The virtual "combat zone"

FT story on a long-overdue rule-set reset:  the fencing off of the web for porn.  It reminds me of Boston’s efforts in the 1980s to put all the city’s porn and strip clubs and prostitution (and—implicitly—drug sales) into a recognized downtown section known as the “combat zone.”

The .xxx domain is one of hundreds of new suffixes being created by ICANN, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

The word “sex” accounts for a quarter of all searches on the web.

The porn industry has been lukewarm to the idea, which a US-based company spent the last seven years fighting ICANN to create.  Why?  It fears a ghettoization effect, just like what happened with the combat zone in Boston, which eventually faded away to a much smaller space.

On a more prosaic but more important note, ICANN also just allowed the introduction of Chinese script to top-level domain names.

Less worry of ghettoization there.