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Unless companies are forced to use this domain, it's useless for filtering.

No force is necessary. There's a neat trick in the geek world called DNS (domain name services). Every time you connect to the Internet, your computer is provided two Name Servers that are used to convert domain names like www.freerepublic.com into numbers the machine can understand like 209.157.64.201. Try it out, click this http://209.157.64.201/. These Name Servers are provided by your ISP. It is a completely distributed system. Now if your ISP is provided a list of porn sites and their .xxx counterparts, and the ISP voluntarily serves one but not the other ... voila ... the companies are forced to use the .xxx domain without truly being governmentally "forced". The people govern themselves; if your ISP won't enforce the .xxx standards, pick a new ISP and stop funding the old one. Eventually, they will come around. I support this 100%.

Good post :) The ISP's volunteer-ism would be based on the market (good thing) and keeps congress from playing around with stuff they have no clue about (good thing), leaving them time to run baseball, the military, and phone companies. ;)

good info.

One small problem I see is that browsers will have to know what DNSs are porn sites and if the porn site doesn't have an equivelent xxx site (or doesn't disclose it) then the browser will have no way of knowing. If someone tried to compile a list of all porn sites it would be difficult as new ones would keep popping up etc..

I'd think if a company existed that compiled a list of these (via crawlers etc..) and developed software (of the like that already exists) it would be much more effective at stopping kids from viewing porn then a red light type district. Which is sort of what you're saying in a different way about choosing the right ISP. It seems what you're suggesting would increase the use of the xxx district, but not assure that porn couldn't be viewed outside this area.

I think this is much ado about nothing and seems to be a big deal because we are contrasting out view of the outside world to that of the internet and it is an imperfect analogy.

Perhaps my arguments are resting on faulty premises - I admit I am not a techno whiz.