One consideration would be the local variations in "pornographic" -- the "pornographism" of women's breasts, the bottom of the feet, etc. vary from culture to culture. However, at least with this idea you would know the intent was prurient.

This is a no-brainer! I read about this idea years ago and cannot understand why the powers that be don't take this very simple and obvious step.

Great idea...and frankly, it would make things easier for those looking FOR porn too. But where would the line between porn and "art" be drawn, beyond which a site must be a .sex, before which it still qualifies for .com? Who decides what is what? Honestly, though -- great idea.

SAN JOSE, California (AP) -- Ten organizations submitted applications to sponsor new Internet domains, including ".mobi" for mobile services and ".xxx" for adult content, the group that oversees key aspects of the global network said Friday....

The ".xxx" domain is sponsored by the International Foundation for Online Responsibility. According to the group's Web site, it would encourage the adoption of the suffix among the "responsible online adult-entertainment community."...

The new domains could be approved as early as this year and would be the first major additions since 2000. Public comments on the applications will be accepted from April 1 through April 30, according to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

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To clarify, I don't believe this suffix would be mandatory. I suggest that anyone interested submit a puiblic comment.

Great Idea~ I think this is a wonderful idea, if there were manditory rules which required pron sites or "adult content" sites to use a specific domain suffix. This way, parents and "employees" could easily filter out such sites without problems or embarrasmant. However, creating "law" over the internet is a risky thing, as many believe that doing this would create problems with freedom of speech... yadda yadda yadda. I really think that there does need to be some kind of 'rules' for the internet. With so many viruses, identity theft over the computer, annoying pop-up ads, spam mail up the wazoo... someone needs to do SOMETHING!Overall, I think this is a great idea that could really solve some problems!

There's a slight problem with this idea, in that the name of the website is determined by DNS servers. And there's a porn site, called, say - pornowebsite.sex, which lives at the IP address 192.168.1.22, and I own a domain, called, say adamt.org, I can update my DNS so that adamt.org points to pornowebsite's IP address. Therefore - anyone browsing at adamt.org would be greeted with the page for pornowebsite.sex. Thusly, a porn site which should be .sex, would be viewable as .org - and the operators of the porn site would have no control over this.You wouldn't even need to register other domains for this - you could get a free DNS name to point wherever you want. You might be able to legislate against people doing this, but supposing the DNS service is located overseas in Brazil, China, Korea, etc.? How easy would it be to prosecute them? Also - with some webhosts, there's two ways of accessing content on shared servers. The intended URL might be pornowebsite.com - but you might also be able to see it by looking at webhostingcompany.com/www/users/~pornosite/It would be nicer if every pornsite had to do something like the ICRA labelling, but then, that still wouldn't apply to sites in countries where there was no such law. My 2cents

Even with it not being 100% failsafe from a technical standpoint (how many things in life aren't though?), there's still no good reason to not require porn sites to adopt a specific suffix different from nonporn sites.

I think it's a great concept!

hey, thats how i found this site, via a bad porn link ;)

The question was raised, how do you determine who should be on the .sex domain. How about starting with any sexually oriented site that says you must be 18 to enter?

Is that disclaimer a law, or are they just covering their legal butts? Either way, seems like a good delineator.

To address another concern, even if you did have adamt.org point to adamtsexkitten.sex via an IP address, a browser or filter could probably either see that retranslate into a .sex URL, or us a list of know .sex to IP translations to filter. Even if it couldn't, .sex or .xxx is useful - and cool.

I have to vote against this one. The intent is good, and the benefits better, but I can see problems.

It's like using NetNanny or other filtering software; there will be false positives. This time, instead of NetNanny putting them on the block list, the Justice Department will file charges. Considering the stigma of sexual legal issues, the burden will be on the defendant to prove his website is not intended to be sexual.

The sad fact is, the internet is near impossible to police. Adult content could still pass on .com sites.

'Responsible adult-entertainment community' Is it really responsible to be looking at that kind of stuff?

Perhaps parents concerned about this should have a look at things closer to home? Porn sites arent asking or forcing children or more often teens to look at them. The child is actively deciding to view the site, and often dissregarding "you must be over 18 to view" warnings.

