Recent Posts
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.sexy may be blocked in Iran
Some networks in Iran appear to be systematically blocking Uniregistry’s .sexy gTLD.
That’s one of the conclusions of a slightly odd experiment commissioned by ICANN.
The newly published An Analysis of New gTLD Universal Acceptance was conducted by APNIC Labs. The idea was to figure out whether there are any issues with new gTLDs on the internet’s DNS infrastructure.
It concluded that there is not — new gTLDs work just fine on the internet’s plumbing.
However, the survey — which comprised over 100 million DNS resolution attempts — showed “One country, Iran, shows some evidence of a piecemeal block of Web names within the .sexy gTLD.”
The sample size for Iranian attempts to access .sexy was just 30 attempts. In most cases, users were able to resolve the names with DNS, but HTTP responses appeared to be blocked.
The survey did not test .porn or .adult names, but it might be safe to assume similar behavior in those gTLDs.
APNIC also concluded that Israel’s .il ccTLD, included in the report as a known example of TLD blocking at the national level, is indeed blocked in Iran and Syria.
The study also found that there may be issues with Adobe’s Flash software, when used in Internet Explorer, when it comes to resolving internationalized domain names.
That conclusion seems to have been reached largely because the test’s methodology saw a Flash advertisement discretely fetching URLs in the background of web pages using Google Ads.
When the experimenters used HTML 5 to run their scripts instead, there was no problem resolving the names.
The study did not look at some of the perhaps more pressing UA issues, such as the ability for registrants and others to use new gTLD domain names in web applications.
I wouldn’t be surprise when .XXX, .ADULT and especially .PORN are blocked. But .SEXY and .SEX are not that obvious.
There are two similar extensions: .SEX and .SEXY.
Are you sure .SEXY is being blocked and not .SEX ?
And considering .sx has been promoting itself in a similar manner, I wonder whether Iran would actually block a ccTLD…
.sex did not exist at the time of the survey.
“slightly odd”?
Yeah, it seemed a little unusual to me that the report spends quite a lot of time talking about the fact that the testing script they used was written in Flash, which highlighted the possible problems with that application, but didn’t seem to have any kind of systematic approach to testing other applications. Not a criticism, just hit me as a bit odd.