My two cents on ".xxx"

For a guy who writes a lot on Newsvine and is clearly very tech savvy, I doubt very much that you have not engadged in at least a little pornography :)

I really doubt most internet providers would ban .xxx sites. They generate at lot of traffic.

I have not been following this topic all that closely. But the last I heard I did not believe they would be forcing all porn sites to be on a .xxx name. In fact this alone would cause massive backlash. The porn industry makes a lot of money and owns a lot of domain names. Despite what they peddle, porn sites have a significant amount of sway. I do agree that having .xxx would allow a better content filter, but there is no way that all porn will be contained to .xxx. Dot com names are international, and who will be the one to draw the line on what is an acceptable amount of skin on a non-porn site?

Personally I have no interest in a G-rated internet. Although it may be in my best interest at some point in life, it is a form of censure and will ultimately start a downward spiral of internet regulation.

If ICANN wants to open up .xxx as an additional TLD exclusively for porn, that is great, so long as they understand it will not be the sole home for it.

Forcing all porn sites to use .xxx brings up serious free speech issues. I wrote an article about this a while back: Domain Issue (mine is the second opinion on that page).

The problem is that no one can define porn. The law is vague when it comes to porn, because specific federal laws about this have been ruled unconstitutional. Obscenity standards are supposed to be defined locally by community standards, not federally for everyone in the country. If a national law blocks all "porn" by forcing it into a .xxx domain, then all they have to do is define speech they don't as "porn". For instance, sites about homosexuality could be declared pornographic, even if they don't have sexual content. Sex education sites could be declared porn. Even information about abortion. It would be up to the executive branch to decide how they want to enforce this, and the Bush Administration would love for a chance to push speech they don't like out of the way.

Not to mention the fact that this could only apply to sites operating within the country, and so filters would still be ineffective.

The only effective way of keeping children away from content that they shouldn't be seeing is parental control. The parents must be involved and monitoring their children. It is not the job of the government or the ISPs to figure out what is or is not appropriate for children. Let's put responsibility where it belongs.

In my mind, this is no different than the zoning regulations which cover "gentleman's clubs" and adult bookstores. It's no different than stores placing certain publications behind the counter.

I agree that pornography can be hard to define, but one would hope that the government would try to put moral and religious opinions aside and try to determine the intent of certain sites. A site hosting images of Renaissance nude paintings would hopefully be exempt, as would an educational site on breast cancer, but a lot of pornographic sites are clearly intended to stimulate and arouse people, and that to me is a key part of the definition of what is pornographic.

I'm not expert on porn, so I'm curious: is there any sort of special registration process a person has to go through to set up a porn site? I know they have to abide by The Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act, especially Section 2257 which requires producers (as defined in the law as "anyone who operated a website that contained photos or videos of sexually explicit material") to maintain records proving that all participants were of legal age. The law also requires "the maintenance, categorization, location, and inspection of records, as well as legal grounds for exemption of these requirements. They require that records be maintained for five years after the dissolution of a business that had been required to maintain them."

If there are other registration requirements for establishing an adult site then the .xxx TLD could be tied into those requirements.

I agree with you Kyle, almost completely. There are bound to be problems, if a .xxx domain is implemented, but I am curious to see what will happen. I will tell you one thing, the .xxx domain will be blocked by every ISP in India, so there will be significant drop in page loads from India. The reason it will be blocked is, because pornography is illegal and prohibited here, even though it is extremely widespread and loosely enforced. Even the big porn sites aren't blocked by the government's ISP, BSNL, let alone private ones like mine. If a .xxx domain is implemented, it will be all over the papers and the government will be right on top of it and will block it off immediately. I'm not saying I mind this, but it is something that needs to be debated. We had a very interesting discussion here on my friend's column.

A suitable place for the porn community (also self recognizable links). I'd say that it's a perfect idea. only way to distinguish actual porn sites from websites.

great!!! I'm sick and tired of surfing through non-porn sites.
great Idea!!!

I would guess that unless you really depend on said porn, then you would be quite embarrased to call your Internet Service Provider to tell them to unblock ".xxx" sites.

