Internet Porn

General Questions
#1

What would you think of the idea of all internet sites that are selling access to pornography being required to have a single internet address code (.porn or something) of some sort so that they could be screened out of searches?

One reasonable argument that I’ve heard about other sorts of screening (by topic), is that it would make it difficult to do “legitimate” searches on topics such as gay rights, breast cancer, etc., because of the key words involved.

I can certainly verify that it is easy to wind up with a list of porn sites when you are trying to find something else entirely. (Not to mention the difficulty of getting OUT of a porn site if you accidently get in.)

In any case, the only reason that I can imagine that this hasn’t already been done is that porn sellers figure they are getting income from people who happen on their sites accidentally or from kids who would otherwise be screened out. Is this so? Wouldn’t more efficient search access be of benefit to everyone? (After all I would suppose it is just as irritating to have to wade through a list of “serious” lesbian sites when all you want is pictures of girls getting it on as the reverse problem would be.) What do you all think?

#2

yeah, i think it should be .cum.
sorry, i couldnt resist that.

I actually think thats a great idea. It would enable an easy way for porn sites to identify themselves, and be blocked if need be. People wouldn’t have to rely on others to decide what is obscene, as some of those parent blocking software types do.

pat

#3

Interesting idea, but I think, as you stated, the industry itself would jump up and down at the suggestion. A large part of the internet’s appeal is porn and I believe it has driven the expansion of the web much like it drove the VCR industry years ago.
I recently did a search on HotBot for parts for a 69 corvette. Something like 33,000 matches. That is: 2,000 on corvette and 31,000 on 69. Go figure.

#4

As one who owns and operates a “porn” site, (albeit unquestionably one of the classiest and coolest such sites on the net: retroraunch.com) I think it’s probably a good idea, but the problem becomes enforcement. Who is going to check all the .com’s to make sure they are NOT porn sites?

And then there is the stigma. With a site like mine, for instance, I have alot of visitors and members that normally have no interest in sexually oriented sites. I don’t know that they would ever end up my site if I had the .porn designation, and that would be a big problem for me.

As for the idea that sex sites make money from kids? Hardly. Kids are nothing but a pain in the butt for adult site operators. They spend no money, they suck up bandwidth, and if their parents find out you get grief from them. Believe me, adult site operators would LOVE it if there was an effective way to keep kids away while letting adults have easy access. Anyone who tells you differently has no clue what they’re talking about.

Stoidela

#5

Well, actually, you’d be relying on whoever decides that a site fits the description of www.potentialsite.org (couldn’t resist) and assigns them that address.

#6

No kidding! I just typed “lesbian” into a search engine, and I had to wade through not one but TWO sites dealing with serious lesbian social issues before I finally found a few hundred sites with pictures of naked women.

#7

[[Believe me, adult site operators would LOVE it if there was an effective way to keep kids away while letting adults have easy access.]]

I would think so, that’s why I was wondering about the .porn idea.

I had considered the “class” issue you bring up. When I imagined the .porn idea, I was assuming self-definition by the industry (sort of like movie ratings)–so that sites which didn’t want to be identified as porn could just opt out and use .com or whatever. I suppose you could use the term “erotic” instead–although currently that term just gets you a lot of garden-variety porn sites. How do you think most of your members find you now, assuming, as you say, that they shy away from porn sites? I would think that a bit of market research would solve the problem for sites like yours.

One thing that occurred to me as a possible reason that there is no .porn or something like it: It might make it too easy for businesses to restrict access to porn sites for their employees. That, I think, WOULD cut into porn profits : ).

#8

On the surface it sounds like a good idea. I bet somebody will be along soon to give us the reason why it won’t work, but I don’t think enforcement is one of those reasons. Enforcement of tax laws is quite minimal, the IRS relies on is the stiff penalty for breaking the rules if you happen to be one of the few audits that are caught. With stiff enough penalties, sites will police themselves.

An interesting article in a recent Adobe magazine addressed the problem of some unscrupulous individuals who registered domain names such as www.playstatiom.com in order to catch those typo-prone people on their way into the Sony Playstation site. They gave a few more examples but that’s the only one that sticks in my mind.

I say we put Cher in charge of the whole thing and give her a huge federal grant. Sorry, it’s that DC air I live in.

#9

Sorry, I should have mentioned that www.playstatiom.com was the URL for a porn site, according to the Adobe article.

#10

Would playboy.com be a porn site? The SI swimsuit issue at cnnsi.com? How are you going to define porn? That’s one problem.

