Last Friday (6/25/2010) ICANN made the controversial decision to accept the application of the top level domain name .xxx.  The .xxx TLD was first introduced 6 years ago by ICM Registry to "provide a place online for adult entertainment providers and their service providers who want to be part of our voluntary self regulatory community," according to the company's own news release.

 

While many think that this could very well help organize the internet and provide a better filtering process making adult-content easier to block; others, including religious groups, think that it would give more legitimacy to the adult entertainment industry.  There is some speculation that this .xxx domain name could eventually be mandatory for any adult content based web site.

 

ICM has already taken over 110,000 pre-reservations for domain names.  They expect it to be up and running early 2011, if not sooner.

 

What are your thoughts?  If the '.xxx' TLD is approved and initiated, do you think this will provide for better regulation concerning pornography and the Internet?  Or will this only lead to more porn web sites and increased revenues for the porn industry?  Is this good or bad in your opinion?  Before you answer consider this: the pornography industry has larger revenues than Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Apple and Netflix combined.  Also, over 25% of search engine requests are porn related (for more interesting statistics about online pornography click here.)