For the longest time - a decade to be exact - there have been efforts to establish a “.xxx” top level domain (TLD) for pornographic sites.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which regulates domain names like .com and .net, had repeatedly rejected applications for TLDs like .xxx, .sex and .adult. Last month, however, it had a change of heart and announced that it would allow .xxx address for adult sites within a year.

The company that has been pushing for the .xxx domain, ICM Registry, says that this development will make things safer both for consumers of adult content as well as for children.

NONE “If you’re a surfer and you’re about to choose to visit an adult site, you don’t know if that site is a responsible site. You don’t know if they’re conforming to best business practices with security, malicious code, etc,” ICM chairman Stuart Lawley told Tech News Daily . “Before you even type it in, you know that a .xxx operator is adhering to a well-known set of business practices.”

Lawley was referring to the fact that some porn sites are laden with malware, viruses and so on. He's got a good point there. If sites are vetted before being allowed to register for the .xxx domain, it’s one way to ensure that they do not contain harmful programs that can adversely affect your computer.

His other point that having a .xxx TLD will make it easier for parents to shield children from pornographic content is a lot less convincing. Yes, you can install software that completely blocks .xxx sites but there will still be plenty of adult sites with the .com domain. And those can easily be found just by Googling a few selected keywords.

To say that the .xxx domain lacks industry support would be an understatement. The fact of the matter is that the porn industry is actually against the creation of such a TLD, as are religious groups. Which makes for very strange bedfellows (pun unintended).

Both groups have been lobbying against it, though for different reasons. The adult industry is concerned that allocating a specific TLD for adult sites is a slippery slope towards censorship and government control.

“If the board doesn’t like what a producer creates, there is the possibility that they could censor it,” says Diane Duke, executive director of the Free Speech Coalition, a trade association representing more than 1,000 adult entertainment businesses.. “This will ghettoise our industry and make us a target of regulation.”

Religious groups and child protection organisations meanwhile, are not happy about this development either as it seems to validate pornography. They also fear it will just lead to the further propagation of smutty sites.

Criticism notwithstanding, ICM’s Lawley is a happy man. Even though the .xxx domain is not yet operational, he's already racked up more than 100,000 pre-registered .xxx names and he reckons the demand will only grow.

Lawley has said he expects to eventually make US$30 million a year in revenue by selling each .xxx site for US$60 (six times more than a typical TLD domain like .com normally costs).

Preempting cyber-squatters

So, who’s been pre-registering all these domains? Free Speech Coalition’s Duke says many of those purchases were what you’d call “defensive” registrations, made by companies that do not want others to cyber-squat on their names. In other words, if you are a porn site operator with a .com, you’d also want to get a .xxx to prevent your site’s brand name from being hijacked.

earth Many industry watchers expect adult site operators to continue operating their .com domains, resulting in a proliferation of even more porn sites on the Internet.

Enough Is Enough (EIE), a non-partisan, non-profit watchdog group, says that the .xxx TLD was a bad idea when it was first suggested a decade ago and remains just as bad today precisely because of this.

“The creation of a .xxx domain sounds good in theory but is a very bad idea,” says EIE president Donna Rice-Hughes. “It will allow Internet pornographers to co-locate their content on both their existing .com domains and the new .xxx domain, thus dramatically increasing pornography’s pollution of the Internet.”

Aaron Kenny, CTO and co-founder of InternetSafety.com, a leading provider of web filtering solutions for consumers and businesses, concurs.

“The way in which ICANN has chosen to implement the .xxx domain will have no effect whatsoever in terms of filtering adult content on the Internet,” says Kenny. “As long as there are still porn sites with .com, extensions, you will still need to filter them one by one. Instead of solving the problem, ICANN has exacerbated it by paving the way for the porn industry to double their online footprint.”

What’s also likely to happen is that even  non-porn businesses might register a .xxx domain just to avoid cyber-squatters too. If you have a respectable business with a .com website, you might want to prevent some porn operator from registering a .xxx site with your company’s brand name. This is likely to be the case with big multinationals.

So, in the end what will having a .xxx TLD achieve? Nothing much really, other than to make ICM rich. I won’t contribute to that, so don’t expect to see me registering oonyeoh.xxx anytime soon. Anyone wants to cyber-squat such a domain, please be my guest.

 

OON YEOH is a new media consultant. His upcoming book on social media will be published by MPH later this month. He invites you to connect with him via Twitter and Facebook .