#11

OK, I think I misunderstood how the whole porn internet domain thing would work. I figured it would be on a volunteer basis, which would allow for the porn sites to avoid being found by kids, because parent could very easily block the .xxx domains. (well, lets assume its very easy, after they make the changes)… If that were the case I think it would be a good idea. If other parties are decide what is, and what isn’t porn, I don’t think its a good idea.

opus:
Why do you think the people who take advantage of typos are unscrupulous? I think its a neat little idea, granted in the playstation case its unfortunate that they may cause many underage people to go to porn sites. But, there are sites that aren’t pornagrapic, and they tell you made a typo, just they also throw some advertising your way. I think its a good idea, one that big corporations will be able to combat in the future, they can buy all the domain names up at once, an expense for them, sure, but it would also mean more people clicking in.

What do you think about the people who seem to speculate on the purchase of domain names. For instance there is one person who bought Episode1.com and Episode2.com, and he is trying to sell them off.

Hmm, a bit far afield i suppose…

pat

#12

“Bill Clinton” should know- the worst offender is www.whitehouse.com. They get a lot of spillover from people looking for the .gov site. They raised a huge fuss when Netscape changed its URL resolution so that .org and .gov resolve before .com (if you just type “whitehouse” into the URL line) The NAACP had the same problem too but got the www.naacp.com people to shut down their site.

Aside from “who decides what is porn?” issues, couldn’t someone get around this with redirects? (i.e. come.to/thecrackhouse)

#13

I was definitely NOT proposing that any third party, government or otherwise, define what porn is. The movie rating thing was a bad analogy in that sense. What I meant was that porn sites would voluntarily put some standard thing in their URLs that would enable people to either avoid them all or go straight to them, as they prefer.

The more I think about this, the more I suspect that there is something about this scheme that would cut into profits. Maybe it’s like soft drinks. They are all so similar that if you want to make big money you have to pour stupendous amounts into advertising to convince people to care a rat’s about whether they drink Coke or Pepsi. Maybe there is such a glut of similar porn sites that lumping them all together in the same place would cramp their advertising style.

#14

I think it’s also a bit of human nature – pack an “R” rated movie with all the sex and violence you want and people will go see it; give it the infamous “X” rating and they stay away in droves, no matter how subjectively ‘good’ the movie might be. In the same way, I think a lot of people would stay away from the “porn” label. To many people, “sexy” and “erotic” are acceptable and even positive terms, while “pornography” is an unacceptable, negative one. It’s a matter of not wanting to call a spade a spade, I guess.

#15

It’s not to tricky to determine a porno site by the name it uses. sex.com, xxxmenu.com,
lesbians.com Etc.

Adding a special extension would just be redundant. Except for special cases, like whitehouse.com [which is a porno site-really].

#16

[[Adding a special extension would just be redundant. Except for special cases, like
whitehouse.com [which is a porno site-really].]]

Not for the purposes I was talking about, which would be to filter them out before doing a search on, say, nipple stimulation (as a natural method of bringing on labor.)

#17

There’s no really sensible way to weed out the porn. Companies try to use blocking software, so they have a collection of pages and keywords in the software. But when you run a search, you still get all the garbage, you just can’t access them.
In the future, the internet will be so cluttered with junk, that databases that charge a fee will develop. You will also get a lot of people indexing special fields, so that someone else has already done the weeding.I keep a bunch of bookmarked indexes as start pages.

#18

I first heard that idea (the .xxx or .porn domain) about a year ago. I haven’t heard anything about it since, though. If anyone is working on it, they are probably trying to keep it quiet to insure that they can make as much money as possible selling the best names. No need to give examples for you veteran porn-surfers, or describe how valuable those names would be ;o)

-Monte

“Oxen are slow, but the earth is patient.” – some Chinese guy

#19

As I remember it, adding a .xxx domain was part of the failed DNS overhaul a few years that would have added .web, .store and a handful of new extensions. At the time, I remember pictures-for-grownups website operators being right behind the idea. I think the adult web industry has more to gain than they have to lose by making their sites readily identifiable.

“Forcing” compliance would be impossible, but come on, who would even want that? I’d rather live in a country where I can make my own decisions about what constitutes pornography and what doesn’t, thank you. But it’d hardly be necessary – allowing www.whatever.xxx would probably result in a land-grab the likes of which we couldn’t even begin to imagine.

Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way if they get mad, you’re already a mile away. And they don’t have any shoes.

#20

Sorry if I misunderstood about volunteering sites instead of using a third party. However, cher3 started by saying ‘all internet sites that are selling access to pornography being REQUIRED to have a single internet address code (.porn or something)’. That does not sound like volunteering. That sounds like third-party monitoring.

Stoidela, interesting to meet someone in the porn industry. The stories you could tell.