I actually find this structured approach to be quite interesting, despite the cynical, money-minting glee with which it will no doubt be executed. How far the industry has come since the days of faxing in my passport to register a .com.
Allow me to translate, for those that were lulled into a hypnotic trance by the Patrick Stewart sound alike:
Sunrise A: Additional adult domain cost! Your existing domain strategy just got more expensive to maintain unless you want your SEO to get nuked.
Sunrise B: Brand Blackmail, early period. Otherwise known as "That's a nice non-adult themed brand you have, it would terrible to see something happen to it."
Landrush: Laughing all the way to the bank. 18 days? Try 18 hours.
General Availability: Gone, all the good names are.
For what it's worth, it looks like the Sunrise B is for blocking/making it impossible to register .xxx domains with your registered trademark such as MarthaStewart.xxx instead of having to pay to register (and presumably not use) MarthaStewart.xxx
If any other TLDs work this way, I don't know of them.
It is a one-time fee. About 200 dollars. godaddy has the lowest price that I've seen (199.00). I think it's a smart idea (if you own a registered trademark) as 200 dollars is a lot cheaper than getting attorneys to go after trademark violators... even if it's a guaranteed win. Registered trademarks carry a lot of legal protection and someone would have to be nuts to try and build a porn website using a registered trademark that they did not own. No legit company would do that as their lawyers should catch it and realize the potential financial doom.
Regardless of your opinion of adult content, this stuff makes far less practical sense than things like RTA labeling http://www.rtalabel.org/. All that RTA requires is a simple meta tag, and it's free.
Content filters abide by it, and it doesn't disrupt existing business.
.xxx is just an effort to make money with another new TLD. It doesn't make the web safer and it doesn't make content-filters simpler or more accurate.
Since no one is proposing forcing sites to use .xxx, those concerned with truly making the web safer should really be looking for the most effective way to get wide penetration of a labeling solution, and a meta tag is about as simple as simple gets.
Since no one is proposing forcing sites to use .xxx,
No one has to propose it openly since the threat is implicit. Regardless of what is said at the moment of creation of the domain, all that a would-be censor has to do is wait [Internet-memory-erasure-period] and say "hey, we created XXX because all the porn is supposed to only be here" and viola.
Viola is a common misspelling (of voila¹) that gets parodied by the more intelligent.
ZOMG !!!!111oneone!!!
--
1 - voila is the English language word equivalent to voilà. Voilà is French and so should be italicised to indicate it's a foreign word. There's no need to use voilà as one can use voila. Viola!!!!!oneone11!
Or the verb raped in French. I honestly care less about the lack of à in an english context but the i-o swap makes quite an grammatically incorrect yet offensive typo, especially about the xxx TLD.
Yes, if it was a mandate then elementary schools could use basic DNS servers to block then entire .xxx domain rather than having to try and use complex and expensive http content proxy filters that only partially work.
We used to evade the filter at school by entering IP addresses instead of normal URLs. (This also seems to work to evade the IWF.) Is there an easy way to block IP addresses based on a reverse-lookup match against .xxx?
Regardless, I could see this being used as an excuse to shunt porn sites to .xxx, even if doing so wouldn't actually solve anything.
I disagree. Setting aside the problem of global top level domains, which I think are a bad idea, tagging adult sites via domain names greatly facilitates filtering as compared to meta tags.
Meta tags are an application level concept and so they have to be implemented at that level via browsers or HTTP proxies, or deep packet inspection.
DNS based filtering can be done more simply via network layer devices without having to look at the application level content. So DNS filters would work even if the website content was encrypted, for example.
From an administrative point of view it is much easier to control and manage network infrastructure than it is to control individual browsers or application level gateways.
Not really, since nothing is guaranteed to be on .xxx. If there was a requirement that people be forced onto .xxx you'd be correct, but people are going to be doing deep inspection anyway if they actually care about blocking content.
The question of enforcement is an entirely different one. I was talking about the mechanism, not the legalism.
This is one reason why global top level domains are a bad idea, there is no clear legal jurisdiction for them unlike country code domains. A legal framework can be built around xxx.us, for example, because it would map to an existing legal jurisdiction. The same can't be said for .xxx or meta-tags in documents served from arbitrary domains/locations.
The consensus seems that the .XXX TLD is just a money grab because it's not forcing adult content onto this TLD, and there is no practical way to even do that.
Therefore, wouldn't a counterpart TLD, such as .SAFE, actually make more sense? Companies that target children, such as Walt Disney, could provide a guaranteed safe sub-internet. With wikipedia's new filtering options, they could put a wiki-subset on .SAFE with maximum filtering on.
It would be hugely costly to police, and so probably the most expensive TLD ever. But some companies would surely still be able to profit.
The counterpart "safe" TLD is part of a much bigger content curation problem that is evolving in the Internet. Some parents out there are not at all OK with Disney content, even, some will want to leave boobs in but head-crushing out, etc, etc. Properly tailoring to people's many shades of content filtering seems like a job for dedicated browser-recognized crypto certificate chains.
