Religious groups worry that '.xxx' would legitimize and expand the number of adults sites, which more than a third of U.S. Internet users visit each month, according to comScore Media Metrix. The Web site measurement firm said 4 percent of all Web traffic and 2 percent of all time spent Web surfing involved an adult site.
Holy crap! One third of internet users (which is basically one third of everyone) visit a porn site each month? And yet the actual time spent porn-surfing is low. And it is probably the case that everyone at least one time a year visits a site, if only by accident. This is a case where I'd really like to see a graph of number of visits per time frame - daily, weekly, monthly, yearly.
Visiting porn sites is a bad idea unless you have your browser really locked down. Lots of porn sites are "honey pots" designed to download mischievous code into your computer. And who really knows how to lock down their browser? Almost nobody.
As for the actual proposal to have a '.xxx' domain... I must admit I am confused. At first I thought it was a no-brainer, but I can see the arguments against it now. It will just lead to government mischievousness. And fights about what should be named '.xxx'. And so on.
One third of internet users. I'd really need to see the graph though - I suspect a few people visit a lot and the rest less often. Do they count Playboy.com? That's probably safe to visit. Do they distinguish between hard and soft core? Does a racy site like Victoria's Secret count?
*Sigh*. Another meaningless statistic.
Later in the article, a religious dude says,
"They will keep their `.com' domains, and I have no doubt they will buy their `.xxx' as well," said Patrick Trueman, special counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian public-interest law firm. "There will be twice as much pornography on the Internet."
Ha! Actually, Patrick, there will be the same amount, but twice as many addresses for it. And one entire set of addresses - the '.xxx' ones - will be ignored by almost everyone. In fact, one could use the corresponding '.xxx' name as an indication to ignore the '.com' with the same prefix. But then a person could register "Yahoo.xxx" and that would confuse things. (Actually, Yahoo.xxx is a pretty funny name for a porn site. But double actually, Yahoo would claim trademark infringement. Like I said, it will just turn into a mess. So I'm agin' it.)
No comments:
Post a Comment