It seems to me, with the views stated below, that having a XXX TLD would be a good thing, then. If things play out as below, it would make content blocking by parental control software that much more effective. Nothing is perfect, of course, but it might improve things somewhat.
The problem is defining what is "offensive". At one end, there's pretty broad agreement that titillating pictures of explicit sexual activity would go into .XXX, but at the other end, there's no agreement at all. Some web sites offer health advice to teens, some of which is related to sexuality. There's sites about breast, cervical, and prostate cancer, which tend to have illustrations of the affected body parts. There's sites about contraception, abortion, and homosexuality. There's sites with pictures of scantily clad 17 year olds which are considered to be art in some jurisdictions, and child pornography in others. Which of those belong in .XXX ? Who decides? I haven't the faintest idea, and I sure hope that ICANN doesn't either. So like Wendy, I don't think that .XXX is a very good idea, but I think that ICANN trying to explain why it isn't would be worse. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://johnlevine.com, Mayor "I dropped the toothpaste", said Tom, crestfallenly.