My two cents on ".xxx"

Yeah there is a real problem discerning when something crosses over to the pr0n area. And what if a site that normally didn't ever do pr0n for some flippant reason decided to (figuratively) pop out it's nipple during the superbowl half-time? Would the be forced onto a .xxx domain?

dennisbbb writes:

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

A man with self control who wants to honor his wife and not pollute his mind with images of other women. It's about being faithful. That's what kind of man I am.

So where does it stop? If we force porn sites to use .xxx, do we also regulate .com so that only commercial sites can use it? IE: would my personal site, which just hosts pictures, etc and serves no commercial purpose, be forced to change to .net? Furthermore, how would you reconcile the fact that most pornographic sites exist for commercial purposes?

And it goes beyond that: If pornographic sites must use .xxx, then what happens if I happen to host a picture of a naked woman on my Yahoo! webspace so I can paste a link to it on a messageboard. Does that violate the regulation? You can see that the enforceability of something like this is a pipedream at best.

Without touching on the validity or righteousness of porn, I do have one question that relates solely to regulation. We've all seen in the past that ICANN is imperfect when it comes to regulating domain name disputes. So, even if the porn industry were to agree to an .xxx or .sex TLD, how do you determine who gets those names? For example, if you have sex.com, sex.net, sex.org, sex.us, sex.biz ad infinitum, all owned by different people, who gets the right to the new domain sex.xxx? How will one be selected over the others? From a capitalistic sense, it makes for a nightmare of litigation and bureaucracy as each owner will assert their own rights to for the name with the valuable .xxx domain. I think all that will happen is years of costly litigation that will not really solve anything.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's a bad idea - I just don't see how it will be accomplished considering how messy even more mundane activities related to TLDs have been.

For example, if you have sex.com, sex.net, sex.org, sex.us, sex.biz ad infinitum, all owned by different people, who gets the right to the new domain sex.xxx?

Isn't it a matter of who registers the domain name with the TLD suffix first? So if someone owns sex.com but someone else registers sex.xxx, isn't it up to those two parties to work out the difference?

The loser can then sue the winner, and eventually end up in front of the WIPO, world intellectual property organization. Also, there are domain 'brokers' who can help out - when a domain is about to become available to register, they take money from you to pound the registrar from hundreds of servers simultaneously.

No, thanks. I think I'll go right on saying that people who don't want to see pornography shouldn't look at it, and that people who don't want their kids to look at pornography should, you know, actually spend some time with their kids.

As for schools, well "blocking pornography" is just a convenient excuse for wiping out large swathes of politically-controversial topics as well (sites about gays and lesbians? Must be pornography! Sites about abortion? Pregnancy comes from sex, so these must be pornography too!).