XXX TLD Officially Open
about.xxx
about.xxx
Allow me to translate, for those that were lulled into a hypnotic trance by the Patrick Stewart sound alike:
Sunrise A: Additional adult domain cost! Your existing domain strategy just got more expensive to maintain unless you want your SEO to get nuked.
Sunrise B: Brand Blackmail, early period. Otherwise known as "That's a nice non-adult themed brand you have, it would terrible to see something happen to it."
Landrush: Laughing all the way to the bank. 18 days? Try 18 hours.
General Availability: Gone, all the good names are.
For what it's worth, it looks like the Sunrise B is for blocking/making it impossible to register .xxx domains with your registered trademark such as MarthaStewart.xxx instead of having to pay to register (and presumably not use) MarthaStewart.xxx
If any other TLDs work this way, I don't know of them.
Content filters abide by it, and it doesn't disrupt existing business.
.xxx is just an effort to make money with another new TLD. It doesn't make the web safer and it doesn't make content-filters simpler or more accurate.
Since no one is proposing forcing sites to use .xxx, those concerned with truly making the web safer should really be looking for the most effective way to get wide penetration of a labeling solution, and a meta tag is about as simple as simple gets.
No one has to propose it openly since the threat is implicit. Regardless of what is said at the moment of creation of the domain, all that a would-be censor has to do is wait [Internet-memory-erasure-period] and say "hey, we created XXX because all the porn is supposed to only be here" and viola.
Windows: Alt-0-2-2-4 = à. Go Microsoft!
ZOMG !!!!111oneone!!!
--
1 - voila is the English language word equivalent to voilà. Voilà is French and so should be italicised to indicate it's a foreign word. There's no need to use voilà as one can use voila. Viola!!!!!oneone11!
Regardless, I could see this being used as an excuse to shunt porn sites to .xxx, even if doing so wouldn't actually solve anything.
As part of a filter I imagine $domain.$tld would get a highscore if $domain.xxx exists.
What threat? There is no threat at all. It is not implicit or explicit. It is just another TLD for them to move into and make $$$.
The XXX in the URL makes the content filtering human readable. That is hugely important, and a service that can only be provided by a TLD.
That said, I agree that this is nothing but a new way to heckle money.
Meta tags are an application level concept and so they have to be implemented at that level via browsers or HTTP proxies, or deep packet inspection.
DNS based filtering can be done more simply via network layer devices without having to look at the application level content. So DNS filters would work even if the website content was encrypted, for example.
From an administrative point of view it is much easier to control and manage network infrastructure than it is to control individual browsers or application level gateways.
This is one reason why global top level domains are a bad idea, there is no clear legal jurisdiction for them unlike country code domains. A legal framework can be built around xxx.us, for example, because it would map to an existing legal jurisdiction. The same can't be said for .xxx or meta-tags in documents served from arbitrary domains/locations.
Therefore, wouldn't a counterpart TLD, such as .SAFE, actually make more sense? Companies that target children, such as Walt Disney, could provide a guaranteed safe sub-internet. With wikipedia's new filtering options, they could put a wiki-subset on .SAFE with maximum filtering on.
It would be hugely costly to police, and so probably the most expensive TLD ever. But some companies would surely still be able to profit.
The counterpart "safe" TLD is part of a much bigger content curation problem that is evolving in the Internet. Some parents out there are not at all OK with Disney content, even, some will want to leave boobs in but head-crushing out, etc, etc. Properly tailoring to people's many shades of content filtering seems like a job for dedicated browser-recognized crypto certificate chains.
This way, different consumers can directly delegate trust to a custom choice of entities that already are engaged in this space (e.g. all the "family focus" agencies), instead of fighting over a centralized TLD committee.
You don't read the news much, do you? ;)
Too bloody right. Here's a helpless girl that needs rescuing by a man to live happily ever after? No thanks.
http://www.cms.kids.us http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2002/11/56429
In other words: .xxx really is a solution only for wannabe-censors.
That is a perfectly plausible solution now that the .xxx TLD exists.
Ah yes, .xxx -- a solution to a problem that absolutely nobody had other than wannabe-censors.
1. Define "porn"
2. Get every other TLD operator, including all the international ones, on board with your definition and rules (e.g. are we only banning websites on port 80, or would FTP sites also be verboten? password-protected sites? is classical art exempt?)
3. Enforce the censorship via some kind of magical system that is automated, doesn't trigger false positives, and allows for an appeal process
Yeah, that'll be a snap to put together.
0. Repeal the First Amendment.
Moreover most, if not all, such "speech" (dissemination of pornography) will ultimately be commercial and so not come under the full auspice of the First Amendment protections.
Legislators will simply say that all sites that feature nudity in a non medical setting will have to be on the xxx domain name. This isn't merely just porn so it can be passed off as 'neutral' and not legislating morality but rather legislating categorizations ("bringing order to the Wild West of the internet").
Now as for how they force sites onto the .xxx domain name, the choices are:
1. Legislators then simply blacklist all sites that feature nudity in other TLDs. This could be called the "Australian" approach or the "Great Firewall of Foo".
2. Fine companies within your country that are running sites outside of the XXX TLD. If only the US and EU do this, it'll drive 98% of the money-making porn industry into the XXX TLD. Then maybe for completionism you can implement #1 against 'foreign porn peddlers'.
False positives are not a concern for legislators. If there's a worry about blowback, they'll simply make the blacklist confidential, and the appeals process non-transparent.
The correct way to do something like this would be to use a whitelist TLD, e.g., .kids. Such would avoid questions of censorship, and of which content requires being legally shoved into the .xxx ghetto, and makes it real clear that if you put porn on a .kids domain you're going to get hammered.
There will however be a sea change in the future, ICANN is intending the open up applications for new gTLDs in 2012 that could see hundreds more TLDs added. So if adding the dozen or so new gTLDs in the last 10 years has seemed countless, it will get worse.
If anything, so many tlds would devalue the existing .coms, .net, .org... if only slightly.
"Hey you should really check out this awesomestuff.sfdj website"
"I'll look at it when I get home."
... later in the day:
"Hmmm was it awesomestuff.com or awesomestuff.me ..."
"Let's ask Google for a link to awesomestuff"
Earlier this year Bing stated that "about 30%" of search queries are navigational.[1]
[1] http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/20... (paragraph before penultimate screenshot)
Martha Stewart can pay under Sunrise B to stop marthastewart.xxx, but can she stop marthastewart.xxx.xxx?
Elementary programming course on 'thesecretcode.xxx'. Legions of porn seeking people converted to programmers, if slashdot is any indication that should be a perfect match.
When's the last time someone told you to go to a porn site in plain English, out loud, anywhere?
They haven't caught on either.
That is all.
.xxx-blocking is likely to take the form of censorship and will make it easier for the censors to affect what other people see.
Water down the domain so it no longer means much, so filtering by it becomes destructive.
Nobody I know in the adult industry is rushing to register anything either (except a few who are doing it purely as a defensive measure and don't plan to actually use it).
I worked at a big porn company a few years ago, and I do consulting for a porn startup now. I have other clients too, but it's a pretty fun industry to work in (fun parties, lots of great scaling challenges, etc).
This sounds like an even bigger necessity for companies not in the adult industry.