If you’ve turned on your TV recently you may have noticed a series of (awful and borderline racist) commercials for www.Buy.xxx. Yep, you can now register Slores.xxx (or whatever). Yesterday the .xxx top level domain (TLD) officially opened as more than 100,000 sites were registered with the domain management company ICM Management.
The creation of the .xxx TLD has been roiling the adult industry for the past few years but is now just creeping into the mainstream media.
Predictably, the usual anti-porn Christian crusaders were against this. On the laughably out-of-touch grounds that .xxx sites would make porn easier to get.
“The establishment of a .xxx domain would increase, not decrease, the spread of pornography on the Internet, causing even more harm to children, families and communities,” said Patrick Trueman, CEO of Morality in Media and former chief of the U.S. Department of Justice Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, when ICANN was voting on the plan.
But for now at least, porn sites will still be allowed to keep their .com and .net URLs so it’s hard to see how creating the .xxx zone will result in more porn on the internet.
Suprisingly, the people most opposed to this have been the porn companies themselves. From the get-go, many of them (including Playboy) fought ICM tooth and nail to try to prevent ICANN from creating a .xxx TLD — for the simple reason that doing so would make it easy for governments to force them into .xxx and then easily censor sexual content.
There are other reasons for creating .xxx as well. The big one is that ICM can now basically extort legitimate website operators into protecting their brands by purchasing their .xxx addresses.
According to CNN:
To protect their reputations against porn purveyors who might seek to capitalize on their name, some universities and businesses have bought .xxx domain names that correspond with their .edu or .com addresses. For example, Penn State in September paid $200 each for four .xxx domains: Penn State, PSU, Nittany Lions and The Pennsylvania State University, according to the university’s student newspaper.
Meet the new American capitalism! Instead of producing a good or service that someone else wants, you can just sit on a top level domain and extort everyone else who wants nothing to do with you! This is exactly what economists are describing when they talk about rent seeking.
Getting back to the social issues.. I know this all sounds like a trivial topic but there are real freedoms at stake. The right to access information over the internet should be protected. (Back in March, before .xxx even went live, India had already announced it would block all .xxx domains.)
Look at how badly China’s “Great Firewall” has devastated civil society in that country or the way Middle Eastern dictators have tried to cut off pro-democracy activists from using social media. Yeah, I know, when you think of porn you think of bad mustaches and tacky background music but do you really want to live in a society free of porn? It’s no coincidence that the countries with the least-restrictive pornography laws also tend to have more gender equity while countries like Iran continue to ban adult content. Sexual repression is just another form of social repression.
