The group that doles out web domains may soon be giving out .xxx addresses to pornography sites. Web-based pornography is obviously a huge business. But will this be a Pareto improvement?
It would improve consumers’ welfare if all porn sites were to use the .xxx suffix: Those customers who want to see porn sites could find them even more readily; those who don’t (and parents) could filter them out more easily. I’m not sure porn purveyors would be better off, though: Perhaps they imagine that some potential customers who might otherwise be ensnared into entering porn sites and purchasing wouldn’t find and enter the .xxx sites. If given the choice, will managers of porn sites want to use these domain names? If they believe the ensnarement argument, it would be a bad strategy for them to adopt the .xxx suffix.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
I’d love it if all porn could get a .xxx – unfortunately that would require not only internet regulation but also a form of judgement to decide what should be included. Slippery slope. Mind you if it could have any impact on reducing exploitation, I’d be in favour of that.
Your City of Austin attempts to censor pornography on its computers in the Senior Activities Centers. Seniors, of course, have every right to view pornography.
Even though access will still be available through circumventors and anonymizers, facilitating censorship by the City of Austin by putting all pornography on .XXX is a bad idea.
I think the ensnarement works not by tricking people into visiting a site they didn’t realize was porn, but rather by titillating and tempting people who were otherwise not actively hunting for porn to click through to a porn site, using pop-up ads or other links. I think that a lot of people surfing “semi-naughty” sites stumble onto porn ads, become titillated, and fail to resist the temptation to engage in something that they may consider wrong. If a porn site relocates to a .xxx domain, but still puts banner ads up on .com sites, they probably wouldn’t see much drop-off in their core “guilty indulgence” “ensnarement” business.
Sram, by using the “related” feature in Google. Suppose you are really into cheerleader porn, but want to avoid all those pesky sites about actual cheerleaders. You’d type “cheerleaders related:.xxx” into Google.
I want to know what non-porn companies are going to do? Will Disney feel obliged to buy disney.xxx just to make sure no porn is ever hosted there?
I call Dibs on http://www.google.xxx
I think porn is pretty readily available on the web anyways. The incentive of a website being “easier to find” isn’t really an incentive. There’s so much free porn on the internet that I wonder if maintaining a “pay” porn website will even still be a lucrative business venture in the future.
It would still be nice to go to a website and know that it’s going to be a “naughty” website rather than being surprised when you get there.
“It would improve consumers’ welfare if all porn sites were to use the .xxx suffix: Those customers who want to see porn sites could find them even more readily; those who don’t (and parents) could filter them out more easily. ”
What’s porn? What’s art? Who decides, and on what criteria? From what nation/ethnicity/religious/social communities’ mores will these standards be drawn?
Why stop with a .xxx domain? Why not a .blog domain, to allow easy filtering of subversive ideas? (One can’t be sure that a blogger’s comments will be safe for the particular sensibilities of a person/culture/ethnicity.)
Who legislates that porn goes into a .xxx domain, and how would that requirement survive constitutional muster? International law?