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Here are some of the more commonly stated reasons for opposition:
* Some people worry that private entities like VISA or Mastercard might opt to allow their customers to only purchase online porn from sites that reside on the .XXX TLD. As the theory goes, if ICM is successful in painting .XXX sites as the only "responsible" adult sites out there, VISA/MC might see it as a PR boon to disassociate themselves with non-.XXX adult sites.
* There's concern that use of .XXX will become mandatory as a matter of law, either globally or on a country-by-country basis. While there's First Amendment precedent in the U.S. that makes this possibility fairly unlikely within the U.S., many countries don't have something like the First Amendment on the books, and there's no legal or historical precedent to suggest that the governments in these countries could be prevented from crafting and enforcing such a law with respect to their own citizens.
* .XXX will be the first TLD blocked in its entirety by entire regions of the planet. Given the distributed nature of the DNS resolution/support protocol, having an entire TLD that simply doesn't resolve across large swaths of the Internet might not be such a good thing.
* .XXX domains are being offered at many times market price for new, undeveloped names with no existing traffic base, and the list of benefits and added value that ICM has come up with to justify the high sticker price strikes a lot of us as essentially meaningless claptrap couched in feelgood marketing slogans, untested assumptions and unsubstantiated claims.
* ICM has been somewhat less than upfront with the 'community' that this TLD is supposed to serve, leaving that community with little reason to trust them to operate the TLD in way that is in our best interest in the future.
Many other reasons for opposition have been stated, but there's a handful that come to mind off the top of my head.
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Q. Boyer
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