The long struggle for an official .XXX domain to host adult websites is finally over, as ICANN today announced:
The agency that controls Internet addresses said Friday it will consider adding the .xxx suffix for pornography to the list that people and companies can pick for their online identities. The decision paves the way for final approval to launch .xxx as an online red light disctrict, alongside suffixes such as .com and .org, in as soon as six months, finally ending a decade-long battle.
The new suffix would not be required for pornographic sites, but backers say it will make it easy for Web blocking software to filter out “.xxx” sites, marking them clearly as porn.
Unfortunately, this isn’t true. The idea sounds compelling: you put all the pornography in the .XXX domain, then you just set web browsers or filters to block all .XXX, and the problem is solved. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple, and .XXX won’t work to make filters more effective.
The reason .XXX won’t work is because of the technology that underlies the Internet. As many Internet users know, underneath the familiar Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) of www.SiteName.com is a unique Internet Protocol (IP) number like 192.168.1.1.
Here’s where the problem with blocking only .XXX name comes in. If a web site like www.playboy.com corresponds directly with a numeric IP such as 216.163.137.68, the filter must block the numeric IP and the FQDN to be effective. [Of course, some websites do not correspond directly to a single numeric IP, but rather share a numeric IP with multiple websites. In these cases it is usually not necessary to block the numeric IP address.]
If the numeric IP is not blocked, it becomes trivial for a knowledgeable teen to defeat filtering. There are many websites on the Internet that for free will translate .com names into numeric IP address. For example, visit http://centralops.net/co/DomainDossier.aspx and enter WWW.PLAYBOY.COM and it returns 216.163.137.68. Enter 216.163.137.68 into a browser, and you can access Playboy. (Alternatively, you can just drop down to a command prompt in Windows and type in “Ping playboy.com” to get the numeric IP)
For filtering companies, the bottom line is that .XXX won’t make their jobs any easier. Filtering companies can’t just block all .XXX sites, because in addition to blocking www.porn-site.xxx they will have to block the numeric IP as well. And that means tracking each .XXX porn site individually to find the numeric IP address, the same way filtering companies track .com porn sites. And that’s a big job. The big filtering companies have millions of pornography sites to keep track of. So rather than making the jobs of filtering companies easier, the main impact a .XXX will have for filtering companies is to simply create more pornography sites for them to filter.
Filed under: Filtering
See also .xxx Domain, approved by ICANN, is a Bad Idea (6/25) from Enough is Enough.
In theory I would have thought that since the .xxx is a top level domain that all IP addresses associated to that TLC would in theory house xxx material.
This being the case filtering companies would simply block at the TLD all requests to access IP addresses associated with .XXX and not have to identify each site by its own unique URL.
Or are IP ranges likely to be spread across TLDs?
Of course if legislation then required all pornography to be in the ‘terrirory’ of .xxx the debate then turns to how to define what constitutes pornography.
The same challenges of interpretation occur in establishing definitions and in further requirements for ISPs to enforce regulations.
Caroline,
ICANN could in theory mandate that all .xxx domains be associated with a specific range of numeric IP addresses. Then you would not have the problem of filtering companies having to work to map IPs to .XXX domains, because they could block that IP range as well. But that wasn’t proposed, and likely wouldn’t be feasible.
The .xxx tld is useless. The adult industry never wanted it. It won’t help parents filter out content they deem inappropriate.
Only the company behind it, ICM registry, will benefit from it.
My registrar emailed me that I could prevent my trademarks from being violated if I paid $300 per trademark. That would prevent people from registering mytrademark.xxx as a domain.
Some googling showed that ICM or whatever the company behind these new .xxx domains is called, has been offering the same trademark protection to celebrities and big corporations for free.
This all sounds like a scam to me. If you don’t pay them, they’ll violate your trademarks. If you do pay them, you end up wasting $300 on a domain name you don’t want or need.