Following last week’s announcement that ICANN has approved the .XXX Top Level Domain specifically for adult websites, Indian officials have not been slow in saying it’s the Indian government’s intention to outright block all sites with the – not yet active – .XXX extension.
In an article in the Indian Economic Times, a senior Indian official at the Ministry of IT is quoted as saying, “India along with many other countries from the Middle East and Indonesia opposed the grant of the domain in the first place, and we would proceed to block the whole domain, as it goes against the IT Act and Indian laws. Some people have said that segregation is better, and some countries allow it. But for other nations, transmission and direct distribution of such content goes against their moral and culture.”
This was one of the fears expressed by those opposing the .XXX TLD; that it would simply make national-level blocking of adult content an easy business. It seems, in India at least, that those concerns will be valid.
