ICANN Approves New .XXX Top Level Domain | Hacker News Reader

ICANN Approves New .XXX Top Level Domain

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32 pointsukdm51 comments

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I disapprove of this cause it will make it easier for antisex campaigners to try to censor the internet.

You could hack the system by only using a .xxx domain for your personal emails when dealing with the state. Tax man: "we can't send you that legal notice because our software blocks that domain" me: "not my problem"

I like your hack, but I'm fairly certain anything important WILL get to you. To be honest, I'm not sure I've had any government dealings that were conducted over e-mail - they're all snail-mail, which I can't stop by living in a red-light district (the real-world equivalent of a .xxx domain I suppose).

I approve of this cause because it will make it easier for parents, corporations, and others with an interest in preventing access to adult material to do so.

To me, this makes the case of people that want real, imposed censorship weaker, because you can say, "Just block xxx and be done with it". With .com, they can say that someone needs to protect you because you might accidentally go to a bad .com website or something like that, so active filtration is needed. If .xxx becomes the standard and the .com just redirects, it will be easy for people who don't want porn to not get it, people who do want porn to get it, and people charged with filtration to relax a little bit.

Why is this bad? How does it strengthen the argument that the internet should be actively censored?

Should porn sites be forced to adopt .xxx? What about softcore porn? What about sites that discuss porn? Porn industry sites? Sex discussion sites? Sex education sites?

The point is, .xxx draws a line, and there is quite a bit of disagreement as to what should be on which side of that line.

"I block .xxx but I still saw {thing I don't like}! They should be required to use .xxx!". "I need to access {important_resource.xxx} for {reasonable reason} but my school/university/ISP/telecom/church blocks it!

(Not to mention the whole can-of-worms that is inter-national law. Consider the differences in policy between countries like Saudia Arabia, Sweden, and the US.)

Nobody should be forced to use anything. It has to be a standard that develops organically, and of course a lot of porn will continue to exist on .com. That's never going to go away. .xxx just makes it easier for what's there, and may earn pornographers some goodwill.

Doesn't this kind of undercut the argument you made above about simplifying the censorship issue? If .com sex sites continue to exist, then nothing really changes at all... (?)

It's a matter of making some things easier to filter, which is better than not making anything easier to filter at all.

That's the situation we have now, isn't it? Some things are easier to filter, since there are lists of porn sites under any TLD and appliance makers utilize them today. So, your improvement is pretty much nil.

No, that list has to be constantly updated, as things come and go. xxx would be a whole namespace that could be blocked and you'd never have to worry about maintaining that portion of the filter. Assuming decent uptake of xxx, it'd relieve some things. Right now, everything is in .com, and new domains have to constantly be added to blacklists. If more new things start going into xxx than com, we'd have half as much work, since xxx is blocked right away.

This is all dependent on good adoption of xxx of course, but if the TLD doesn't exist it's not even possible. So we're happy the opportunity is presented, and I think that mainstream pornographers that want social tolerance will prefer the xxx TLD as a means to illustrate their good intentions.

How does it weaken the argument that the internet should be actively censored?

Just because .xxx exists doesn't mean there won't be "pornography" or "offensive materials" on .com/.{foo} addresses. This just provides an excuse for policy and law makers to write legislation saying "Pornography can only be on *.xxx domains".

It's naive to think this will have any effect whatsoever on the availability of porn to your average < 18 year old anywhere in the world.

It weakens the argument because it will be trivial to block a lot of pornography, so those that say they need the government to block the pornography for them (since there is so much pornography it's impossible to block individually) have a weaker case; there will still be porn on .com, but .xxx can appease some, and I think that most reputable and/or serious pornographers will go to xxx.

It will have some effect, I think. I think that most reputable pornographers, in an effort to demonstrate compliance with standards and keep the adults-only vibe that keeps them on the right side of public opinion, will eventually migrate to xxx. It will be easy to block at least some pornography, which isn't to say that a filtered individual can't just go off to a known .com site. Porn will always exist on .com. It does help to some degree, however.

I don't expect the government to pass a law regarding xxx and even if it is passed I don't expect it to be remotely enforceable. .xxx is merely an opportunity to make life easier on everyone, if the standard is widely adopted.

It's also not entirely about filtration. People that want porn can peruse xxx domains and use scripts to highlight and/or prefer links to xxx.

Well, I plan on getting myself a .xxx domain name for personal projects and such (non-porn) because I like the suffix. I'm curious how many people won't be able to get to my sites because of wholesale .xxx blocks.

If enough legit stuff starts appearing with an .xxx domain name then there will be pressure to get rid of complete tld blocks.

If the operator gets its way, the .xxx TLD will reportedly have three sunrise periods[1]:

The first period would allow owners of porn-related trademarks to claim their .xxx domain names and use them as normal, ... the second would enable non-porn companies that don’t want their brands associated with adult material to basically “turn off” their trademarks in .xxx domains, paying a one-time fee. ... The third proposed sunrise would allow owners of non-trademarked porn domains in other TLDs, such as .com, to get their equivalent .xxx using an automated Whois check.

A comment from the author on this item indicates that they hope to begin sunrises in June, landrush in September. I have a feeling they will be expensive.

[1]: http://domainnamewire.com/2010/12/07/xxx-will-have-three-sun...

And when the flow of money from that second .xxx sunrise category starts to slow down, they can introduce .sucks on which, for a one-time fee, each trademark holder can park a "no it doesn't" rebuttal page. Then .isterrible and then .OwesUsMoreMoney .

