
(Tries to imagine hot chick squatting on a domain)
[fails, shrugs] I guess there really is a site for every kind of fetish.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
All this will do is rake in registration $$$ and have zero effect on anything else. Take any site for example, like youporn.com. They will go register youporn.xxx so they have their name protected, and one will redirect to the other. If some other company tried to register youporn.xxx out from under them, the real site would just sue and claim it.
They won't give up their .com addresses, so nothing will change.
It is only in the US that xxx is equivalent to porn. In other languages, xxx means crossed over or censored. So why the fuck is the new tld called "xxx" when the porn link is only obvious to Americans? Isn't ICANN supposted to care about the whole world and not just the US? If they wanted a porn tld, they could have called it ".porn," ".adult" or even ".sex" both which would have been more logical than ".xxx" Is it because the word "porn" is so dirty you have to call it "xxx" instead and pretend it is something else?
Football Odds
They've been trying to get a .xxx domain for a long time, but I couldn't figure out why. The porn industry opposes it, the people who oppose the porn industry oppose it, and tech people generally oppose it. Took me a while to realize it was only some registrars who wanted some extra cash who kept bringing it up.
My question is, why did ICANN finally relent? Were they bribed? Did they just become impatient over the issue that they've said 'no' to for over a decade? Is it possible to get anything passed through ICANN if you just ask enough times? Why is ICANN supporting this blatant rent-seeking?
Qxe4
If not, someone should get on that...
More importantly (at least according to Ars Technica) is that ICANN approved Chinese internationalized domain names in this same update notification. What's the big deal with the XXX domain? Okay so now I know that the porn site I'm going to is actually a porn site ... big deal. Ain't going to help filters all that much anyway unless it's required which would be really stupid and shortsighted. I think the changes for a billion Chinese speakers is bigger news.
My work here is dung.
I think the concept behind the .xxx domain has the potential of leading the internet down a dangerous path. If the other TLD's are forced by their governing entity, e.g. the US government for the .com TLD, to prohibit pornographic content, the precedent will be set to segregate and regulate content.
Register yourname.xxx as your personal homepage, and give it out to all of your friends and coworkers! When they ask, "Umm, is this...", respond with, "You'll just have to go find out, now won't you?", and follow with a wink and a wry smile. Of course, you always could, you know, if you wanted...
no, it's Ice Cube that's the popular one.
"There are no facts, only interpretations." --Friedrich Nietzsche.
i'm not talking about the religious nuts, i understand their point of view: they think a .xxx domain makes porn legitimate. as if not having a .xxx domain means POOF, all porn disappears. porn is a part of society, and some can argue it actually serves a valid purpose (harmless release of sexual frustrations). get used to it, (hypocritical) social conservatives, you have a better chance fighting the rising and falling of the tides. its not going away, ever
but i'm talking about the porn purveyors: why are they fighting this? it's not a ghettoization, its a domain. yes, it makes it easy to censor sexual content. and what's wrong with that? if i have some kids in my house, and i want to black hole all .xxx domains, i should be able to do that. if a nation wants to blackhole all .xxx domains at a national level meanwhile: ok, this nation is retarded. as if not having .xxx means they won't engage in idiotic censorship? you make it easier for them? do you see iran and china quaking in their boots because censorship is hard? get real: a committed censoring asshole is a committed censoring asshole, the issue of easy or hard to censor is an issue for people who want to block the domain for legitimate purposes (kids in the house), not an issue for those who will censor no matter what
and finally, there's the red herring of sexual content that shouldn't be grouped with porn, like sexual health. well if its sexual health, like how to put on a condom, its sexual health, end of discussion. its not pornography. yes, some assholes will try to group sexual health issues with porn. the existence of such assholes does not mean sexual health issues deserve to be with porn, just that there exists assholes in this world with harmful ideas about sexual health that you need to fight, and the existence or lack of existence of an .xxx domain does not change their existence or the need to fight them. in fact, let them make fools of themselves by trying to group sexual health topics with porn, and reveal to the thinking rational world what ignorant assholes they really are, bring their idiocy to the forefront
the REAL point is that pornography is not some GOTCHA that tries to sneak up on innocent teenagers and corrupt their souls, this is social conservative bullshit (and fails to understand human nature). clearly defining and delineating pornographic content simply underlines the most important point here: pornography is something that people choose to consume, and if some hypocritical social conservative asshole doesn't like that fact, or is ashamed of that fact, then don't click on an .xxx domain, end of story!
because no one is trying to trick you into recognizing that you have sexual urges
fly the new .xxx flag loud and proud. its simply a healthy recognition of the fact that we are sexual beings, and we are happy and comfortable making a space for this material on our internet. LACK OF recognition of the validity of porn is the REAL problem, lack of an .xxx domain is an act of misplaced shame, and that's the real motivation behind ignoring the issue, and denying porn its own domain
giving porn its own domain is sex positive, and good for society. really. every rational, self-aware human should celebrate this
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Lawley says he expects to make $30m (£20m) a year in revenue by selling each .xxx site for $60, and pledges to donate $10 from each sale to child protection initiatives.
