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We hope you’re ready to keep “accidentally” stumbling upon porn websites at work, home, and at the Apple Store. Yesterday, Internet regulators rejected plans to create a .xxx domain, which supposedly would have made it easier to find and, yes, of course, avoid online pornography. This finally concludes a battle between fuddy-duddies who feel that giving porn its own domain would be recognizing it as legitimate and the porn peddlers who worry about giving the government more regulatory powers over the industry. But in the end, these were probably just a bunch of distracting issues from the real matter at hand: that ICANN (the group that handles these domain names) could get some good scratch from all new registrants.
What we find most amusing that the idea for the new domain was first launched in 2001 and it took five whole years for our elected officials to reach a conclusion. Check out the Wall Street Journal’s full coverage of all of the players and arguments. For now, you're on your own to find what you're, ahem, looking for.
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There's no compelling technical reason why we shouldn't have an infinite number of top-level domains (.com, .net. etc...) In fact that was part of the original design of the web. For some reason, the US Government won't allow ICANN to open up the top-level namespace. Top-levels like .biz and .info had to go through the same grueling debate that .xxx is going through right now.
Wouldn't every owner of a dot com domain need to register an xxx domain to protect their copyrights and trademarks? Would Disney want someone to register disney.xxx?
"it took five whole years for our elected officials to reach a conclusion."
I don't think the members of the ICANN board are "elected officials" in the sense you mean. As far as I know, ICANN is an international nonprofit corporation, some of whose directors were elected and some unelected.
http://personal.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/boardsquat.htm
It's silly to think that creating a new top-level domain would have restricted porn sites to .xxx. Did anybody really think that all the owners of current .com, .net and, for all I know, .edu porn sites would just give them up and move en masse to a new neighborhood?