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Comment by cookiecaper | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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