If he actually gives $6 million per year to child protection causes the universe will implode out of shock and amazement.
.xxx domain (or that .xxx can be blocked altogether), so now they're safe from porn? Because I'm sure that .xxx porn sites will never use pop-up loops or deceptive ads or auto-dialing trojans the way many .com porn sites have done forever. The new .xxx porn industry will be squeaky clean, with our children's welfare at heart!
.com, .net, and .org porn sites to re-register in .xxx and drop their old domains, which will not happen.
.com sites for quite some time, and that .com sites will simply register the same domain registered under .xxx and redirect people back into the .com site.
Also on children, are they supposing children will never stumble into a
Not to mention the whole thing won't have any damn effect unless you simultaneously force current
Furthermore, for the whole notion of giving adults an easy, consolidated place to access porn, let me give ICANN a big hint: whether it's porn, cracks, bomb making instructions, or whatever, the most obvious place to look for anything even vaguely taboo is always the one most flooded with scams, viruses, top lists, etc. which make the obvious places by far the most worthless places to look. I predict that absolutely all worthwhile porn will remain on
What's the correct syntax for wget to retrieve an entire TLD?
wget -r *.xxx isn't working.
Wouldn't this snuffix soon be included in the firewall blocklists of corporations and not-so-open-minded states? And that would be bad for the xxx business so the sites would have to keep/create .com sites too.
"It is only in the US that xxx is equivalent to porn. In other languages, xxx means crossed over or censored"
so in countries besides the usa sexuality isn't the biggest target for censorship?
and i said "in countries besides the usa" not "my own special subset of liberal european countries i use to ridicule the usa's policies, rather than the full set of countries in the world, revealing that the usa is actually moderate or left of center on most issues, and even more left leaning on some free speech issues than supposedly liberal european countries"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"Each domain registration will cost $60 a year, with $10 going to a nonprofit organization promoting “responsible business practices” for the industry." Beside this being overly expensive for a domain name the fact that they donate $10 per domain to a nonprofit organisation is just wrong. Who are they to decide for us that this should be done? Aren't they supposed to be some sort of objective organisation when it comes to this?
*yawn*
There are too many now, adding even more just dilutes things further and makes it harder for the consumer.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Sure it can, if the registrar makes good on its pledge to ban child porn from the TLD, that would likely be a significant draw to porn sites. Especially ones that are asking for people to pay. With $60 a year in registration fees, it's not going to make much difference off the bottom line of a decent site, but being able to say that you're free of unadvertised impropriety can easily add up to big sales. People that frequent those sites are often times concerned about things like kiddie pr0n and becoming a victim of ID theft. If the registrar manages to crack down on that more than the .com registrars do, then it's likely going to make much larger sums of money.
One month from now: .xxxx! Hell yeah!"
"But our site is so hot it blows all those tame triple-x sites out of the water! We need
"Who defines porn, anyway? What is it, exactly?"
this is an age old logical fallacy i'm sick of: "because grey areas exist, we can't say black isn't white"
porn exists, and is real. because there are grey areas doesn't mean we can't characterize something as porn
an analogy: abortion
at some point, its a just blob a woman is purging. at another point it is a human being you are murdering. ignoring for the moment the existence of the complete idiots who believe that when a sperm meets an egg you have a human life, or the complete idiots who think murdering a newborn is just late term abortion, there is a simple question for you: when exactly does a blob become a life?
