More on .xxx

Someone alerted me an AP article on the .xxx controversy. It has some more details on the arguments that conservatives are making against it:

Skeptics argue, however, that porn sites are likely to keep their existing “.com” storefronts, even as they set up shop in the new “.xxx” domain name. And that will reduce the effectiveness of software filters set up to simply block all “.xxx” names.

The “.xxx” domain “legitimizes this group, and it gives false hope to parents,” said Patrick Trueman, senior legal counsel at the Family Research Council and a former Justice Department official in charge of obscenity prosecutions.

The adult entertainment industry is also hardly behind “.xxx” as a group. Many of its webmasters consider the domain “the first step toward driving the adult Internet into a ghetto very much like zoning laws have driven adult stores into the outskirts,” said Mark Kernes, senior editor at the trade monthly Adult Video News.

ICM insists it would fight any government efforts to compel its use by adult Web sites, but the existence of “.xxx” would certainly make the prospect easier.

“There are going to be pressures” to mandate it once available, said Marjorie Heins, coordinator of the Free Expression Policy Project at New York University’s law school. Federal lawmakers have proposed such requirements in the past.

Robert Corn-Revere, a lawyer hired by ICM to address free-speech issues, said the company has pledged $250,000 for a legal defense fund to keep “.xxx” voluntary, and he notes that courts have struck down efforts to make movie ratings mandatory.

Even if it were mandatory, it wouldn’t be foolproof.

A domain name serves merely as an easy-to-remember moniker for a site’s actual numeric Internet address. David Burt, a spokesman for filtering vendor Secure Computing Corp., said a child could simply use the numeric address when the “.xxx” equivalent gets blocked.

Better technologies exist, he said, including a little-used self-rating system that lets Web sites broadcast whether they contain nudity, violence or foul language, along with the specific forms, such as presence of genitals or passionate kissing.

* * *

ICANN board member Joichi Ito, who backed “.xxx,” wrote in his Web journal that the decision wasn’t an endorsement of any type of content or moral belief but a chance for “creating incentives for legitimate adult entertainment sites to come together and fight “bad actors.’ ” Anti-porn activist Donna Rice Hughes, however, remains unconvinced.

“They are not going to give up their “.com’ addresses,” she said of porn sites. “It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure that one out.”

It is true that just creating the .xxx domain would not, by itself, require all the pornography to migrate there. But, that’s not a reason to oppose it. Cleaning up the .com area is step two. As for navigating to the sites by the numeric address instead of the name, filtering software could easily account for that by doing the name resolution and blocking the site if the number is associated with a .xxx domain.

What’s scary is that the industry is already raising money to fight to keep the domain voluntary. What is the argument against requiring them to essentially label their content? How is it different than current zoning laws, which have been consistently upheld? Their position appears to be that they should be allowed to distribute pornography to anonymous consumers with little or no assurance that the recipient is an adult. Especially for free content, it is analogous to standing on a street corner, wearing a blind fold, and handing out pornography to every man, woman, and child who happens by. What’s wrong with legal constraints that limit that sort of activity to a particular “place” in cyberspace so that parents can more easily keep their kids away? Whatever “harm” that causes to the “free speech” rights of the smut peddlers is so minor and speculative, that they would have a hard time opposing such regulation.

Bottome line: any voluntary system, like ratings, won’t work, and the .xxx domain offers the best chance at an effective system that will be upheld by the courts.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 29th, 2005 at 8:10 am and is filed under Constitution and Courts, Technology, The Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.