.xxx
Hello, I've been reading some adult webmaster boards, and I've been involved in the adult industry for over a decade now. I'm not even in USA and the decisions made there influence my whole livelyhood, and this .xxx is something I need to voice my opinion about. As far as I could understand from all of the topics regarding .xxx on adult industry websites, nobody in the industry supports it aside from those who are obviously going to make money out of it directly, not as operators of the websites, but as resellers of .xxx or some other way to make money directly from simply the .TLD to be approved. I would just like to point out why *I* think going onwards is a very very bad idea. 1) .xxx is something that can easily be blocked from children, which is excellent. However, it's also very very easy to block legimate adult industry sites. This leads to censorship, and that is bad. A better solution to be to discard the idea for .xxx and adopt .kids instead. That way there is no censorship and responsible parents can install software that would allow certain users on their computer to use only sites with .kids TLD. 2) .xxx is just another way to make money. The prices for .xxx are ridiculous, and as a webmaster who owns hundreds of domains, it's sickening to think I would have to pay thousands and thousands of dollars extra per year just to keep my websites available to people. I'm by no means a millionaire, my countrys taxation makes sure of that. 3) Who gets the .xxx? I have some highly branded domain names as .net and .com, does the .com owner automatically get .xxx? No? What if things go sour and US-based ISP's start to push their morals and ethics to people whether they want it or not, and start censoring certain .TLD's (.xxx namely). Will the branded .com owner lose all of his/hers visitors to the .xxx domain squatter of his site? The .net can sometimes be more branded than the .com, what then? The .com gets it? The fastest guy to register gets it? The whole orders WILL get messy, there will be lawsuits and basically a huge waste of peoples time and resources. I am relatively sure I am not alone with this opinion, as from my point of view it seems everyone is opposing the .xxx and atleast those who support is are staying awfully quiet. Why are they staying quiet? They don't want to be targeted as 'traitors' by the industry who as a whole pretty much thinks the .xxx is a horrible idea. It would make them look bad, and hence lose affiliates and advertisers. They just happen to be the big corporations who have money to buy the .xxx versions AND fight them in the courts. How would someone like me, a smalltime european webmaster, go against a big corporation with unlimited funds to support their lawsuit. If they register a .xxx that I'm using as .com, what can I do aside from try to sue them in the US. It will cost me tens of thousands of dollars and is an incredible pain, I'd imagine. So please don't take the word of the big corporations that this is what 'the industry wants'. It's what they want, and the small entrepreneurs will get burned in the process. They don't oppose the .xxx because they either don't even know anything about it, or even of it.
|