• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    12 days ago

    There was a push… way back in the 90s, to implement a regulation on the internet in which “adult” material would register itself under the “.xxx” domain. And then you could do whatever horny shit you wanted under that heading, in the same way you could drop F-bombs and racial slurs on Satellite Radio or Cable TV. If someone didn’t want their kids to watch certain material, they could very easily block the content by censoring everything from the “.xxx” domain. And ISPs could even offer “child-friendly” connections by automatically refusing to serve that content to opt-out customers.

    The plan died in committee, because conservative politicians considered it unfriendly to businesses.

    Similar pitches - broadcast frequencies that could be blocked with special chips in TVs, registries that businesses could add themselves to in order to let systems auto-filter there material, HTML metadata tags, FCC rules updates, state funded industry managed ratings agencies - all got the axe under a political class that insisted it was too hostile to the interests focused on making money.

    And so now we don’t have any kind of tagging or sorting or filtering option native to content. It’s all just a mass of generic data. Which is good if you want to engage in traffic quietly under the radar. But awful if you want to be an above board commercial enterprise with normal customers.

    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      11 days ago

      It is worth noting that the .xxx domain does still exist.

      Its… a lot more like the late 90s / early 00s web.

      https://icannwiki.org/.xxx

      www.Search.xxx

      I… am uncertain as to whether or not payment processors …care at all, or a lot about anything going on here…

      But uh yeah, people could just… start using this domain more and try to force a re-evaluation of internet/society norms.

      The internet is a lot less of a ‘US sets all the rules’ thing these days.

      • burntbacon@discuss.tchncs.de
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        11 days ago

        I seem to recall the .xxx going live/large-time in the late 00s era. There was an article series in the newspaper about my area’s colleges all suing to gain control of the (college name).xxx sites.

    • Akintudne@reddthat.com
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      11 days ago

      And then several conservative states voted to enforce “age verification” wholesale, with garbage implementation that serves no one but identity thieves. Fuck politicians.