this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2025
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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.
And then several conservative states voted to enforce "age verification" wholesale, with garbage implementation that serves no one but identity thieves. Fuck politicians.
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.
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.
Those ideas don't really solve this problem though. Advertisers and payment processors would just not service these "adult content" sites. So all the popular sites wouldn't allow adult content.
somebody would fill that gap. there's a market there, so somebody will see the opportunity to make money when there's no competition
Somebody, sure. There's advertisers on porn sites. Just not the same ones on all the other sites, and they don't pay the same. It's a different market. Any company for whom all-ages content is a significant part of their product is gonna want the non-porn advertisers
And network effects would ensure 95% of users stay on TikTok/YouTube/Instagram/...
Several adult friendly platforms have come and gone. Many of them very profitable and self sustaining. They all eventually get screwed by inability to process payments.
And when people try to create their own payment methods not subject to arbitrary morality rules, the full weight of the existing banking system comes down hard and strangles them in the cradle.
We could absolutely have safe, profitable, self sustaining adult friendly spaces, but the powers that be don't want that to exist and work hard to undermine that from every possible angle.
It's really no different than all those efforts to ban local fiber ISP coops or how abortion clinics get shut down by arbitrary full hospital regulations because they couldn't ban them legally.
Someone would get in on that niche if it was the case, guaranteed.