This way, different consumers can directly delegate trust to a custom choice of entities that already are engaged in this space (e.g. all the "family focus" agencies), instead of fighting over a centralized TLD committee.
I assume Mark is refering to the DigiNotar hack (and earlier Comodo ones) and the ensuing shit-storm which showed what an awful security model the current CA/certificate system really is.
This is what the KIDS.US domain was supposed to be. Their directory lists fewer than 10 sites that successfully signed up. All of the content is dead or stale. Just how do you police any sort of dynamic, interesting, ever changing content?
2. Get every other TLD operator, including all the international ones, on board with your definition and rules (e.g. are we only banning websites on port 80, or would FTP sites also be verboten? password-protected sites? is classical art exempt?)
3. Enforce the censorship via some kind of magical system that is automated, doesn't trigger false positives, and allows for an appeal process
Legislators will simply say that all sites that feature nudity in a non medical setting will have to be on the xxx domain name. This isn't merely just porn so it can be passed off as 'neutral' and not legislating morality but rather legislating categorizations ("bringing order to the Wild West of the internet").
Now as for how they force sites onto the .xxx domain name, the choices are:
1. Legislators then simply blacklist all sites that feature nudity in other TLDs. This could be called the "Australian" approach or the "Great Firewall of Foo".
2. Fine companies within your country that are running sites outside of the XXX TLD. If only the US and EU do this, it'll drive 98% of the money-making porn industry into the XXX TLD. Then maybe for completionism you can implement #1 against 'foreign porn peddlers'.
False positives are not a concern for legislators. If there's a worry about blowback, they'll simply make the blacklist confidential, and the appeals process non-transparent.
Does this First Amendment require that you allow people to release porn movies as U rated? So why does labelling online, via a dedicated TLD suddenly mean that the First Amendment needs to be repealed?
Moreover most, if not all, such "speech" (dissemination of pornography) will ultimately be commercial and so not come under the full auspice of the First Amendment protections.
The correct way to do something like this would be to use a whitelist TLD, e.g., .kids. Such would avoid questions of censorship, and of which content requires being legally shoved into the .xxx ghetto, and makes it real clear that if you put porn on a .kids domain you're going to get hammered.
My comment above links to the ghost-town that is *.KIDS.US, which - with Congressional support - tried to do exactly that. It failed then, and would fail now.
Not quite countless. There are 307 TLDs today, up from about 250 a decade ago. Most of this growth as been in non-Latin IDN domains (There are 21 gTLDs today, including .XXX)
There will however be a sea change in the future, ICANN is intending the open up applications for new gTLDs in 2012 that could see hundreds more TLDs added. So if adding the dozen or so new gTLDs in the last 10 years has seemed countless, it will get worse.
I agree. I think a lot of people do this already, and not just for sites where they can't remember the exact URL. It's often just as quick to type 'bbc' or 'facebook' into the Google search bar, especially if Google is your homepage. You don't have to worry about typos, either. Some computer users I know, older users, access everything that way. When I asked one why, she replied that she found the browser address bar "fiddly".
Earlier this year Bing stated that "about 30%" of search queries are navigational.[1]
The temptation to put a useful, non-porn site on a subdomain of .xxx is quite large. Just to make the point that .xxx is useless and for the large number of clicks that it will no doubt bring.
Elementary programming course on 'thesecretcode.xxx'. Legions of porn seeking people converted to programmers, if slashdot is any indication that should be a perfect match.
It reminds me of the .mobi silliness. Why would a TLD, meant for the mobile devices, require one more keystroke, AND for the unfortunate people stuck using old phones with telephone keypads, require hitting 6 twice?
ICANN is a corrupt undemocratic non-representative self-important parasite on the internet who's main concern is increasing their budget so they can schedule more of their all expense paid meetings in Puerto Rico or Costa Rica.
I get the impression that the people who are blocking porn would not be customers of porn sites. In other words, only people who don't want to see .xxx sites would block them. So why is that any different from the AdBlock that I run in my browser already?
I can think of a ton of great domains, but at $250 or so a pop (including taxes) that's probably not going to happen.
Nobody I know in the adult industry is rushing to register anything either (except a few who are doing it purely as a defensive measure and don't plan to actually use it).
I worked at a big porn company a few years ago, and I do consulting for a porn startup now. I have other clients too, but it's a pretty fun industry to work in (fun parties, lots of great scaling challenges, etc).
I believe the name for that is kinetic type:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_typography
I'm not aware of any specialized tools, I've heard of using illustrator and after effects, however.
Allow me to translate, for those that were lulled into a hypnotic trance by the Patrick Stewart sound alike:
Sunrise A: Additional adult domain cost! Your existing domain strategy just got more expensive to maintain unless you want your SEO to get nuked.
Sunrise B: Brand Blackmail, early period. Otherwise known as "That's a nice non-adult themed brand you have, it would terrible to see something happen to it."
Landrush: Laughing all the way to the bank. 18 days? Try 18 hours.
General Availability: Gone, all the good names are.