ICANN Approves Dot-XXX Domain for Porn | Hacker News Reader

ICANN Approves Dot-XXX Domain for Porn

pcworld.com

38 pointssound37 comments

I wish the ICANN would knock it off. TLD's are not an effective way to group websites. They are making the namespace more complex for little or no benefit. Now that the horses are effectively out of the barn, they should just make the TLD registry replace the concept of a domain. Cannon already bought .cannon right?

Can someone explain to me how this helps the Internet ecosystem?

If I were a porn site, why would I want this address? Filters, parental controls, etc. are most likely going to block the entire .xxx domain - this would limit page views.

History has shown that .com is the most popular TLD - how is .xxx going to help? It seems like an attempt to drum up registrar dollars.

.xxx helps because it allows easier segmentation. xxx sites will be considered "good citizens" for moving over. Filters will block all of them, which is fine because people who'd be filtered significantly (kids) don't have money to spend on this stuff anyway. Others may be filtered only at work but frankly that's a job-saving idea so it keeps money coming in.

If you want porn, you know just how to get it; go to any xxx domain out there. If you don't want it, you know how to avoid a larger part of it; don't go to any xxx domain out there. Sounds like it works well to me!

No mandatory compliance would ever work, and there will always be porn littered all over these many internets, but .xxx domain will make at least part of it easier to access/avoid, according to the desires of the user and/or its guardians.

"how to avoid a larger part of it"

not true though; most of the existing porn will remain where it currently is. New sites might choose to start up with .xxx, existing big sites might buy the .xxx counterpart and keep their .com.

The end result is no reduction in non-.xxx porn, and some extra porn on .xxx. Totally pointless.

The other thing is, most responsible adult companies already work to make sure their sites are labeled clearly as adult-only sites. Parents have options to prevent their children from going to these sites. In fact, these sites are safer for children than Facebook when you get right down to it.

It's pretty hard to block these sites because you have to know the domain name/information on each one. Assuming large-scale voluntary compliance, and I think the chances are good that all the "big" producers will move over, it's much easier to just filter the xxx domain and be done with it.

Usually the idea is to keep it away from children because children will willfully look at it without understanding. That page that says "Absolutely DO NOT look at this if you're under 18" has no relevance to an under-18 year old.

It's the same reason we put all other restraints on teenagers; if they were capable of detecting trouble and reliably refusing to participate therein, then they wouldn't need all of the things that are in place to protect them from themselves, foremost among these being parents.

> It's pretty hard to block these sites because you have to know the domain name/information on each one.

No, you do not. There are services out there that assist in this.

http://www.cybersitter.com/ http://www.netnanny.com/ http://www.cyberpatrol.com/ http://www.asacp.org/

Couple this with parental controls in Windows and Mac (I'm sure it has it), and you don't have to know each domain.

> Assuming large-scale voluntary compliance, and I think the chances are good that all the "big" producers will move over, it's much easier to just filter the xxx domain and be done with it.

There already is voluntary compliance amongst the the big producers, as well as the smaller ones. There is no incentive to attract children.

These sites have already a vested interest in their current domains. Do you realize the cost involved with moving domains at the scale you are discussing? For what? To do what's already possible and being done?

I'd be more worried about sites that you wouldn't think to place in .xxx and yet are in many ways worse (looking at you, reddit!)

No, you do not. There are services out there that assist in this.

http://www.cybersitter.com/ http://www.netnanny.com/ http://www.cyberpatrol.com/ http://www.asacp.org/

Have you ever actually used any of these tools? They are horrible. They have a much worse cpu and network overhead than McAfee and aren't remote effective filters unless set to unreasonably restrictive settings.

Proxies working on pre-compiled blacklists and whitelists are a better solution and the new tld could only help with this. Even if only new pornographic site were ever given a "xxx" tld, then it would save the effort of having to explicitly blacklist them.

Those services either use really crappy (many false hits both ways) and heavy heuristics to try and determine that a pornographic image was downloaded and block it before display AND/OR a known "blacklist". So while you can outlist the compilation of said blacklist, someone still has to add sites that were confirmed to contain the material. Both ways are inefficient and spotty.

I admitted in my first post that you will never rid the internet of porn or make it completely unavailable to anyone. There is always a way around. But if the filter is good enough, unless the person is really determined, they will give up before they find its cracks.

Also, filtration is great for preventing an accidental stumbling-upon and so on.

A .xxx domain just makes sense, there's no reason not to do it. If you want to look at porn, you can find new sites by trying whatever, like, wallace_naked.xxx. You can filter for hyperlinks only to other .xxx sites. If you don't want to look at porn, you just blacklist the whole TLD and a great deal more work is done for you.

Again, you're right that there will still be porn on .com. I don't think anyone believes that's going to go away. But it's just a matter of simplicity; a .xxx tld helps everyone either way, so what's the problem?

I would be opposed to mandatory enforcement of this provision, but I think most legit porn producers will switch over for the citizenship points.

And how about any of the infinite mirrors which aren't the big producers? And do they block RapidShare? Torrents?

It's impossible to filter it all (maybe with strong A.I., but show me a porn filter that has that and I'll denounce this claim).

What nonsense are you talking about? What does Rapidshare or Torrents have to do with filtering out porn sites that would use the .xxx TLD?

> It's impossible to filter it all

And?

.xxx won't change that. At all.

Rapidshare hosts a lot of porn. If you're looking to filter the internet for the purity of person X, a random link could lead them through that and to porn. Q.E.D. Similarly, torrents are not always what they're advertised to be.

And I wasn't implying it will change the filtering problem. Merely pointing out that it isn't easy, which you implied quite strongly. Schools have been struggling with it since they started (magazines behind books), and paying companies like those large amounts of money for woefully incomplete solutions.

