ICANN Approves .XXX
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lothos writes "Pornography will have its own top-level domain, dot-XXX, the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers decided today." Ars Technica has a short but thoroughly-linked article tracing some of the long history (in Internet time) behind the push for .xxx. See also ICANN's announcement of the approval, and — for all the juicy details — the rationale behind the decision (PDF).
Re:It's a good decision (Score:4, Interesting)
I wouldn't be so sure. The porn sites, from what I've heard, want to be in a .xxx domain so that they can be blocked more easily. Why? Because that gives them protection against future bills like COPA that would be much more burdensome for them.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure a lot of porn sites will continue to maintain their .com or .net domains, but I'd imagine they will quickly be modified so that each page redirects you to the same page in the .xxx domain. It's easy enough to set up a web server to do that.
TLD for Financial Transactions (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd really like to see ICANN create a TLD limited to banking sites and online stores the way .edu and .gov cannot be registered by any old scammer. I think that would do a lot in the way of preventing phishing. Few people understand the concept of security certificates and even fewer know why a self signed certificate is bad. ID theft and fraud seems to be a more important issue than preventing a 12 year old from seeing the human body due to a stigma based off 2000 year old mythology.
Re:5..4...3... (Score:4, Interesting)
So what if someone were to use some .xxx sites for non-porn? Will this to be illegal too?