Well, if something like that happened, I'd have to call them up and make them unblock it just out of principle. I wouldn't want anyone imposing their moral standards on me, especially if it's a service I'm paying money for.

The obvious issue here is one of enforcement. What happens when someone puts up a porn site that isn't registered as .xxx? Are they arrested and thrown in jail? Then you'd need that elusive definition of pornography. How do you gauge the 'intent' of a site? I might have a site filled with images that somebody else finds pornographic, but my intent was just to supply examples of human sexual expression.

As a hard and fast firewall to 'protect the children', .xxx is a useless and unenforcable concept.

However, as a VOLUNTARY measure, it's a great idea. Most porn sites do not want children to be using the site. After all, they are looking to make money by providing a service to adults. Kids just cause problems and rarely have a credit card. So I would think the vast majority of sites would want to migrate to XXX over time, just so they can forego any more elaborate schemes to keep the kiddies out. The popular browsers will rapidly adopt a simple password protection scheme or similar blocking access to the .xxx domain and then nobody can claim that the porn site producers have not done all they can to keep out the kids.

And yes, some kids are clever enough to get around the passwords and such. My personal opinion has been that if your child is clever enough to hack your computer, he's probably ready for porn, but I realize that might not be the most popular view.

But honestly, that's your problem, parents of the world. It's your resposibility to keep your kids safe. Backwards is as far back as we can bend.

Eventually, it does require acutal parenting, sorry.

I wonder what $.02 would get on a .xxx....

While this seems like a great idea in theory, I wonder if it's just too late to be able to be logistically, practically possible.

I share Calvin's question on the rights to the same .xxx name. I also wonder how they are going to force everyone with a porno .com/.net/etc site to switch over to a .xxx name?

Also, it brings into question of what's pornography? Is nerve.com pornography? I know many people who would say no. I'm not sure I want the government deciding this. Southpark.com would have to southpark.xxx, I'd imagine. :)

In the end, I just don't see this as being as useful as the people proposing it would hope it to be. Like RadicalCentrist said, I guess we'll have to rely on good old fashioned parenting on this one. Scary, huh?

Sorry to comment on a commenter, but ignorance should be corrected.

I agree that pornography can be hard to define, but one would hope that the government would try to put moral and religious opinions aside and try to determine the intent of certain sites.

It is the WORLD wide web, and people have different standards all over the globe. Saying that your government's way is the right way and all others' are wrong is what starts many, many wars. If you think that maybe each country's government should filter the internet specifically for it's population, maybe you should move to China!

Hey, that's how to solve it: make .xxx only for good, *American* porn! You know, like all the other subject spacific domains? .edu, .gov, .mil, etc? The United States already owns several random and unfair tlds; why not make another one?

fastfinge, we (the Unites States) invented the internet. I think we earned the right to a few top level domains all to ourselves :-)

Yup, it was Al Gore!!!

Seriously, this is the sort of crap I've come to expect from The United States; never mind that the internet was composed of educational institutions all over the world, all of the credit still devolves on the U.S so you can justify your special treatment. The United States did not "invent the internet". It built arpanet, a military communications network. At the same time, various other networks all over the world were constructed by various people, for various reasons, using various protocols. The "internet" began when all of these networks began to join together (mostly through universities world wide). Are you aware that the web, that thing that most non-geeks think is the complete internet, was invented in Switzerland? By your logic, all html tags should be in German (one of the official languages of Switzerland); they invented it...don't they "deserve" to have it in their language? Of course not! If everyone else is to use it, it must be English as that's the most popular world language. The reason the United States "deserves" to have .gov, .mil, .edu, etc is because it has the money and power to bully every other country into accepting that the United States Government is the only government worthy of official recognition on the internet. You didn't "invent" the internet; you participated, along with others, in the development of the internet. Then you stole credit and control of everything, because nobody else can stop you.

we (the Unites States) invented the internet

Typical yankee "My country is better than yours!" crap.
The Internet may have been developed by the US, but the World Wide Web was developed at CERN, which, last I checked, is in Europe, not the US.