Go to google and search under images for 'sex' 'naked' etc. See what you find. Any number of other search engines offer this feature too which is all too easy to access. Or perhaps you should download a p2p client (popular among children for downloading mp3s) See what adult material you can find searching on one of them.

I can tell you now, porn sites arent the only source of such material. It is too easy to come by, changing domains isnt going to change anything. If a child is intent to see such material, they are going to find it and that is that.

I'm sure alot of you will even admit that it is normal for kids to be curious about this and investigate in their teen years.

Rather than complaining about how hard it is to block sites from kids trying to access them, why dont you take a look at the source of the problem. Your child. They are the ones deciding to look at this material, and you should try to educate them on the matter.

You are not going to stop kids from looking at pornography by doing this. I am sorry, but thats just the way things are.

This is terrible.

For one thing, I'm tired of the illogical fragmentation of TLDs to boost revenues (.info, .biz, .law, .museum, .home and so on). Further, you don't need a .sex TLD to recognize that giantboobies.* is probably an adult site.

And if you must introduce another TLD for this purpose, how about introducing .kids and adults who are too lazy to watch over or education their children can lock their browsers to only follow within the .kids domains. No need to sanitize the rest of the internet.

Further, who will be the grand arbiter of what belongs in .sex? What about sexual harassment related websites? About about sex advice or planned parenthood? America isn't the only nation in the world and while there are differences in "adult" and "obsence" within the country, there are also differences among each nation.

Take a lesson from your local library. They don't have an "adult" section. They simply have a section set aside for children. Adults are free to pick and choose what material they wish to observe without the imposition of going through hoops "for the sake of the children".

And, finally, I've been online since before the Internet was widely used. I was surfing BBSes when I was a pre-teen in the late 1980s. I was barely a teenager when I was downloading porn from BBSs in the early 1990s. I'm a successful, normal, happy adult with great relationships and have not been harmed by "the evil nakedness!".

Oh, by the way - a quick workaround for this? A kid just has to type in the IP address of the site and your ".sex" is rendered useless.

Really, the idea is silly. Grow up, people. And it certainly DOES censor the internet. And if you MUST do somethign this ridiculous, at least do it the CORRECT way by segregating material that is absolutely appropriate for children into a child related TLD - as opposed to trying to identify every piece of material that you believe is NOT appropriate for children and segregating that.

Also, I notice that you only speak of seperating "adult" content into a "sex" domain. So as I would understand it, something violent, grotesque, hateful or simply inaccurate shouldn't be seperated? How about the babble of religious sites and cults? That should not be segregated?

Why not create a TLD for every imaginable type of content? Even for domains that contain multiple genres of content, you can pigeon hole them into one single category. And you could have 10,000 TLDs. Sure, it'll be hard to remember of "bobsplumping" was a .com, .biz, .info, .water, .plumbing, .household, .fixit or other TLD . . . but hey, why not?!

'Responsible adult-entertainment community' Is it really responsible to be looking at that kind of stuff?— fatpie, Aug 11 2004

Is it really anyone's business to be accountable to you on what is or isn't responsible for them to consume? If you don't like it, don't go looking for it. Go clutch your rosary beads and pray for the baby jesus.

ATTENTION PLEASE

IT HAS COME TO OUR ATTENTION THAT FOR THE PAST YEAR THIS SITE HAS BEEN HOSTING A DISCUSSION ABOUT SEX LABELLED "Require Porn sites to be .sex "

ACCORDING TO THE NEW REGULATIONS ENFORCED BY THE GOVERNMENT, THE ADDRESS OF THIS SITE FROM NOW ON WILL BE "WHYNOT.NET.SEX", IN ORDER TO ALLOW WORRIED PARENTS TO CONTROL THEIR CHILDREN'S ACCESS TO DEVIOUS AND IMMORAL SITES SUCH AS THIS ONE. THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT BECAUSE THIS WAS YOUR IDEA. SO DON'T EVEN TRY IT OR WE'LL HAVE THE HOMELAND AND INTERNET SECURITY STORMTROOPERS IN YOUR HOUSE FASTER THAN YOU CAN PRESS CTRL+ALT+DEL. WE'RE NOT KIDDING.

