I Want to Sex.xxx You Up

By Jocelyn Geboy in News on Jan 9, 2007 7:15PM

If you have any sort of familiarity with the Internet, you know that the tail end of internet addresses tell a little about the entity that owns the site. .com(mercial). .org(anization). .edu(cational). That sort of thing. Honestly, we never really thought a whole lot about it. We started to notice these things and realized they matched up and thought that was cool, but never knew much about it past that.

Well, there's a method to this lack of madness. There's a governing body called ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) that is a private-public partnership "dedicated to preserving the operational stability of the Internet; to promoting competition; to achieving broad representation of global Internet communities; and to developing policy appropriate to its mission through bottom-up, consensus-based processes." They're making sure it's not an Internet Lord of the Flies out there.

So, when some people came up with the idea that it would be smart to make porn sites have the .xxx suffix, ICANN has to approve it. We heard about this a little while ago and were thrilled. We have varying personal opinions on the subject of pornography, but ultimately, we always are left with the two most important things dear to our heart: the First Amendment and not wanting to get fired.

If people want to look at and download porn, fine. Go crazy. But we're always pissed off when we Google "stuffed sheep" looking for some cute toy for our niece and click on a link too quickly only to have some horrific fucking picture fly up on our screen and then wonder what kind of terrible virus-ey script we've just run behind the scenes as well. If sites were .xxx'ed, then we at least have the chance to look for that. There's something about a bunch of x's together that our brains just instinctively recognize.

Interestingly enough, this idea has brought the smackdown from both porn sites and anti-porn peeps alike. The strange thing we found when we went to the archive of the comments is that they all literally said the same thing. We think that this had to have been an email campaign where people got forwarded an email telling them exactly what to say, namely, "I am opposed to the establishment of the triple X domain. You should be working to get pornography off the Internet, not putting more on it!"

The porn sites are afraid that singling them out on a specific domain will allow the government to censor them. Strange. The way we look at it, an .xxx domain isn't going to encourage any more pornography. Just like drinking and drugs, there are always going to be people to consume porn. We'd rather know where it is than have it turning up where we least expect.

*(We apologize for the Color Me Badd reference. It was begging for it.)

Image via music.msn.com.