Neat! But to bring things a little back on topic, as inflamitory as my comments were, I think they really do offer a solution to the .xxx regulation problem. A website could be judged as porn based on the country it runs out of. If, in that country, it is considered porn, it could be required to go under a second level domain; so a canadian porn website might be canadaporn.xxx.ca, an american one americanpoorn.xxx.us, etc. That way folks can still filter out xxx if they like, and we have some widespread method of enforcement.

If you think that maybe each country's government should filter the internet specifically for it's population, maybe you should move to China!

There's nothing in the bill that states the government is going to do the filtering, this is a measure so that citizens can better filter it. Nor did I ever say that the American government is the "right" government and that everyone else was wrong, I was stating that this particular idea is a good one. I don't think each government should filter the Internet, but a lot of government's do already, and there's nothing I can do about that. As I said, there are already legal requirements that pornographic materials (magazines and videos) be kept away from minors as best as possible, whether it's keeping said materials behind a counter or zoning regulations that state adult stores cannot be put in residential areas, and this proposal seems no different. International sites and sites in different languages is another matter so I think this should be limited to sites hosted within the U.S. or whose parent companies are based in the U.S.

I don't see how this is bad for pornographers, either. It doesn't make it any harder to find for the people that want it, which is where the really money is. Sure they may get a small, small amount if you stumble across their page, but that percentage of a cent is nothing compared to the $19.95 a month or whatever it is they charge.

How does the registration work? What if two porn sites have the same name but one with .com and one with .net, for instance? Is there a bidding war or is it just first come first served? If it's the latter, I can only imagine how the network traffic will be the day the floodgates are opened for the land-grab.

I believe that different Top Level Domains (TLD), such as .com, .net, and .org are separate. So if you haven't already registered www.newsvine.net someone else could. Once someone registers a domain it is essentially there's as long as they keep paying for it yearly, if someone else wants to buy said domain then an agreement has to be reached between the two parties and it often does essentially become a bidding war. In fact, it looks like Newsvine.net is already taken and is a redirect page, as is Newsvine.org.

The only effective way of keeping children away from content that they shouldn't be seeing is parental control. The parents must be involved and monitoring their children. It is not the job of the government or the ISPs to figure out what is or is not appropriate for children. Let's put responsibility where it belongs.

Agreed, however it seems rather impossible to police your children 24 hours a day, so you would most likely use filtering software or parental controls within your browser or your ISP. By putting pornographic material (and let's all be honest, an anatomical drawing of the body isn't pornographic, a girl "servicing" 5 guys is) it would allow you to better filter it out yourself. Everyone seems to think that the government is going to start blocking porn on it's own, and I don't believe that for a second. The porn industry is a multi-billion dollar one, and when money talks people tend to listen.

First of all.. c'mon, what kinda of a man are you if you don't watch a little porn.

Second.. I would think .sex is a sexier domain suffix.

www.hardcore.sex
www.springbreak.sex
www.luvporn.sex
www.asianz.sex

see how much sexier it is than .xxx, that's my $.02 .

Porn is not only on porn sites. It's on bittorrent, youtube, myspace...it's the spam I get via email, the links I see on other websites, the pop-up ads. .xxx has no effect on any of that whatsoever.

There's also the matter of WHAT is porn that people have already been talking about here - (link to possible inappropriate material following): Porn and Circumstance - this is the same story written two ways, once as erotica, once as porn. Fun read, if you've never seen it, and food for thought...where would erotica end up? Or do you, personally, think the entire thing is porn. It is all fully subjective.

Every person, every country has a different definition of porn, and the Internet is international. Is an unrated version of an R movie porn?

While the idea sounds good on its face, when you really start to dig it seems more like a band-aid for a much larger problem. It'd be nice to do something, sure, but this isn't it.

Oh and Leo is not, I repeat, NOT a "tech guy". He's a RADIO MAN.

Anyone who doesn't see how defining porn is very difficult and personal doesn't remember John Ashcroft, the then-Attorney General, covering the "Spirit of Justice" statue's bare breasts. Is this picture of Ashcroft in front of the statue pornographic? He apparently thought so. And he was the head of the DOJ. No regulation on this issue will succeed, people can always move their operations to a different country.