Porn-Industry Outsiders Fear 'Shakedown' In .XXX TLD

The long-debated .XXX top-level domain opens this week; reader SonicSpike sends a snippet from the Washington Times about what may turn into a hornet's nest of anger at how the new domain is being used: "Some adult-entertainment companies are balking at the entire scheme, saying that ICM Registry LLC, which is overseeing .xxx registrations worldwide, does not have permission to sell the .xxx version of trademarked names and brands. In addition, the Florida-based company is raising eyebrows — and charges of 'shakedown' — by trying to get non-porn companies to pay to prevent their brands from being registered as .xxx sites. After all, what maker of baby food or children's movies, for example, would want to have sites such as gerber.xxx or disney.xxx floating around the Internet?"

This has already been discussed

[Kral_Blbec]

There is a clause that allows companies to register their own trademark domain for a steep discount if they don't intend to use it for adult content. A couple hundred bucks to a mega corp isn't a shakedown.

Re:Worst of both worlds?

[Anthony Mouse]

I'd like to see a scheme like the .xxx tld work well- simplifying things for people who don't want to encounter internet smut without error-prone filter setups and without futile attempts to keep that kind of stuff off the web entirely. But it looks like this is being done in the worst way possible.

The trouble is that it can't work that way. You can't exclude all smut to a single set of domains for a large number of reasons. For one thing, nobody really agrees on a definition. For another, any single domain may contain a wide variety of things: You can find a metric ton of non-smut on tumblr, but you can also find plenty of naked women there too. And you basically end up with two choices: Either you banish all of those websites in their entirety to .xxx and then all of their non-smut content ends up behind the filter (and you hit First Amendment problems in the US), or you let websites containing smut use non-.xxx domains, but then the filter doesn't actually block the smut because nobody uses exclusively .xxx when they can reach a larger audience by paying another $8/year to get the equivalent .com domain.

The problem is really with filtering in general, not with domains: You have a trade-off between false negatives and false positives. The only way to have a low number of false negatives is to have a high number of false positives and vice versa. And we decided a long time ago that it's better for government to accept the large number of false negatives and then let people choose for themselves what content they want to consume, than to have a government censorship board that decides what people can see and hear.

Re:Never forget who OWNS the Washington Times.

[NiceGeek]

I don't know when people started taking the stance that all opinions and all sources should be given equal time and weight, but it has led to a massively uninformed populace.