of course, the ultimate answer is a complete grey area, and will always remain a grey area, forever. it is a completely subjective issue. and yet it requires definition, and is very important to define
that doesn't mean we should make early abortions illegal or make murdering newborns legal. what it means is that life is complicated, there are grey areas, and simply because grey areas exist and are complicated, you are not excused from making tough choices
so yes, there are grey areas: pornography or not? but just because that grey area exists, you are not allowed to chicken out and say "because there are grey areas, i will not take a stand and talk about what is pornography and what isn't." caging your cowardice in philosophical bloviating does not change the fact you are a coward
excusing yourself from the debate just makes you a cowardly asshole, standing on the sidelines does not mean you are morally superior. its just a cop out. take a fucking stand, whether on pornography, euthanasia, religious fundamentalism, free speech, abortion, etc.: grow a backbone, don't run and hide, and take a fucking stand on grey areas in this world
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
just ran a quick dig in the terminal on my mac... captured the results with wireshark and put the evidence on cloudshark.org:
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Pornography/erotica is a genre. So are Action, Romance, Documentary, etc. Is there a similar push to create the likes of .action, .docu, and .love ?
And of course, the argument that certain content is especially sensitive hasn't been wielded to lobby for creating .hate, .religion or .violence
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
See this explanation. phantomfive (GP) was almost correct, except that the movie rating system didn't have any rating more obscene than "X", porn movie advertisers/marketers invented the "XXX" as even more shocking than "X". And because of the "misuse" of X, the MPAA has moved to calling it "NC-17" which is hard to twist into a marketing advantage.
There's always a way around domain name filters. http://1113982824/
OTH, folks do seem to know that Whitehouse.com and Whitehouse.gov are two different entities. Would they with a business or other entity?
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
what took me 200
please someone mod parent up
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
businesses that wanted to prevent their names from being hijacked. Mr. Lawley said businesses could ensure that their names were not misused in the dot-xxx world by paying a one-time fee, to be set from $50 to $250.
Sounds like trying to extort money from honest businesses. Forcing Amazon to spend money for Amazon.xxx
That's what she said!
The thing that's coming up in my cynical fuzzy little brain is that it could be a pressure point by some groups to bully ISPs into banning the entire domain.
I'm imaging protests against AT&T by some religious groups wanting "their" local ISP to ban "indecent" material.
ISPs wanting to do what's "right" cave in and blocks everything from the .xxx domain and we're back to where we've started.
On the plus side, it'll make finding and blocking that material easier for individuals - at least for those sites that participate.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
> "sex" are English words that have no meaning in other languages
Sex = 6 in Swedish. I thought this was hilarious when I found out --- OTOH, I was a bit tipsy at the time.
What is porn and who gets to decide what business should relocate to the xxx domain? Whose standards apply in something that is in an international arena?
And I can't wait for Four X beerto get into the porn market with a domain of xxxx.xxx (maybe the should sell some Seven X beer?)
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
is that it is usually brittle minds who can't deal with a little noise in their signal
by filtering people like you out of my life by poisoning the signal with a little noise, i get to deal with minds that are usually more flexible
saves you time, and saves me time, win win
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
is it easier for you if the supermarket scattered the cereal boxes all over the store?
or if they had one aisle labelled "cereal"?
it's a rather simple point that most people easily grasp: better categorization has all sorts of benefits for all sorts of reasons
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
How the funk can it take 10 years to approve a new TLD? Was ICANN under the impression that if it approved it, the world would be flooded with pr0n, as if it's not flooded already and has been since pretty much the inception of the net as we know it? Only in America are organisations able to take themselves so incredibly seriously and be so incredibly prudish about it. Apple's another one: no nipples in the AppStore boys! Steve Jobs says they make you go blind (or is it just very thin?)
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
"Thanks for bringing the discussion down to youtube comments level, you childish cunt."
hypocritical troll is obvious troll
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It's not supposed to work. It's supposed to encourage legislators to pass laws that will allow them to fine or shut down websites they don't like.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
ICANN has drifted far afield of its original mission and today exists to line the pockets of the domain registrars. Does ICANN really think that adult sites will abandon valuable .com domains and migrate to .xxx? No. ICANN thinks that people will rush to stake new claims in the .xxx space, either to their your existing brand or speculate on a future one.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I thinks .xxx is a good idea and porn sites should be force to move to it, and it would be easy to filter porn sites in schools using squid :)
http://askaralikhan.blogspot.com/
The porn sites don't want it, the anti-porn sites don't want it. Is not usefull for the purpose of a root domain. It will only serve to suck money from some sites that will register yet another domain and not use it.
The ICANN is adding weigth on the idea to deprecate the ICANN.
-Woof woof woof!
Ok, it's 2010, DNS still stinks for the web, can we replace it with something more open and tell ICANN to take a flying leap?
