I wish the ICANN would knock it off. TLD's are not an effective way to group websites. They are making the namespace more complex for little or no benefit. Now that the horses are effectively out of the barn, they should just make the TLD registry replace the concept of a domain. Cannon already bought .cannon right?
Can someone explain to me how this helps the Internet ecosystem?<p>If I were a porn site, why would I want this address? Filters, parental controls, etc. are most likely going to block the entire .xxx domain - this would limit page views.<p>History has shown that .com is the most popular TLD - how is .xxx going to help? It seems like an attempt to drum up registrar dollars.
Regardless of the arguments for or against, this is what I thought was sad:<p><pre><code> That claim of independence gave ICANN board member Rita
Rodin Johnston pause for thought. "I still question
whether, in fact, there is a real sponsored community
here," she said in the board-meeting debate before the
vote.
However, she went on to vote in favor of the new domain,
saying that despite her personal reservations about the
proposal, she felt obliged to by ICANN's decision-making
process. "It really doesn't matter what I think. What's
important is that ICANN has a process that it set up and
the process came back and said that sponsorship criterion
was met, and that this board has the courage to follow
that criterion," she said.
</code></pre>
"It really doesn't matter what I think"?? If you are on the board of any organization, I would argue that it very much matters what you think, otherwise, what is the point?
I can only imagine the kind of domain name land-grab this will invoke. Squatters will be prepping their naughty keywords database in preparation, I suspect.
Honestly, I see this as a good thing.<p>"consumers" will see it as a shortcut to what they're looking for. Thus "hosts" will benefit by owning .xxx domains. Sites <i>without</i> .xxx won't succeed as well as those with. Scale up, and you've got a basic means of organizing sites that didn't exist before.<p>It of course won't mean that black-listing .xxx domains will mean a porn-free surfing environment. Expecting that is like expecting Wikipedia to always be correct, and I highly doubt it'll even approach Wikipedia-consistency. But admitting porn is out there and providing a way to organize it and keep it a little more separate from non-porn simply cannot be a bad thing.<p>edit: why does everyone seem to think sites won't own <i>both</i> a .com and a .xxx domain, for at least a respectable period of time? If intarwebIs4porn.com doesn't buy intarwebIs4porn.xxx they'll be <i>slaughtered</i> if a mass migration occurs, because the owner of the domain can camp it for as much as they want. <i>They will buy them</i>. They only stand to lose if they don't.
It wouldn't surprise me if the pornography industry didn't completely ignore this TLD. The nature of pornography means that it's possible to be very creative in naming your site.<p>If you look at Alexa's list of the top adult web sites you'd see the following names: livejasmin.com, pornhub.com, xvideos.com, youporn.com, xhamster.com, tube8.com, ...<p>It doesn't look to me like the .com namespace is running out of room for pornography.
Seems to me that this decision just transfers $$$ into the hands of the TLD operator. Porn website operators will now want to buy example.xxx as well as example.com and example.net and so forth. Non-porn operators may want to buy anotherexample.xxx to protect their anotherexample.com name.