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Spotlight

Some Thoughts on the Approval of .XXX

By David Ulevitch, Founder/CEO

Late last week, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) gave final approval to a new top-level domain, or TLD. It’s one that people have been debating, proposal, advocating for, and advocating against for years — .XXX.
Over the past 11 years, .XXX has been proposed and voted on a number of times. And while it still isn’t clear when and how .XXX will be implemented, it’s certainly of interest to those of us in the DNS and Web content filtering space.
Here are some initial thoughts:

  1. There is no incentive for an adult website to leave their .com domain and move to .xxx. Most sites will probably end up having both a .com and a .xxx domain, but there’s no reason for a successful adult website to move entirely over to .xxx. There may not even really be justification for a new adult site to make a home in .xxx.
  2. .xxx doesn’t make it much easier to block adult content, because even though an entire TLD can be filtered, it certainly won’t be comprehensive (see point #1).
  3. Overall, introducing .xxx now — instead of 11 years ago when first introduced, or even better, when the primary TLDs were created — will have little to no effect on the adult industry and their domain name TLD choices.
  4. There’s a significant monetary aspect to adding .xxx as well. While most domains are $10 per year, .xxx domains will cost $60 to register. Certainly registrars have a vested interest in seeing .xxx approved for their own gain. The cost to registrants and trademark holders will be significant.

Though .xxx websites aren’t available yet, we know keeping adult content off networks is a big priority for our millions of parents and businesses using OpenDNS in their workplaces, school districts and homes with children. If you enter .xxx as one of your blocklist options on the Web content filtering section of your dashboard, you can block the .xxx TLD today so that when it does go live, you are already configured the way you want to be.
We haven’t decided if we’ll add the entire .xxx TLD to any of our categories just yet; it might be too crude a hammer to try and block content with, as there will likely be significant non-adult sites in the .xxx TLD once it goes live.