The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers recently passed a ruling allowing for .XXX to appear at the end of website domain names – replacing the .COMs and .CO.UKs – and these suffixes have now started to leak onto the World Wide Web.
A statement reads: “ICANN’s decision to give .XXX final approval is a landmark moment for the internet. For the first time there will be a clearly defined web address for adult entertainment”
It’s not a surprise to discover the type of sites .XXX is related to. It’s pretty obvious to most and online smut-merchants will be reveling at the business potential of having such a trendy tag. But the main intention for ICANN’s ruling is to keep access to these urls controllable by the web-surfer and through search engines, keeping the internet “as free as possible from fraud or malicious computer viruses” and most importantly these sites can be kept “out of the reach of minors”.
An estimated 200,000 or more .XXX domain names are said to have been pre-reserved. However, some adult-content providers are not so keen to take up the suffix in fear they will lose control of their content if blocks and bans start coming into effect, as they surely will, as recently seen in India.
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