Thus Starts the Warsaw Ghetto for Online Adult Sites
June 4, 2005
7:49 a.m., MT

I know this isn't news any more, but it's been bugging me ever since I saw the first headline, which was from ABC: Porn Sites to Gain a Top-Level Domain (which I'll abbreviate TLD). What could be bad about people who want adult sites voluntarily getting this domain? This article provides some interesting glimpses ... (all emphasis mine):

It's official—the Web soon will have its own red-light district. This week, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers approved a plan that will allow pornographic Web sites to use URLs that end with ".xxx." ....

ICANN spokesperson Kieran Baker said the nonprofit organization has merely taken the first steps to creating designated adult URLs, and that the Canadian ICM Registry will handle how the new top-level domain, which will be voluntary, is distributed and dealt with. ....

ICM president Stuart Lawley said in a statement, "By moving forward with .xxx, the online adult-entertainment industry is taking part in a proactive approach to its presence on the Internet, making an identifiable commitment to responsible behavior and to the development of best business practices."

ICM also posted information about the new adult-oriented destinations, including how and why the new domain will prove to be beneficial, the most repeated comment being that the best-practice guidelines accompanying an .xxx site will relieve pressure from child and family safety groups—namely because a regulatory group that heads up the .xxx domain will set rules as to how and where adult Web sites with that top-level domain operate on the Web. ....

According to the ICM Web site, a voluntary .xxx domain is also necessary to protect the rights of adult-content creators and consumers on the Web. ....

ICM says the responsibility falls to this voluntary, industry-led movement. The ICM statement says it will promote child-friendly surfing online, promote credible self-regulation for the online adult-entertainment industry and protect freedom of expression for adult-content creators and for Internet users, among others.

The new .xxx Web sites will start to roll out once ICM and ICANN create and sign a mutual contract. The new domain will cost less than $100 and will be available to registrants willing to adhere to the predetermined best business practices.

Let's start with the most obvious thing: price. I just registered a new TLD and paid under $20 for two years -- why on earth would I want to spend massively more money on a new TLD that's going to be automatically blocked on lots of computers (think libraries and such)?

And why would I agree to let some techno-regucrat dictate my "best business practices"? Do thinking people really need to have the extra-obvious .xxx appended to know that something named "bondage blog", for example, isn't something the kiddies should be seeing, no matter what its extension?

The organization that'll be doing this policing is the International Foundation for Online Responsibility (IFFOR). Here's the first line on their home page:

The .xxx TLD is intended to primarily serve the needs of the global responsible online adult-entertainment community ("Community").

Didja notice that teeny adjective responsible in there? Whatever could they intend by including it?

At paragraph three we get to the heart of the matter:

The IFFOR may refine this definition [of "online adult-entertainment community"] as may be necessary for the operation of the TLD.

Yes, let's keep the definition sufficiently slippery, so that we can increase our control on the fools who sign themselves up for our tender ministrations ...

How often have we seen something that starts as voluntary ending up being mandatory? Does anyone think for a moment that there'll be no attempts, say, to require SSNs and other numbers in setting up an .xxx site so that tax thugs can go after porn sellers? Or that a sin tax won't be levied on .xxx domains to cover the administrative costs of its regulation? (And let's not forget about the litigation, when a blocker gets hacked or fooled and lets an adult site through ...) And of course, all that personal information required to register the TLDs will probably get sold to the likes of ChoicePoint and LexisNexis; they're whizzes at ensuring sensitive information remains private!

A PCWorld article closes with a very interesting quote:

In 2000, U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, D-Connecticut, joined several other U.S. politicians demanding ICANN to approve the .xxx TLD. In a paper [PDF alert], Lieberman wrote: "I think (the .xxx TLD) has a lot of merit, for rather than constricting the Net's open architecture, it would capitalize on it to effectively shield children from pornography, and it would do so without encroaching on the rights of adults to have access to protected speech."

Bullshit. The online adult community is already being encroached in various ways. Those who get the .xxx TLD will simply make it easier for future squeezes to choke them.

If you've read this far and you're thinking something like, So what? I'm not a porn peddler and I don't visit those sites, so what does this have to do with me? Here's what it has to do with you: it sets a very dangerous precedent. Once porn (and will erotica be part of that? Where's the line between the two?) gets shunted into a "safe corner" of the internet, do you think the regucrats will stop? Plenty of other things are demonized ... unapproved political ideas (such as fills this space) ... the right to keep and bear arms ... guns in general ... bloggers ... where will their controlling hands turn next? If you care about liberty, it matters.

Sunni

Replies: 8 people have spoken!

On Saturday, June 4th, Ginny said:

Yep. It opens the door. And people do have the 'so what' it doesn't affect me attitude, then lo and behold when their rights get smashed and no one cares--they wonder why.

On Saturday, June 4th, Matthew Bryan said:

Plenty of other things are demonized ... unapproved political ideas (such as fills this space) ... the right to keep and bear arms ... guns in general ... bloggers ... where will their controlling hands turn next?
Good point. I can see it now: a .dis for dissent, or .agw for anti-gov. wackos. All easily screened out by schools, libraries, or anywhere else frequented by "impressionable minds".

On Saturday, June 4th, Kirsten said:

I love being able to say this- I am a porn peddler.

As an owner of a website marketing adult products, I have a few things to say. I haven't gotten through the whole post so pardon me if I repeat something, but I am a bit hot under the collar.

1. It is not my responsibility to babysit someone else's children. I have no obligation to relieve child and family groups or parents of their responsibilities.

2. I market commercial products. There is nothing irresponsible about doing that under .com auspices, and I strenuously object to Stuart Lawley's and IFFOR's implication that there is.

