

ICANN Approves New .XXX Top Level Domain  - ukdm
http://domainnamewire.com/2011/03/18/icann-approves-new-xxx-top-level-domain/

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rmc
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"

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cookiecaper
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?

~~~
bkudria
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.)

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cookiecaper
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.

~~~
bostonpete
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... (?)

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

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jedsmith
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.

~~~
cookiecaper
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.

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jedsmith
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...](http://domainnamewire.com/2010/12/07/xxx-will-have-three-sunrise-
periods/)

~~~
nooneelse
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 .

~~~
bkudria
I want a .iloveicann

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BoppreH
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.

~~~
chaosmachine
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.

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

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bkudria
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.)

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dboyd
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.

~~~
bkudria
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}

~~~
jarek
.me is a ccTLD is for Montenegro.

~~~
bkudria
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.

~~~
jarek
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.

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

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

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

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MatthewPhillips
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?

~~~
tomjen3
I don't have much honor left, but a domain shark I will never be.

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

~~~
tomjen3
But then you are not really domain sharking it, are you? You are actually
using it (or planing to do so).

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jarin
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?

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wmf
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.

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rglover
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.

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

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

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kmfrk
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".

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droz
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?

~~~
drdaeman
> a financial district

.biz?

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

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GHFigs
Why, why, why?

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JeremyBanks
To make more money for ICANN, probably.

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

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

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phlux
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.

