Seems like no matter what you search for these days, you always will end up with links which are completely off topic, and usually contain questionable material. I believe it might be wise to seperate the valid from the invalid, ie putting such things as pornography, pirating, and other "objectionable material" on a seperate network. The two networks might be linked to each other, but one would be distinguished from the other similar to the idea of the "WWW" in front of our .coms and whatnot. United States ISPs could then force age verification in order to activate the ability to view the material on the other network.
-- MrJoe, Jul 27 2000

IANA http://www.iana.org
Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. This is the board that regulates top level domain names, and any new domain suffixes will be found here. [BigThor, Jul 27 2000]

Kinda baked already -- There's soon going to be some new domain suffixes. I can't remember them all, but I do remember ".sex" and ".travel". I imagine that down the road, there will be others.

Having your sex site part of the ".sex" domain would be a win-win situation. Family friendly ISP's could block ".sex" sites, as well as family friendly search engines. Maybe you'd even be able to specify what domains you wanted to search, e.g., "include .travel, .com, .org, .net, but exclude .sex"

People looking for sex-on-the-net could restrict their searches to ".sex" domains.
-- eagle, Jul 27 2000


Rating systems like PICS are attempts to do this, as well.
-- egnor, Jul 27 2000


Currently, the new top level domain names being considered are .arts, .firm, .info, .nom, .rec, .shop, and .web, but a .sex or .xxx domain doesn't seem to be among them (nor does .travel, incidentally). Apparently these plans aren't final, though.

Too bad- either a .sex or .xxx TLD would be an excellent solution to a lot of Web problems, mostly those that eagle mentioned above.

Also, RSACi ratings are widely accepted as well as PICS ratings. The nice thing is that you can set proxy servers, browsers and web servers to block any site that has more objectionable content than you specify is allowable- provided that the site is rated in the first place....

The problem is that most webmasters and designers of objectionable sites don't bother to get them rated. Thus, when some apoplectic parent stumbles across the site and rates it through NetNanny or CyberPatrol, the site usually gets rated much more harshly than it should.
-- BigThor, Aug 05 2000



random, halfbakery