Everything You Need, or Don't Need, to Know About New .xxx Porn Domain

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ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has approved the new .xxx domain for sexually explicit sites (read: pornography). Two big groups have been against it, and for completely different reasons: some in the adult entertainment industry are worried about censorship (a separate domain might make that easier), while religious and traditional values groups think it's unwise to set aside an entire chunk of the Internet for porn.

Those groups, clearly, have lost. Now what?

• .xxx-based Jokes "ICANN has porn?" reads the article on DailyTech--an improbably brilliant pun for that small segment of the population familiar both with the I Can Has Cheezburger site and the acronym for the domain-creation body. "We're totally registering SpeedoStudent.xxx," responds JD at Queerty to the news, "because that just sounds like smart business strategy." Meanwhile, Max Read at Gawker finds little to add to news that's pretty entertaining on its own, but tosses in a picture worth a thousand words (completely safe for work, we assure you).

• Pros and Cons The domain "makes filtering out unwanted content approximately 80 billion times easier," writes Nicholas Deleon at CrunchGear. Thus, he's baffled by the anti-porn folks' opposition to the move. He points out that giving porn its own domain is hardly going to give porn a huge boost: porn does fine on its own ("fully one-third of all Internet downloads are for pornography"). He does elucidate ICANN's own hesitance on the issue: "ICANN ... wasn't sure it wanted to create a .xxx TLD for fear that it would be forced into a sort of Internet policing role. That's not ICANN's job, and it couldn't be an 'Internet cop' even if it wanted to."

• Pros and Cons, as Explained for Marine Biologists  Theoretically the domain should clean things up, explains Tony Bradley at PC World, but it probably won't actually work that way. He explains through the cunning use of cetaceans: "porn sites will be like dolphins. All dolphins are whales, but not all whales are dolphins. Dolphins are a subset of the larger whale family. Similarly, all XXX sites will be porn, but not all porn sites will be XXX. Many porn sites have a long and established presence as a dot-COM domain and will not simply abandon that."

• The Bottom Line: Internet Still Dirty All joking aside, Bradley makes a strong argument against expecting a suddenly pristine Internet. He says "what is more likely to happen than dot-COM getting cleaner, is that more respectable businesses will be forced to purchase the dot-XXX equivalent of their primary domain simply to ensure it isn't purchase by a purveyor of porn." Meanwhile, adult entertainment companies will retain the right to use .com. The new domain may seem like an easy fix, but it's not.

• The Bottom Line: Porn for Stupid People "Great news for really dumb people searching for adult content online," declares Flavorpill's Caroline Stanely.