SINCERELY,YOUR GOVERNMENT

Ok I've been around the internet for a long time (pre-1993). As well I've accessed online pornography and still do like to look at naked women online. Personally I'm pretty liberal, and I hate censorship.

Here is my real life example. Say you are a school child and you are doing a report on Native Alaskans. You happen to know that one of the groups of natives is known as the Aleut. So you go to the browser and type in www.aleut.com. What you get is explicit sexual images (full fledged intercourse), for a website called supermarketwhores.com. I'm still trying to figure out how whores in supermarkets has anything to do with being Aleut. Now if your the Aleut Tribe you might feel a little saddened that the name of your people is being associated with pornography.

Now I'm not sure that the best way for controlling online porn is by adding a new TLD, and either is ICANN or anyone else from what I can gather. There have been at least three attempts to institute legislation on the matter, all have failed. Now I don't want to see information about woman's cervical cancer being targeted, or gay & lesbian info, or even explicit literature. I agree that if a child wants to obtain pornographic imagery, they will. Heck I did when I was young before the internet even existed.

What I am interested in doing is the same thing that is done in corner stores. There are these opaque plastic covers that are placed over pornographic magazines. Now why should a pornographic website be forced to move to a new TLD? I mean they put in the same work as anyone else, they prospected the internet in the early days and staked their claim.

My rough idea right now is that ANY website showing explicit sexual or graphic material shall not have any such material presented on the root folder of their website. This means if you have a website http://www.sex.com/, you would not be allowed to have sexual imagery on a page at http://www.sex.com/index.htm, but you could have it on a page in a folder under the root such as http://www.sex.com/sexfolder/index.htm.

This is something that any level headed person should be able to agree to. Whether they are showing images of dogfights, or of naked women, any page you get at the root level shouldn't be showing nastiness, because this is the "cover" of the website. What I am interested in stopping is the accidental exposure to children of explicit material. Whether it be how to protect yourself from genital disease to full fledged porn.

Implementing the a new TLD probably isn't the solution. Maybe we are looking in the wrong place. What would be great is if the W3C (world wide web consortium w3c.org) could create a tag that all of the pornographic, and explicit sites could use, possibly even be forced by law to use (at least USA based ones). In this way the pornographic industry could avert any further lawmaking aimed at them, by self labeling their content. Parents, schools, churches, etc would have tools that would easily be built into newer browsers.

I always get dragged into these sites as soon as I start reading the posts.

In the case of the Aleut Tribe mentioned above, there are legal measures the tribe can take, and offices and places they go to to complain.

Now luckily ICANN is not easy with adding TLD, at least not as easy as those chicks on supermarketwhores.com .

One of there themes is to keep the internet from fragmenting. Like IANA they have this whole tier concept going on, so adding more TLDs then SLDs lopsides it.

..i

.sex domain names are a good idea, of course.

BUT, as many people here already said: There can be no 100% infallible content control on the net and THIS IS A GOOD THING. There will be always porn pages on .com or .net domains. In the same way, religious groups could register www.abstainfrom.sex and it's perfectly okay. This is the net, a bit of anarchy is part of its nature.

Kids stumbling on the wrong pages is the downside of this. But there are good content filters out there, and if you want to let your kid surf the net unsupervised, install one.

Well fuckin a, you got your pitiful wish and the internet heads into further decay. :\...

.xxx domains were just approved Last night...

http://news.com.com/Porn-friendly+.xxx+domains+approved/2100-1030_3-5728713.html?tag=st_lh

Yes, life really sucks at this moment, when porn requires it's own URL, whats next .ebay?

I have to vote no on this. Seeing the number of non-pornographic sites affected by 18 USC 2257 (Currently in limbo status after a midnight deal with the Justice Department), sites which would easily be classified under this .xxx domain. See The Gaping Maw.

This idea will not work. Now that the .xxx (.sex) domain exists the ISPs will drop carrying it as the govts, and anti-porn groups, will sue the ISPs for providing known porn. So any porn site will have to have a .org or .com address just to get any business.

