I was at home, so I took a chance on the .xxx link, but seriously, this is worse than registering your trendily-named startup's domain in Libya. I'm all for devaluing ICANN's TLD money grab, but for the time being, this sort of URL is going to set off alarm bells.
Huh, I thought you had to have a porn site to use a .xxx domain. (Like, I registered saurik.xxx so no one else could take it, but at the time I had to register as "non-porn", and so it is just permanently parked... I guess I never checked to see if I could override that.)
Because porn sites have little benefit by being seen by users subject to such filters, and they'll be less targeted if they keep to an area that is simple to filter out. The whole concept of the evil pornographer trying to corrupt your children is deeply weakened by a recognition that some people want to filter out porn, that that's OK, and that the industry should make reasonable accommodations for that.
Those with disposable income to spend either on porn directly or at the porn sites' sponsors are perfectly capable of browsing on their home connection where no restrictions exist. The only people who are filtered are a) children, who don't have any money to spend on things like that, and ostensibly are not legally allowed to consume/purchase "adult" material anyway or b) people who are at work. Neither of these types of people are worthwhile to the porn industry.
I think it's even positive for citizens with national web filtering, because it will take pressure off moderation of other TLD, and their typical national web filter circumvention method will allow access to .xxx just like it allows access to all the other banned stuff.
It also allows people who want to filter for porn to find it easily. Think imgur.xxx for NSFW and imgur.com for not-NSFW. imgur guy says he is obligated to keep "no pornography" in his TOS even though it's obviously not enforced because otherwise he can't get any advertisers. A segregation like this can allow him to actually follow these terms and take adult-specific advertisers on the site in the xxx namespace.
The only argument against the segregation into a custom namespace is that porn sites shouldn't make filtration easy, but I don't really see any benefit to that position for anyone.
I was at home, so I took a chance on the .xxx link, but seriously, this is worse than registering your trendily-named startup's domain in Libya. I'm all for devaluing ICANN's TLD money grab, but for the time being, this sort of URL is going to set off alarm bells.