The New Republic is advocating the creation of a XXX top-level domain for the purposes of getting all porn sites onto it and making it tougher for kids to access. Its a pretty large article, but it never addresses one of the toughest questions surrounding this issue: What qualifies as a porn site.

This site would probably meet my definition of a porn site, but the text to picture ratio here is pretty heavily tilted towards text. Does that matter? Would Daze Reader be considered a porn site? We have alot of similar material, but he has even fewer pictures than here. How about sex diary websites?

The XXX domains may be created, but I can’t see any existing porn sites moving to them. I can envision lots and lots of sites setting up either a mirror of their site on the XXX name, or additional sites – but not moving. Its way too big a risk, both in how that section of the internet will be treated and in how the move to a new domain name would affect Google rankings and traffic.