3. I haven't spoken with my business partner yet about this, but we have a dilemma to resolve. We can spend the extra $$$ to get the apparently fairly pricey .xxx domain name in addition to our current one- this would add a significant expense to an operation we are running extremely inexpensively at the moment. Or we can opt out of the .xxx domain and then risk the value of name when someone else picks it up and competes with us on it as a .xxx, or worse lose our name completely if we are later told we cannot use .com.

On Saturday, June 4th, Brad Spangler said:

"Do thinking people really need to have the extra-obvious .xxx appended to know that something named "bondage blog", for example, isn't something the kiddies should be seeing, no matter what its extension?"

So many people don't even LOOK at the URL they are going to ANYWAY. That's why we have such a huge problem with phishing sites.

How many of the sheeple have typed their bank account logins into a fake form on sites with URLs like www.geocities.com/somebank/ ?

Lots!

I've ran adult sites before but currently have just one. I just don't put a whole lot of work into them anymore as I've NEVER made any income from them -- at all.

Honest, Mr. IRS Agent! The field really is just THAT competitive!

While I do LIKE seeing additional marketing options (such as new TLDs) open up, the context of this indicates that yeah -- it's a new corral and the cattle drive is going to kick off pretty soon now.

The fact is that the adult entertainment industry in aggregate is huge.

Where small operators have been successful in the past, they will soon have the additional hurdles of burdens related to this to clear.

This won't hurt the huge media companies of the adult entertainment world.

This won't hurt foreign web site operators.

The small, independent web site operators are the ones who will suffer.

This is top-down class warfare designed to stamp out any talented mavericks and stop them from having independent livelihoods. They don't *want* you to have the option of finding ways to support yourself without groveling / scraping / bowing within their soul-crushng institutional framework of corporatism.

They don't *like* the idea that self-employed people have no boss they can lean on if that person becomes "politically inconvenient".

On Sunday, June 5th, Sunni said:

Brad, I suppose I shouldn't be, but I'm amazed that people don't check a URL before clicking, and fall for such obvious phishing things as you posted. I almost always look, and if a site doesn't reveal where a click will take me, then I'm very unlikely to follow a link. Guess that makes me one of them conspiracy whackos, don't it? And you're absolutely right about this being another means of controlling and monitoring income/money flow.

Kirsten, your points are excellent. One type of commerce shouldn't be singled out in the way this TLD will do, and it makes things very confusing for anyone with sexually-oriented content on the internet. It sounds as though it's geared for businesses, but what if you have a sex blog, and you just talk about your sex life and/or fantasies? Should you be required to get an .xxx TLD? If your blog has Google ads, does that make it commercial enough? What about affiliate relationships with porn sites?

I've not researched the details of the .xxx TLD, but I've seen nothing suggesting that porn peddlers will not be allowed to use .com TLDs for now. If that changes, it'll be very interesting to see how domain renewals get handled.

This looks more and more like the beginning of the end of the wonderfully anarchic internet.

On Sunday, June 5th, ESC said:

1. the government will NEVER be able to force a site to obtain a .xxx domain, or ANY site to have a specific domain. it's too massive an undertaking.

2. the cost of obtaining on is significantly more..yes..about $75. but being that the online adult industry is one of the most lucrative online ventures, even the smallest company should be able to foot the price tag.

pardon me if I don't get all choked up about it. Don't me wrong, I am in full support of the adult entertainment industry - as well as a customer. but I don't think a new domain name is going to bring it down, OR infringe upon our liberties. I'm saving my righteous indignation for the Patriot Act.

On Monday, June 6th, Sunni said:

Sure, the Patriot Act is much worse than this "voluntary" segmenting of the internet. That's a devil almost everyone recognizes. Because this is voluntary for now, and because it's "solving" a "problem", many people will be very accepting of it. That opens the door to a variety of possible infringements on individual liberty.

On Monday, June 6th, Pat T said:

OTOH: Whose idea was this at first? Perhaps some porn sites feel this is a way to be cosidered ‘legitimate’; by being ‘self’-regulated, they may feel they now have some breathing room.

If porn is trying to become ‘respectable’ (I’m not saying it isn’t respectable now), they may see this as a means to achieve respectibility, AND equality via the law, at the same time.

Now government intervention will surely grow on the heels of this domain, as has already been noted. WE know this. But porn is no smarter than any other sector of the entertainment business -- they may not perceive it that way. Or if they do, they may consider taking what they can, one step at a time, and fighting off the next step at a future date. After all, they’ve been down this road before, and they know how to fight for their rights and their life.

The one thing they have going for them is the knowledge that pornography is NOT going to go away, no matter what laws are put into effect. And the closer they get to respectibility, the less chance the law has of taking it away again. Adult channels are on cable and satellite already. Putting them on the internet ‘legitimately’ is not far behind.
Taking respectibility away again, all over the world, will be the tough part -- but that will be government’s problem. Let’s see them try to do it!

(Didn’t mean to play devil’s advocate, but I guess that’s what I’ve done. I question if a separate .xxx domain is a good idea for several reasons, and certainly it shouldn't be regulated -- but I can understand the thinking that some proponents might ascribe to it.)

In any case, the market may not support this domain anyway.
If some porn sites wish to reach EVERYBODY, they may not choose .xxx, instead taking their chances the ‘old-fashioned’ way. They may be leery of .xxx because they define themselves as something other than pornographic, or they don’t wish to be constricted (by one domain), and will fight the rulings against them.
The more obnoxious porn sites (pedophiliacs, slave-trade connections, e.g) will go elsewhere, as they can’t or won’t meet certain conditions of the ruling. They will find other ways of presenting themselves, which is no different than what they do now in some cases.
All of which means: the market may not support this domain!

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