.XXX Domains to Make Porn Sites Transparent?
Plans for .XXX domain names to represent pornography sites are continuing to move forward. For the next 18 days, pornography sites and those and other “members of the adult Sponsored Community” will gobble up as many internet addresses as they can, according to the ICM Registry company.
The “Landrush,” as it’s called, allows pornography websites and related content to have their own space on the internet, all tagged with an obvious .XXX format.
The new names will become available Dec. 6.
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Some don’t agree that the names are a good idea, however.
Bruce Arnold, an information law lecturer from the University of Canberra, thinks that the names will not work because the entire international community cannot all agree on pornography standards.
“It's not going to work because we don't all agree on what is porn, and that's a huge issue," Arnold told Fox News.
Arnold also cited that in many other countries, nudity and sex are not as taboo as in the U.S. This, in addition to a wide variety of sexual differences varying based on country, would make the .XXX effort “fundamentally flawed,” he said.
Others disagree; Stephen Collins, a spokesman for an Australian civil liberties group says “having [.XXX] available is going to make website content clear.”
This is not wholly true. Because the .XXX campaign is not mandatory, many established sites may not change their domain name, for fear of being blocked.
Still other pornography sites use cybersquatting- a term used to describe misspelled popular site names that redirect to another site altogether. Many sites misspell common things kids search for to tempt and condition their next generation of customers. Changing their domain to .XXX would be a dead giveaway for youths and parents.
In response to the .XXX move, universities all over the country are scrambling to purchase the names; the schools don’t want their academic institutions associated with smut.
Terry Robb, the director of information technology at the University of Missouri-Columbia, had this to say: “We don't want someone coming across our trademark on a porn site. God only knows what they'd come up with,” he told CBS.
Although it is uncertain what percentage of all internet traffic is dedicated to pornography, it is safe to say that it is a large amount. Forbes states that at least 1.1 percent of the internet is pornographic in nature, but that is only visible sites indexed by search engines like Google and Yahoo.
The reason for the disproportion representing pornography as a larger part of the internet (some have misstated porn to be over 50 percent of the internet) comes from the sites’ popularity, not their number.
It costs around $200 to register an .XXX domain name.
