As millions of people across the United States begin to gear up for the intense discussions and arguments that will arise during the primaries and eventual presidential election that will come in fall 2008 (inset_name_here FTW), one particular vote has been largely forgotten.

This week, there are plans to vote on the controversial .xxx domain, which, if passed, will create a brand new domain solely designed for online porn (and ultimately not affecting what you do at night ;)). While religious groups argue that creating a .xxx domain will not only legitimize large online pornography circulation, they claim that doing so will also essentially double the amount of porn, since most major sites will probably keep their .com address as well (isn’t this a good thing?).

ICM Registry, the main company behind the push for adoption of the .xxx domain, believes that creating this new domain will allow parents to block porn in a much simpler manner than before, by simply blocking the string ‘.xxx’ from the URL field. Of course, this argument is more off-base then the people who visit AdultSheepFinder.com (probably OKFW-ish). Everyone who has ever taken a crash course in Internetology knows that the actual word representation of a domain address is just an alias, and one can simply use the actual IP address to navigate to a specific web site (providing that the site is on a dedicated server, otherwise it gets more complicated).

Besides the opposition from the porn industry and religious groups, which is ironic at least, there are representatives from the Free Speech Coalition that suggest creating a domain directed towards children’s websites would be better. Using this method seems much more appealing, since blocking .xxx isn’t completely safe and blocking everything but a kids domain would be relatively simpler.

With the vote to happen within the next few months or even this week, the decision will surely be against creating a .xxx domain. Personally, creating a kids domain seems like a better plan altogether, since the ICM Registry company is really only trying to make some quick money. What do you think?

[Via technnewsworld.com]