New .XXX Top Level Domain

Jigabug writes "There's a story over at Yahoo! News mentioning yesterday's approval by ICANN on a new .xxx TLD. Domains are currently planned to be offered at 60.00 each for registration. The .xxx joins the recently approved .jobs and .travel." From the article: "Adult-oriented sites, a $12 billion industry, probably could begin buying xxx addresses as early as fall or winter depending on ICM's plans, ICANN spokesman Kieran Baker said. The new pornography suffix was among 10 under consideration by the regulatory group..." CNN and the BBC have commentary as well.

Re:Wow, they did something right!

[garett_spencley]

This is NOT good news.

1) ISPs can and many will undoubtedly block .xxx

2) If any country decides to introduce legislation mandating the use of .xxx for adult sites it will SEVERELY hurt the adult industry as many people who own hundreds of domains would have to pay much greater amount than they currently do for .xxx equivalents ... and you can bet that domain squatters are going to do whatever they can to make a fortune off of registering .xxx equivalents of popular adult sites.

It's already known that $10 off of each domain sale is designated to go to IFFOR to "contribute to issues facing the adult online industry" .. however, most savvy webmasters pay less than $10 / domain as it is right now... and any adult organization supporting the new .xxx is undoubtedly only in it for personal financial gain .. as the overwhelming disapproval of adopting the TLD by the adult industry as a whole has been seen time and time again.

Re:Would that be a problem?

[Lifewish]

I guess your beef is more with them actually legislating it, but that doesn't seem like such a big deal to me either.

As a Brit, I'm not too keen on the American govt trying to claim legislative control over the internet. If I decide to put kinky pictures on my site (which, as you will note, is at a .org domain name), does that mean that I get sued by the American govt? If the plan is for the legislation to only apply to Americans, how is that going to be enforced without removing internet anonymity? How long til the world governments decide that, since the whole .xxx thing worked so well (or regardless of the fact that it didn't) they'd like to control more stuff thank you very much?

How long til my favourite white-hat hacking sites go dark?

Re:Just a price hike

[Anonymous Coward]

That's like asking who pays for Music CDs or DVDs.

Not everyone is a communist thief who uses P2P.

Not that everyone who uses P2P doesn't buy porn, I make good $$$ by spamming alt.binaries.* and P2P networks with my trailers.

Not funny, 100% TRUE

[EvilStein]

Blogs are cluttering up search engines faster than online poker spammers are. seriously. I would *love* to type in a search and eliminate all blogs from the results. Maybe if the blog wankers would come up with a tag that would allow us to skip blogs in Google searches this wouldn't be a problem, but no, that won't happen because bloggers love the page views.

Re:Just a price hike

[rho]

Sounds like classic discriminatory pricing to me. Of course, there's nothing wrong with that. I'll wager good money that you're also in favor of a progressive income tax. This is Slashdot, after all...

Porn sites are ALL for-profit ventures. A lot of .com sites (and .net and .org) are financed out of the pocket of regular folks for numerous reasons. Moving adult sites into a "ghetto" would solve one of the Slashdot crowds' pet peeves--Internet filters that filter breast cancer sites. (Why Slashdot is so fascinated with breast cancer is a fat-geek joke just waiting to happen.)

Put all the adult sites in .xxx! If you don't want porn, you block all .xxx sites! Simple! Effective! And no breast cancer sites will be harmed in the process! And now Slashdot is all up in arms about an adult "ghetto". Not that the adult sites would agree to do this to begin with--the industry is built on slowly whittling away the public's resistance to adult entertainment, and that's hard to do when you're relegated to an easily avoidable TLD.

Re:Hmmmm...

[sharp-bang]

Agreed. If they wanted to protect kids they should have created a .kids TLD for content specifically for children's use, making it quick-n-easy to whitelist the domain for kids to browse from ome/school/library networks, and making it easy to identify abusers of the TLD.

Re:I like it.

[iamlucky13]

Well perhaps because as a general principle, it's immoral to charge different amount for different fields of endeavor. A domain should cost the same, regardless of the TLD in which it resides.

Says who? I can think of lots of cases where different endeavors cost different amounts. Take parking. I can park right next to the Duncan Plaza for $8 for four hours. Or I can park in the garage 2 blocks away for $0.95/hour. One is closer to where I'm going. .xxx specifies more closely the content than .com, .net, or .org.

It's also not without precedence. Check out the price of .jp, .cn, .tv, or quite a few other TLD's. Perhaps you would be better to consider the extra revenue as incentive to ICANN to create this additional service for its customers. Nobody is forcing them to buy it and nobody is forcing ICANN to create additional TLD's to administer.

Re:Hmmmm...

[loqi]

Hello; "XXX" is a euphemism. Just use ".sex" and there isn't any confusion.

Unless you don't speak English, of course. Given that we don't have language-specific namespaces for these things, XXX is a pretty reasonable choice.