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(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — According to reports released Monday, the Indian government has said it intends to block the .xxx domain, following the news last week that ICANN had announced its own intentions to work with the ICM Registry to enable the creation of a top-level domain specifically for adult content.

At the news of the domain’s approval, and during the many-years-long buildup to that point, companies operating in the online adult industry had expressed concerns that they would be “ghettoized” by being forced onto the new domain (though no plans exist to push content off the .com domain), and that it would make it easy for governments to arbitrarily block content.

While one of the stated objectives of the .xxx domain was to make it easier for parents (or people who want to for whatever other reason) to block pornographic content, India’s move goes a little more toward validating the concern, among those in the business, that .xxx is a move against adult content.

An article in the Economic Times quoted a senior Indian official at the ministry of IT.

“India along with many other countries from the Middle East and Indonesia opposed the grant of the domain in the first place, and we would proceed to block the whole domain, as it goes against the IT Act and Indian laws,” said the official. “Some people have said that segregation is better, and some countries allow it. But for other nations, transmission and direct distribution of such content goes against their moral and culture.”

Experts say the Indian government, and others, have a harder time blocking content (adult or otherwise) on the .com domain, or on their local country-code TLD, without laws in place to govern that sort of thing.