> And I wasn't implying it will change the filtering problem. Merely pointing out that it isn't easy, which you implied quite strongly

You're taking things out of context, and putting words in my mouth.

This is a discussion of the .xxx TLD. My contention is that .xxx won't improve porn blocking precisely because of the reasons you mentioned. There are already tools that do a lot of work to block it, and .xxx isn't going to change anything. The sites that would use .xxx are already blocked.

So, a porn sites are already blocked, and will use .xxx just to have it. It won't improve blocking. At the same time, .xxx won't block sites that don't play by the rules, and sites like RapidShare or Reddit, where you can find porn.

That's what I've been saying.

It doesn't really seem to harm anything either though. Pornographers can argue against regulations due to the increased ease in filtering, even though in practice I'm sure there will still be plenty of porn on the .com's for the forseeable future.

You could have 'private mode' automatically engage when on .xxx sites.

Ideally, sites will eventually redirect the .com domain to .xxx.

Filters will filter it, well-behaving search engines will get rid of the old results, and human-generated links will slowly change over.

Which will provide no additional benefit, but will cause additional problems.

True, it would limit page views, but don't forget that (for better or worse) there are laws about viewing pornography across most of the country and much of the world as well. At least some of that traffic is coming illegally, and it may be only a matter of time before porn peddlers are held legally liable for that traffic.

I think it makes a lot of practical business sense to be able to unequivocably categorize your business.

I wonder if this would sponsor any relevant legislation. US based sites being forced to this TLD in order to place Liability for Minors on parents.

It could work like US film ratings. There was a time when film makers deliberately added elements to pull an R rating because audiences associated that with more enjoyable films.

Consumers might associate "a real .xxx grade site" with quality. But they will have to be trained.

In theory .xxx is the perfect ghetto for adult content. Dump everything there and then it becomes so much easier to filter/block/firewall, etc. Pornographers will see this coming from a mile away and most won't bother with the .xxx tld. Moreover, none of the big porn sites of today are likely to relinquish their prized .com domains. On the whole it's a bad idea that will have little result.

Regardless of the arguments for or against, this is what I thought was sad:

  That claim of independence gave ICANN board member Rita  
  Rodin Johnston pause for thought. "I still question 
  whether, in fact, there is a real sponsored community 
  here," she said in the board-meeting debate before the 
  vote.

  However, she went on to vote in favor of the new domain,   
  saying that despite her personal reservations about the 
  proposal, she felt obliged to by ICANN's decision-making 
  process. "It really doesn't matter what I think. What's 
  important is that ICANN has a process that it set up and 
  the process came back and said that sponsorship criterion 
  was met, and that this board has the courage to follow 
  that criterion," she said.

"It really doesn't matter what I think"?? If you are on the board of any organization, I would argue that it very much matters what you think, otherwise, what is the point?

I can only imagine the kind of domain name land-grab this will invoke. Squatters will be prepping their naughty keywords database in preparation, I suspect.

I think the cheapest way to get a desirable .xxx domain would be to register a nonsensical domain like "dumptrucking.xxx" and then make it a new term for some sex act. What is "dump trucking"? I don't know, and neither does anybody else -- yet. It's brand-building writ sleazy.

I think we can assume premium domain names will be sold in a land rush auction, not registered on a first-come-first-serve basis. Similar to e.g. .ASIA or .AM. There may even be different registration fees like .TV has.

Honestly, I see this as a good thing.

"consumers" will see it as a shortcut to what they're looking for. Thus "hosts" will benefit by owning .xxx domains. Sites without .xxx won't succeed as well as those with. Scale up, and you've got a basic means of organizing sites that didn't exist before.

It of course won't mean that black-listing .xxx domains will mean a porn-free surfing environment. Expecting that is like expecting Wikipedia to always be correct, and I highly doubt it'll even approach Wikipedia-consistency. But admitting porn is out there and providing a way to organize it and keep it a little more separate from non-porn simply cannot be a bad thing.

edit: why does everyone seem to think sites won't own both a .com and a .xxx domain, for at least a respectable period of time? If intarwebIs4porn.com doesn't buy intarwebIs4porn.xxx they'll be slaughtered if a mass migration occurs, because the owner of the domain can camp it for as much as they want. They will buy them. They only stand to lose if they don't.

Complete waste of time and a boondoggle.

In other news, domain registrars issued updated guidance on improved earnings...

No doubt, this is a huge money giveaway to whomever will be selling these.

It wouldn't surprise me if the pornography industry didn't completely ignore this TLD. The nature of pornography means that it's possible to be very creative in naming your site.

If you look at Alexa's list of the top adult web sites you'd see the following names: livejasmin.com, pornhub.com, xvideos.com, youporn.com, xhamster.com, tube8.com, ...

It doesn't look to me like the .com namespace is running out of room for pornography.

I would be surprised if every site doesn't immediately get their .xxx out of nervousness. How long until someone puts laws saying porn must be hosted on .xxx "for the children"? Sites using .com could be accused of trying to hide instead of clearly marking their dangerous content.

Idiotic, yes. So how probable?

Someone could avoid such a law simply by hosing their .xxx site in another country. And even if every national government agrees that segregating porn on the Net would be a good thing, you’ll never get them all to agree on a standard. In some countries topless women are no big deal, and in others an exposed elbow is obscene.

Seems to me that this decision just transfers $$$ into the hands of the TLD operator. Porn website operators will now want to buy example.xxx as well as example.com and example.net and so forth. Non-porn operators may want to buy anotherexample.xxx to protect their anotherexample.com name.

Where can I register at?

sex.xxx

the most expensive domain evar

more likely free.xxx

se.xxx?

Swedish is a guarantee of quality ;-)

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