I want a .iloveicann

Here's my biggest fear:

An internet provider blocks the domain. At first, nobody will complain because "every other media does the same"; then someone will complain, but everyone else will scourge this person as a "perv" and before we realize we have a huge precedent against net neutrality.

Or, significantly worse, someone writes a law making it illegal to host "adult content" outside of .xxx domains. It's a lot easier to legislate/enforce filtering when all the "bad stuff" is conveniently on a single TLD.

Damn me for not noticing that. I can already hear it: "think of the children!"

If it weren't because it's so hard to define "adult content", I'd be slightly worried as well. Heck, Scandinavian news channels show boobs like it's nothing (because it is, but cultural norms and all that).

Besides, I don't think the internet is so centralized that this could be enforced - people will just register from another country with laxer jurisdiction.

An easy way to combat that is to start hosting great non-porn content on .xxx domains. I intend to do this from the get-go.

Having all of the "bad stuff" under one TLD is the whole point, obviously. Government censorship is bad, I agree, but I don't think it's that realistic to think the government will take porn offline. Maybe I'm naive. I like .xxx because it makes private filtering and monitoring much simpler.

This whole TLD thing is stupid. Why do I have to choose amongst the .com/.net/.org buckets? (Or even worse, register all of them to pre-empt squatters.)

It's not entirely stupid. Although, if you are arguing specifically against the non-regional TLDs, then I would probably agree with you.

.gov was a bad idea.

.gov.us (or .gov.ca.us) is not.

Outside of obviously regional things. amazon.de and amazon.ca serve their purpose fairly well.

I would agree that the difference between ibm.com and ibm.org and ibm.net is impractical at best.

Agreed. .gov was a bad idea, along with .com/.net/.org/.co/.mobi/.me/.biz/.info/.etc

I don't see the need to have a distinction between amazon.de and amazon.ca. If Amazon wants to segment by country, they can do that on their own, not by offloading onto DNS.

Getting rid of also silly things like .co.uk would be great, but raise lots of uncomfortable questions. Ideally, DNS is would be nationally/politically blind, with the exception of government entities under .gov.*.{gTLD}

.me is a ccTLD is for Montenegro.

That's not how GoDaddy is selling it. One could make an argument that it ceases to become a ccTLD once anyone can register it for "novelty"/domain-hacking use.

Godaddy doesn't operate the registry for .me. ccTLD is just a class of TLDs established with a specific purpose. The purpose might get de facto expanded at the country's discretion, but that doesn't obviate the original purpose. The people of Montenegro would disagree with your claim that .me was a bad idea.

With no geographic-based TLDs, you introduce a need to disambiguate non-related brands which would have been perfectly distinguished by ccTLDs. Compare http://www.era.mk/ and http://www.era.pl/ - neither organization is controversial in its right to the TLD in its country, but one or both would have to settle for a disambiguation otherwise.

Disambiguation by business might be an idea - but then which TV1 gets priority? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV1

I think it's high time to register comcastsu.xxx

My ISP is less likely to be available for long: coxsu.xxx

So who else is camping out the night these go live to snatch (see what I did there?) one of the premium domains to cash in on later?

I don't have much honor left, but a domain shark I will never be.

I dunno. pr0n.xxx seems like a fun one to play with, no pun intended. Or goatse.xxx, uni.xxx or ha.xxx.

But then you are not really domain sharking it, are you? You are actually using it (or planing to do so).

when these domains start being available to the general public, all the good stuff will already be taken.

As somebody who used to work at an adult company (and has a different adult company as one of my clients), I'll say that most adult companies are probably excited about the idea of making it easy for parents to block these domains, but not excited about the possibility of being forced into using them (and the subsequent possiblity of ISPs blocking .xxx domains en masse). Some of adult sites' biggest customers are in countries where porn is illegal, and giving ISPs an easy way to block the entire industry would hurt adult sites even more than they are already.

On a side note, why hasn't a .app TLD been created yet?

The process for creating TLDs is very slow; even if someone proposed .app on July 10, 2008, ICANN would still be pondering the process for evaluating it.

In regard to stratifying domains and simplifying the process of omitting adult content, I think this is a great idea. While the "evil empire" image is easily applied to ISPs (in regard to purposively blocking access to these sites), realistically, unless they want to lose a whole hell of a lot of business, they'll leave it alone.

I bet most ISPs in China don't want to even think of any content filtering, but Great Chinese Firewall is still a reality.

So, what is the technical definition of content that should be in this TLD?

If I were a good-looking female actress in showbiz (0/4, dammit), I'd love the prospect of seeing "<myname>.xxx" on the web.

Most of these people already get fan sites with some permutation of their full name. (Hyphenation, .net, .org). Maybe now we'll see a common trend if <air quotes> "fan sites".

I can see why people would want this, but it sets an interesting precedent.

Now that we have a "NC-17" TLD, are we going to start seeing "R", "PG-13", "PG" and "G" TLDs as well?

Likewise, if the internet is going to have a redlight district, is it going to have a financial district, china town and so on?

china town

.asia ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.asia

> a financial district

.biz?

I've always hated .biz. I don't think I've ever seen a legit company with a .biz domain name.

Why, why, why?

To make more money for ICANN, probably.

No, but close. Ex, ex, ex.

This is certainly going to be the most blocked TLD ever.

I think there are sysadmins blocking it preemptively as we speak.

Back in the day - there was an article I read about "The never ending sex.com battle" which was about the sex.com domain squatting/stealing debacle...

I thought it was a great name... so I registered neverendingsex.com thinking I could easily monitize it based on the fact that sex.com as a landing page was making several million per year...

But I didnt do anything with the domain and let it die, and someone else grabbed it.

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