.XXX Domain Makes Me .MAD

Hey! Wouldn’t it be great if porn sites were made pornier by putting a big .XXX at the end of them? That would make me so much more aroused and reduce the confusion I feel when I visit a dot com and can’t determine for myself whether or not I’m looking at porn. After all, it’s very hard to judge whether or not I should devalue content and the people who make it simply by looking at it. I need more LABELS, man, especially when I visit one of those sites that’s sort of sexy but also has lots of words on it and I’m not sure whether I should start rubbing my mini-boner yet. Will it pay off with a free sex video? Or is there going to be a long non-nude poem to interrupt everything? Are there going to be a bunch of annoying “join now” buttons or will the mystery be preserved of why someone on the internet is enticing me with erotic photos (just because she loves to show off her hot body for free, I hope). If professional porn sites have a big-ass Triple-X right in the address bar, won’t it provide a genuine public service?

NO, actually. So why, after years of opposition from porn-makers and porn-haters alike, did ICANN approve the .xxx top-level domain (TLD)?

It’s all about a shady group of people (ICM Registry) setting up shop to make A LOT of money pretending to advocate for the porn industry by ignoring and exploiting those of us already vulnerable to stigma and accustomed to submitting to cutthroat deals and crazy terms. While claiming to be our friends, part of their strategy is to undermine confidence in established .com porn sites by claiming that .xxx sites will be more trustworthy after being approved by their board of greedy know-nothing monkeys or a “policy council” of bros. To be fair: contrary to the ZDNet article, at this time it costs nothing to reserve domains; I appear to have successfully reserved 78 of the .xxx versions of my .com domains for zero dollars and am told I’ll have to verify ownership of those .com’s before I’m able to actually purchase them as .XXXs).

In a move designed to accomplish nothing but make a few people richer, ICANN officially put small businesses like mine over an expensive barrel, forcing us to reserve and eventually buy duplicate domains to avoid domain squatters and speculators registering the .XXX versions of our .COM names. We’ll have the honor of paying more than $60 per domain (at least $4,678 if I register all of my adult domains) every year to prevent these thieves from stealing our web traffic or trying to sell our names back to us at inflated prices if .XXX is made mandatory for adult websites. This isn’t paranoia speaking; domain squatting, speculating and traffic theft were enough of a problem WITHOUT the .XXX TLD. Remember the whitehouse.com problem? And my TastyTrixie.com site isn’t famous or extremely lucrative, but that didn’t stop someone from registering tasty-trixie.com to trick my hard-earned traffic into going to his site and buying memberships to the TrixieTeen site he promoted for years. What a difference a dash makes!

The money required to buy the domains isn’t even the scariest part of .XXX; it’s the threat of censorship, discrimination, and unconstitutional speech regulation on top of the very real possibility of losing our businesses entirely if we’re forced into the .XXX ghetto but can’t afford to buy our established domains or lose them to thieves, are denied payment processing because of our .XXX designation, or are targeted for reduced service by ISPs on a net whose neutrality is on very shaky ground. Many indie pornographers (and even a few corporate producers) give voices to minorities whose stories are already scarcely heard via websites that are not all or even mostly porn, particularly in the free areas and blogs of “solo girl” and guy sites; the .XXX designation could render everything we share about our lives “porn”. It’s bad enough to be dehumanized and reduced to a word indicating we have “no redeeming content”, but also means what we have to share about being women and/or trans and/or low income and/or of color and/or sexual and/or queer could become inaccessible (if they aren’t already due to filters) to many people who want to hear from us. You can read more about the censorship angle in this post with opinions from Jiz Lee, Nina Hartley, April Flores, Buck Angel and more, including some rabidly redundant comments from me.

If we’re lucky ICANN will approve other TLDs to further categorize our site content, like .XXL for BBW content, .LRG for the plumpers (sporting fewer than the qualifying number of belly rolls to be considered .XXL), .LOL for sites that make me laugh, .XLOL for porn sites that make me laugh, .GAY for any site that doesn’t appear straight enough to get married, and so on.

If the content on your site doesn’t all neatly fall into ONE of the predetermined categories maybe you won’t be able to register for a domain name at all -OR- you could be offered an expensive premium TLD like .CONFUSING or .DOESNTUNDERSTANDBRANDING or .NOTENOUGHSTEREOTYPING. If at one time you qualified for one brand of domain name but gain or lose weight, change your party affiliation, start fucking people of the opposite sex, or take off too many clothes (or put clothes onto parts of you that were nude at the time of your initial domain registration) then your domain name should be seized and put into a holding tank full of sharks for three months, kindly allowing you to remove the contradictory content or shift your entire business to a differently dotted restricted area.

Perhaps I’m being unfair, though. We won’t be forced to choose one restrictive TLD over another. Those who take their businesses seriously will be given the opportunity to register HUNDREDS of duplicate domain names reflecting every single niche interest they’ve ever mentioned in passing on their sites for thousands upon thousands of dollars in registration and renewal fees each year! Think of it as paying $9 to $75 a year for each and every tag you’ve ever added to a blog entry.

You think I’m exaggerating, but .XXX is paving the way to approve even more TLDs, not because these TLDs would actually be useful to anyone, but to try to squeeze as much money out of the internet as possible. But the big difference between .XXX and proposed TLDs like .CATS, .JOBS and .MOVIE is the potential for abuse and oppression from within the porn industry and without. Let’s not forget that “XXX” was inspired by the MPAA rating system, one of the greatest continuing examples of “voluntary”/corporate censorship still telling us that pussy-licking is a fringe act of obscenity nobody should see, but depictions of rape on the big screen are just good old American story-telling!

If anyone is going to be censored, maybe the government should censor ICANN’s endless creation of new TLDs. As it stands it’s like buying a piece of land, building your home on it and then having someone tell you ten years later you also need to buy the plot of air above you and erect a new hover-building before your house is condemned as too damned dirty for ground level.