Ghettoization
Run for the hills everyone! The entire kink community is doomed! Plans are in the works to move all porn on the Internet to a .xxx domain. Why its almost like they are rounding all of us up and shipping us off to a walled camp for reeducation. How dare they shove us all into some blighted corner of the net. Oh what a repressive society we live in. We are all so oppressed. Its an outrage! When will this persecution end?
We are being persecuted? Right?
Well, only if you think a .xxx domain would be a separate area of the Internet that is. How exactly that is even electronically possible I am not quite sure. I admit it has been a while since I took any data communications class back in college, but domain names are only handled on the application layer. Once you get into packets of data being ziped through wires, the data packs transmitting porn all function the same as any other data pack.
Yet everyone seems to be saying that a .xxx domain would be a “ghettoâ€. Amazing how many people are using that exact word. Not slum. Not shanty town. Not skid row or “da projectsâ€. Not asylum or prison or interment camp or dog pound or any other metaphor of a place where you round up the undesirables and lock them away. Heck, I would have suspected a few fellow perverts to call it a dungeon.
As far as I can tell, the first use of “ghetto†to describe a .xxx domain came from a press release by the Free Speech Coalition on March 15, 2006 http://www.freespeechcoalition.com/.xxxbill.htm It seems unlikely that with so many people using just the word ghetto and nothing else, that the trend could have been sparked as recently as march 15th. But if there is a prior use, I have yet to find it.
I wonder how exactly this segregation would take place. Would there be a second internet backbone built? Seems about the only way that there even could be differing sections of the net with one area being of infirior quality to the other.
Compare with phonesex lines. A 900 number is used generally for phonesex. An 800 number is for other generic businesses. So when you call a 900 line is it more prone to static and drooped calls and fadeout compared to an 800 number? Obviously not since both kinds of calls are carried over the name lines. The distinction between a 900 number and a 800 number is merely an identifier for switching computers. There is no change in quality of service between the two.
Likewise, for the Internet, an domain address is simply a routing identifier. That address gets converted into a series of four numbers and from there, thats all a computer concerns itself over. For example, the google homepage is 64.233.161.147 and can be verified yourself by typing this into your browser address bar right now. Now normally your ISP does this address-to-number conversion for you, but you can do it yourself at http://www.webyield.net/ipqt.php or even download http://www.tomahawkcomputers.com/ to have your own desktop computer do it for you automatically.
The point being that even if a .xxx domain went into effect, it would not be a separate location. It would merely be a display convenience for us humans. The machines that run the net wouldn’t know the difference and it would therefore be impossible for this “place†to get turned into a ghetto.