.XXX has been approved.
A few days ago, ICANN -- the quasi-government corporation that oversees the internet’s naming and numbering system, approved the .XXX top level domain. .XXX will operate much like .COM does now -- meaning it will be a domain name people can type into their browsers to take them to a website -- but similar to the way .GOV is reserved for governmental organizations, .XXX will be reserved for pornographic or adult content websites.

Current expectations are that .XXX will be available for purchase and use by year’s end.

.XXX is not a perfect solution.
Is .XXX a complete solution to eliminating accidental access to adult sites, or for parents and others to completely control access to these sites, or to filter their incoming email? The answer to this question would be an absolute no.

Adult website operators will not voluntarily let go of their .COM names.
The reason .XXX is not a perfect solution, is because most of the adult content sites currently use .COM extensions. You can be sure that adult site operators will most certainly snap up their .XXX equivalents (i.e., the owners of girls.com will purchase girls.xxx – or at least attempt to do so). However, they will be very reluctant to let go of their .COM domain names. This will detract from the effectiveness of .XXX.

It’s going to take awhile for .XXX to really work.
Still, the significance of .XXX names will grow in importance as new adult sites register their names to .XXX, and existing adult sites migrate away from .COM (and .other top level domains) to use .XXX exclusively. I suspect that it will take some sort of government intervention to require adult sites to use only .XXX extensions. It’s anybody’s guess when and if the government will take such action here.

It’s going to take action by private industry and the government to resolve the matter entirely.
Another solution might be for browser manufacturers to only allow users to access adult websites when a .XXX domain name is used. In other words, attempts to access websites containing adult content with web site addresses that use other top level domain extensions such as .COM or .NET, simply wouldn’t resolve. I suspect that we will need a combination of government and private solutions to solve the adult content issues to most everyone's satisfaction.

Some religious groups oppose .XXX.
As can be expected, certain religious groups oppose .XXX. One is a right-wing group called the Family Research Council. They released a statement immediately after ICANN approved the .XXX extension. Its statement read as follows:

"The new domain would do more harm than good," said Patrick Trueman, FRC's senior legal counsel and former chief of the U.S. Department of Justice's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section. "The .com domain has been a cash cow for the porn industry and pornographers will not give it up and remove themselves to the '.xxx' domain. Instead, they will populate the .xxx domain and perhaps double the number of porn sites available on the Web."

According to the web news service PressEsc the above group also blamed the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq on MTV. So it makes sense to take what they say with a huge grain of salt.