Why are we still using DNS for the web? Seriously, can anyone come up with a good reason why we need host.domain.tld (or host.domain.country) to represent a web site?
My mind hurts.
.mil address, we know it is for the military. But the fact that it had a .mil address didn't make it easier to find. It is also a special case since normal civilians can't get a .mil address.
.org, .net, .com, etc., anyone can register them and there is no regulation whatsoever on what kind of sites they can be. In the end there is no real difference between them. Now we are just going to be adding .xxx to the list. It doesn't end up mattering at all.
.xxx domain for, how do they find it, without using a search engine or another site that links to it? How does .xxx on the site name help at all in finding the site?
But, yeah, pretty much, those designations don't mean much of anything, and pretty much things are already not organized without search engines and indexes. Now you are learning!
With some exceptions, of course; for instance if a site has a
As for
Here's a serious question. Someone gets online, lotion in hand, and wants to find some porn. Not just any porn, but porn that is right for them, and really gets their juices flowing. Other than guessing, which you don't need a
That's really bad argument you've got there. They don't have to comb through all those records to effect a ban. It's much less complicated than you make it sound. Law enforcement is more than willing to do that part of the job for them if they report something that doesn't smell right.
.com and other TLDs have issues with it is that there's a huge number of domains and not the resources to do it. If you charge more and have a smaller number of sites, it gets significantly easier.
All you have to do is ensure that the person using the domain name is who they say they are and that they've got the proper licensing and insurance to run a business. It's not terribly complicated.
The reality is that sites that engage in child porn don't go through those steps. They don't register their business, they don't get insurance, they don't buy in their own name.
The reality is that the more prominent sites already police themselves out of necessity, verifying that they've already done that isn't really that hard.
Ultimately, the main reason why the
Indeed, it is:
1113982824 -> 0x42660768
0x42 0x66 0x07 0x68
__66_.102_.__7_.104
104.7.102.66.in-addr.arpa. 86400 IN PTR lax04s01-in-f104.1e100.net.
66.102.7.104
I did not know you could do this until just now, so thanks GP!
(Also slashdot's layout mangling is awful, so please excuse the underscores)
Who has Microsoft.xxx, or Vatican.xxx
This is nuts. What is porn anyway.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Someone should register that and put up an innocuous kitten pic, see what they do.
"Who defines porn, anyway? What is it, exactly?"
We're looking at this all wrong. This is a hidden stimulus package in disguise. Seriously, think of all the IT people who will have to be hired looking at porn sites to define them and mandate a .xxx domain. When will the job offers start being posted? Finally a use for my decades of experience.
Of course should google have books.google.xxx for any of its banned books? Speaking of books filled with sodomy, incest, and guides to oral sex, will there be a mandated bible.xxx?
This is exactly right. It's the same reasoning why violent criminals don't bother to register their guns, and coke shipping rings swap license plates on their stolen cars.
If they were doing something illegally, going through legal channels to make their actions visible to authorities is incredibly stupid, even enough for wrongdoers to pick up on.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Comment removed based on user account deletion
treally. we don't need an organization to regulate tlds. open them up wholesale. http://www.stuff.things/ or http://www.slash.dot./ open it up or gtfo.
...
Doubt it. It's a domain squatter site now.
Enjoy. The entire TLD will be blocked shortly by most "family" ISPs.
... and wanting to register a .xxx domain name, but NOT use it for porn?
Just like all the 2-letter TLDs, eventually it will get watered down and there won't be much difference anyway.
any sex-related website re-register there and remove itself from other domains such as .com or .org
And how long does it take to do a rewrite rule in apache to redirect any request for domain.com/somepage to domain.xxx/somepage ?
The only concern is the damn domain squatters ... ICANN should give a 6 month grace period to the people holding the .com domain so they cannot be squatted on the .xxx domain. If after 6 months, they haven't registered, then the domain can be opened for anyone to grab.
Of course, they won't, because ICANN has always been about the money ... otherwise the whole domain squatting thing would never exist in the first place.
Erm... I can see two problems with this.
.com register to be available in the markets where ".xxx" is blanket-banned (like Australia??), and those that "think of the children" appalled that there is still so much smut outside of the .xxx TLD.
.xxx names? In that case, where will these companies go? Vanish? I doubt it. So they'll just host on a .com, a .org, a .net, and so forth, meaning the people who wanted the .xxx TLD will have reason to complain, and websites that did migrate to .xxx will be at a competitive disadvantage.