So you are back to the same place very quickly - no effect.

If you can create laws restricting porn to .xxx you could also have created laws banning porn totally, if you can't legally bann it totally - restriction of trade, or freedom of expression/speach - you certainly can't force the .xxx domain either.

Politicians are so short sighted!

Define porn.

Is a sexual-dysfuntion site, giving advice on how to have successful sex, a porn site? Who judges if a site is porn? You?

Religious groups have tried to have gay advice sites classified as porn, even housing and legal-advice sites. Compuserve (or was it AOL) once banned the word "breast", and was inundated with complaints from women trying to discuss breast cancer.

Similar things have been tried before, and have all failed because no-one has found a definition of porn that actually works.

Not all websites can be defined in that black and white sense. Some sites contain nudity but aren't necessarily pornographic, like art sites. It won't provide the level of security suspected, though it would catch the worst.

It all comes down to one thing. This is totally unworkable because one person's porn is somebody else's "normal", and nobody owns the internet so there is nobody to enforce an arbitary standard. If there was, somebody else would object to it.

A true story (I read it in the newspaper a few days ago).

The Dutch have decided to produce a "Welcome to Holland" video, to be shown to all applicants applying for a work permit. The idea is to show what Holland is really like. Part of this is about Holland being a tolerant society, and shows scenes which are regarded as "normal" and which you should expect to see, for example a topless female sunbather on a beach and two gay men kissing in the street.

Problem, they cannot show this to applicants in some countries because it if they try and import it it would be confiscated as pornographic.Is a web site which includes this video pornographic or not?

Like with the .xxx proposal, a .sex domain would only make porn easier to find. It might help keep children from seeing inappropriate content through eased filtering, but only inasmuch as administrators are willing to comply with abiding by .sex registration. It would not help define explicitly what "pornography" is, nor help in its regulation within and between nations.

Good Idea. The United States blocks overseas content all the time. There is all sorts of websites viewable overseas that is not viewable here. So regarding overseas content, block it like they already do.

I myself enjoy some occassional porn, recently that of Celebrities. But I agree that being able to easily block that content from children without parents having to pay for that service is desireable.

Does the US really block some foreign sites? I thought that was only China.
What about the (legal) gambling sites some in the US are making such a fuss about, they are obviously not blocked.

Why do all the great ideas become not practical ideas? I'm sure the porn industry would take exception to being segregated from the general population if it meant search engines would not include them in results. I can see the lawsuits stemming from what is 'porn' and what is 'the study of humans in their natural form'. Playboy is art, Hustler is porn?Like one Supreme Court justice said.."I know it when I see it"...well, that certainly sounds subjective to me.How about getting to the meat of the problem (kids looking at porn) by teaching parents how to block, scan, key tag, secure their computers....or perhaps move the computer to visible viewing areas. We all found our father's nudie mags under the socks, but were we all taught right and wrong regarding what we saw?? Again, like so many other questions, the answer lies in responsible parenting.

How would this be regulated?

The only problem would be where do you draw the line in what is "pornographic"

It'll make it too easy for kids to find porn, ie, just type www.anything here.sex Evetnually, they'll find one

I believe you’re missing the point of porn sites. Most of them are just “cash-click” pages camouflaged with porn. Sex sells! I am a webmaster for several sites. If I put one click object that says “big boobs” every boob that surfs to my site would click on it. And if I linked several “pay-per-click” domains to that click… it’s all money in the bank! Nobody cares about providing you with porn… They just want you to click on things in their website. I believe the “.xxx” would work for “Playboy” and “Penthouse” types, but the other 95% of sites would never comply.

I believe you’re missing the point of porn sites. Most of them are just “cash-click” pages camouflaged with porn. Sex sells! I am a webmaster for several sites. If I put one click object that says “big boobs” every boob that surfs to my site would click on it. And if I linked several “pay-per-click” domains to that click… it’s all money in the bank! Nobody cares about providing you with porn… They just want you to click on things in their website. I believe the “.xxx” would work for “Playboy” and “Penthouse” types, but the other 95% of sites would never comply.