As the search for filthiness comprises up to one-third of the Internet’s bandwidth, there have been numerous attempts to corral those searches into a representative domain extension that would be the “.com of porn.” The battered frontrunner of this proposed extension is [dot] xxx.
This month the International Corporation of Assigned Names And Numbers (ICANN) decided at its annual meeting in Brussels to fast-track approval of the .xxx Top Level Domain (TLD), pending further review and discussions with sponsoring domain registrar ICM.
Forward thinkers in the adult industry do not like the idea of a “porn ghetto” and have opposed the creation of an internet red light district for numerous reasons, not least of which is the failure of the video company Red Light District, which released the Pam Anderson, Paris Hilton, and Amy Fisher sex tapes.
Others don’t care, or think this is a pointless exercise.
“I’m indifferent,” said porn star Kimberly Kane.
My opposition
Traffic. While I do not want anyone to accidentally land on my porn commentary, news, and review site, a .xxx corral would mean that far fewer people would feel comfortable visiting for the majority of my content that is not particularly hardcore. This would include academics, journalists, and fans of consumer and/or sex culture whose Internet Service Provider (ISP), university, or job site chooses to filter out .xxx suffixed sites.
I have held jobs and studied at major universities as well as worked for major media conglomerates while I’ve been Gram Ponante, America’s Beloved Porn Journalist, and have noticed that several blocked access to this site already, as well as to sites like Fleshbot and AVN. Imagine the traffic hit I and people like me would take if we were forced into a new extension?
Workload. If .xxx is actually enforced (see below), it would make sense for me to keep GramPonante.com (which I’ve owned for six years) as a PG-13 feeder site to GramPonante.xxx, all the while paying bandwidth and registration fees for both sites, when one site is expensive enough already.
Enforcement. There is no language yet about whether entities running porn sites on .com platforms would be required to move over to .xxx, leaving open the question of Why do this at all?
Stuart Lawley is the chairman of ICM, the registrar that is pushing for the .xxx extension and whose company stands to gain millions of dollars if the extension is approved. He says that .xxx would be “great news for those that wish to consume, or avoid, adult content.”
This is true to a point, but only if the corraling of porn is enforced. Nothing will happen other than a big mirrored land grab, in which that third of all Internet traffic simply gets dispersed, if there is no mandate that there can’t be porn in the .com, .net, etc. realms.
What is porn? If there is to be a mandatory exodus, what has to go and what can stay? Your text-based lesbian erotica? My images of pixelated or obfuscated vaginal insertion? Someone else’s tender coming of age stories centered on Mindy Cohn’s nipples?
Shame. “People will do anything to avoid being embarrassed over sex.”
Lee Roy Myers is both a porn director and the owner of a company that puts together adult broadcast deals in Canada, and he brought up the subject of shame, which I hadn’t considered before.
“If you separate porn from the mainstream world, you put people in a position where it may embarrass them,” he said. “They may not want to go to a place where it’s clear what they’ve gone to see.”
I asked him to elaborate.
“Your cable company sells you a tiered package that includes Showtime, ESPN, and Playboy,” he said. “If your wife then wonders why you have the Playboy Channel all of a sudden, you can say it was part of the package. Ditto when I would put gay content into a larger adult package. We knew people were watching the gay stuff but we also knew they wouldn’t actively buy it. .xxx is like that because it represents a definite choice that people might be too ashamed to make.”
When I have written for high traffic sites like Defamer or Wired or TMZ , the volume of comments I’ve received has been staggering. When I’ve excerpted those stories on my own site or Fleshbot or Hustler, all sites with sizable traffic, the comments are disproportionately low.
I asked someone I knew to be a reader of my site why she never commented.
“I just don’t want anyone tracking me down as a porn reader,” she said, and her friend agreed. This was shocking to me, as everyone I know is a porn reader, admittedly or not.
“That’s not something everyone wants to share,” she said.
So that’s why the .xxx domain should not go through: because sharing is shameful.
Previously on Porn Valley Observed: A brief and non-hysterical history of the .xxx domain; “Turn it off!” – George C. Scott in “Hardcore”
See also: ICANN
It smacks of something foul, it really does. I just hope that sites aren’t forced to .xxx, either new sites or old sites, and it just, instead, becomes an option. Of course, I don’t actually hold out much hope.
I could have sworn, though, that I read that existing sites would be grandfathered, but that might have just been a sleepy haze.