Internet gets its own red-light district

[Northwood_DK]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8064734/

The Internet's primary oversight body approved a plan Wednesday to create a virtual red-light district, setting the stage for pornographic Web sites to use new addresses ending in "xxx."

[illinifan999]

get em quick

[Ksyrup]

Since this appears to be voluntary, once the first hundred or so obvious site names go (and I wonder if an argument will ensue over the rights to certain .xxx domain names that are similar to existing .com porm domain names), I doubt this will be much of a draw to internet porn sites. A lot of them appear to get hits by having multiple linking domain names similar to legit domain names, and having an .xxx extension would kill that. I can still remember accidentally typing in www.wheather.com (http://www.wheather.com) at work 6 or 7 years ago, and being directed to some bestiality site. That was a fun explanation to the IT guys...

[Samdari]

Since this appears to be voluntary, once the first hundred or so obvious site names go (and I wonder if an argument will ensue over the rights to certain .xxx domain names that are similar to existing .com porm domain names), I doubt this will be much of a draw to internet porn sites. A lot of them appear to get hits by having multiple linking domain names similar to legit domain names, and having an .xxx extension would kill that. I can still remember accidentally typing in www.wheather.com (http://www.wheather.com) at work 6 or 7 years ago, and being directed to some bestiality site. That was a fun explanation to the IT guys...

Did the same thing. In the early days of ebay, I heard lots of their ads on the radio. But I heard the site name as ebid (which makes sense for an auction site, no?). Turns out ebid was a porn site with vulgar sounds on the front page.

Big oops.

[sterlingice]

Then there's the infamous whitehouse.com that was a porn site (since whitehouse.gov is the actual). Thankfully some of that stupid cybersquatting has been taken care of due to legislation in the last 5 years.

Frankly, this is really stupid- why would you go here instead of .com unless your .com address is already taken? If they *required* all porn sites to move over to .xxx and had some plan to move existing .com sites over to .xxx then that would be great- it would make blocking porn easy for work and make looking for porn easier (and penalties for having porn remain on .com or .org, etc).

But, as it is, porn still relies on silly things like mistypes to generate business and there's no logical reason for existing sites to move over. It's like asking everyone in the neighborhood if they'd like to voluntarily change addresses. A few people will say "sure, I didn't like that I lived on 225 Maple Street anyways, 225 Morningside Drive sounds a lot better" but everyone else figures it's just more of a pain in the ass to change their address on stationary, tell everyone they know a new address, and everything else.

SI