Sex domain gets official approval

news.bbc.co.uk

11 points·nickluft··5 comments

The thing that concerns me about this tld is the potential for more puritanical groups to attempt to push any and all "adult" content onto it, then legislate access restrictions. It has the potential to be a vector against network neutrality.

I hope this is really about convenience and not backroom censorship.

I had the same fear as you, but lets be real - if they wanted to outlaw porn, they don't have to put in on a special domain first, they could just outlaw it.

On the other hand, this allows schools and companies to much easier block porn. It also gives parents a real choice in what to allow their kids to access (personally I don't mind my future kids look at porn, but I would like the opertunity to block it anyway as it would be a good motivation for them to learn some computer skills).

if they wanted to outlaw porn, they don't have to put in on a special domain first, they could just outlaw it

Yes, but having it moved to a TLD that can more easily be filtered makes that transition that much easier. I think the real push will be to legislate that all adult content be moved to the XXX domain... at least in the US.

Seems to me that this decision just transfers $$$ into the hands of the TLD operator. Porn website operators will now want to buy example.xxx as well as example.com and example.net and so forth. Non-porn operators may want to buy anotherexample.xxx to protect their anotherexample.com name.

Yup. The more TLDs there are, the more you have to buy. Perhaps that it the silly thing about domain names. The meat of the domain is the domainname not the tld;. When I have explained to non-techies why they should buy the yourname.org yourname.com etc. they find it complicated.

Perhaps I should be able to just buy yourname and all the tlds associated with it.

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