.xxx name? should a BBS with discussions of sexual topics be moved to a .xxx?), but even on the point of "it'll stop criminals which is good", I find you're over-optimistic as to how difficult it can be to forge and corrupt officials from some of the poorer and less structured of the 200-odd countries in the world.
First of all, which laws will apply? Say you host a website in Sudan (it's just an example, I don't know the specifics of Sudanese law, but in a Crapsack World...), registered to the Sudanese authorities (with appropriate bribing), and insured by a nice little front company (which has also done all the required palm-greasing). Now, you can "legally" take photos of 15 year-old girls in the nude, and distribute them in Sudan. Does this mean these images can be posted on CrapsackWorld.xxx? Or will the TLD require I only post images of 18+ year old women? On the other hand, Sudan has strong laws that ban intercourse of muslims with non-muslims. Can Sudan be sure that this type of content will not be available? Or will the TLD deem that it's an "unreasonable request" on Sudan's behalf, leading Sudan to block the entire "*.xxx" range?
Even before we start looking at the "criminals", the simple differences in laws between countries mean that it's almost certain the ".xxx" TLD will attract even more controversy and be criticized for "not holding up to promises" by every side in the debate : USA blaming for the profusion of "illegal underage porn", Sudan blaming for the profusion of "immoral interreligious porn", companies feeling that they're just being conned into paying an extra amount since they've got to retain the
Now, where do criminal websites that offer "kiddie porn" usually operate from? The USA? Canada? Saudi Arabia? Russia? Belarus? Ukraine? Moldova? They work in countries where there is a lack of general public enforcement of laws, where it's easy to bribe officials or falsify documents, and they can "easily" dissappear. So what is the ".xxx" TLD registar going to do when he recieves the first bunch of documents from Moldova that "appear" legitimate? Authorise them? Refuse them? And when they've been shown to be 30% fakes, are they going to implement a new kind of detective/investigative process to find out with each application if it's legitimate? Refuse the lot and tell them to get similar documents from Russian officials? It'll just be a case of these criminals moving around a little to find the right hands to grease (and if they're into human trafficking, they probably already know enough about that), falsifying a couple of documents, and then waiting for the take-down letter to move to the next domain name they've registered.
Or do you think countries like Congo that just cannot guarantee a minimum of protection against corruption and fraud shouldn't have the right to have companies register
There are other issues, like free speech and expression (should 4chan move to a
Assuming the current .com registrars will carry the .xxx domain just like they do the .com/.org/etc domains already, I don't expect them to treat the domain much different.
Because it's an American tld (three letter domain). If it was .xx.uk you'd have a point. Argentinians don't have to use it if they don't like/understand it. Americans can use .xxx to host a children's book store. There's no hard correlation between TLD and content or location, aside from .gov, .mil and .edu (and the like). This is part of why TLD are a bad idea in general... they are meaningless and cause more problems than they solve.
+2 points for trying to impress the girl at the campus bookstore with your cultural thenthativity though.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
"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"
And exactly how will these conservative members of Congress do this? Will they pass laws banning sexually explicit content from .com/.org? It's been tried and has failed in the courts. Besides, even if they were able to craft a law that would withstand the courts, how do you force SomePornSite.com, registered in Russia and hosted in Turkey from abiding by the US law? Also, as a side note, don't the conservative members of Congress usually argue against government intervention in private industry? (I know, they're against it except when they're for it, but I always think it is good to point out hypocrisy.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
What POSSIBLE use could a NON-sex site have for something like free-nude-girls.com? Adding the .xxx is one of those great-on-paper ideas. None of the .com/.org editions are going to disappear - there's no reason to. No one with a "clean" site would want to own supersex.com and then blog about pie recipes, would they?
antipaucity
At the lower levels, nothing is categorized. Every website is gotten to by a 32-bit address and some other information in an IP packet header. DNS is designed to make this more palatable for humans. Search engines just add another layer of abstraction on top of this. In a sense, Google is the logical next step in DNS technology. So, while I realize you are attempting to be satirical, what you say is much closer to literal truth than satire.
QUOTE: "Donation is indeed forced... That's not a donation, that's tax."
- - -
RESPONSE: This "donation" is a cynical maneuver. The companies that install huge, bright LED billboards along I80 in California also donate money to children's charities. So... when the populace tried to ban these distracting eyesore billboards, there was a big outcry.
"But they are donating $$$ to childrens' charities, and if we don't let them put up those billboards, then childrens' charities will lose $$$!"
It's a very very manipulative tactic. And it works. Which makes me sick.