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He's missing the point on .xxx. No person with any vague understanding of the internet thinks that they can block pornography entirely from a person interested
by cookiecaper 16y ago
He's missing the point on .xxx. No person with any vague understanding of the internet thinks that they can block pornography entirely from a person interested in getting to it. It's not that hard to get around filters because porn is everywhere online, but it can still be useful to filter it, even though a determined individual can obviously bypass your block. Here's why:
1. First and foremost, filtration software isn't just about adversarial blocking. It can stop your grandma from getting tricked into going lemonparty.org. This is a big one.
2. Children looking for porn without permission are often under non-ideal constraints, like a time limit before someone else comes home. If you can get fairly good coverage, the kid will have that much less time, and many kids aren't going to invest in figuring out how to bypass it; they'd just as soon go to their room and fap there, or go to a friend's house where there is unmonitored access.
3. Filtration can be used to demonstrate a good-faith effort to keep your network and environment safe (at a library or net cafe, for instance). Same principles as number two here: if it's difficult enough and the user is under time constraints, they'll just wait until later.
There are other good reasons, but that should suffice. .xxx isn't about keeping a sophisticated, determined opponent out, and that's rarely successful no matter what measures you take. The internet is always going to have porn and there shouldn't be any enforcement forcing adult content onto xxx.
However, if xxx sees wide adoption, and the xxx sites move off of com (redirect), that's a big weight off the shoulders of blacklist and filtration vendors. To be able to block a whole huge namespace like that, where xxx is now hosting 30% or some other significant number of the new adult content that would have been on com if not for the xxx TLD, that's a big efficiency gain, even if you still have to filter com.
- dustingetz 16y ago> if xxx sees wide adoption Off the top of my head, I (and I think also the author) don't see any particular reason to think that .xxx will see wide adoption.
- cookiecaper 16y agoThe author indicates that there's already a large queue of pre-orders. I think xxx will achieve adoption by pornographers that want social acceptance. Basically, any pornographer that operates in the real world as an "adult media company", "glamor photography", etc. A xxx domain will demonstrate a willingness to allow your content to be easily filtered, which is important for porn companies because as much as adults love pornography, generally, they want some control over its introduction and availability to their children. xxx-exclusive hosted content will be seen as a good faith effort to keep parents in control. I think that eventually any porn company that wants social tolerance will be on xxx because it will be better for their image. Topsites and other aggregators will probably stay on com as they don't really care and it doesn't effect their commissions and/or ad money.
- regularfry 16y agoMy guess is that the bulk of the pre-orders are organisations who want .xxx as well as .com, the same way you've kinda got to have .com/.net/.org. I don't see that there's any reason for them to drop one for the other.
- rmc 16y agoThe author indicates that there's already a large queue of pre-orders. I would assume that's existing domain and copyright holders who want to reserve their domain/tradmark before someone else does. That doesn't imply there will be a lot of usage.
- tommorris 16y agoYep, I was on the Wikipedia IRC the other day and there was a debate about whether the Wikimedia Foundation should register wikipedia.xxx, wikimedia.xxx, wikinews.xxx etc. to prevent people from squatting them and doing evil things with them. I'm sure plenty of businesses, non-profits and governments are thinking the same thing in order to prevent whitehouse.com/whitehouse.gov mixups.
- xyzzyz 16y ago> However, if xxx sees wide adoption, and the xxx sites move off of com (redirect), that's a big weight off the shoulders of blacklist and filtration vendors. So, they should move to .xxx to facilitate being blocked? Somehow I do not see it.
- cookiecaper 16y agoYes. As I mentioned above, I think it will become the friendly thing for commercial, bona fide purveyors to do, just as it's friendly now to have a page that says "If you're under 18, click here to leave!" I think any page that currently has such an intro will move to xxx for the social goodwill, and that any page that doesn't won't.
- joebadmo 16y agoBut the "under 18" landing page doesn't actually block anyone, including those under 18 from continuing on with the site, so there's really no incentive not do it. If they move to a guaranteed to be filtered tld, they'd explicitly be asking for less traffic, which seems unlikely to me.
- vacri 16y ago... you seriously think that .xxx will stop trick sites like lemonparty and goatse? I am gobsmacked.
- cookiecaper 16y agoIt was an argument for filtration, not specifically for xxx. There will still be trick site in the com space; fortunately, lemonparty and goatse, at least at their canonical domains, are easily and quickly blocked.