.XXX proposal
Bear in mind while reading this that I have 2 young children that I would like to see protected from exposure to pornography. This is of course not completely possible with any technical nor legislative solution. The only truly effective solution lies with parents paying attention to what their children are doing on the web, and on explaining to them when they can understand it what the dangers are. I also own domain names and revenue sites, but no porn sites nor gambling sites by choice. That being said, .XXX might have been a good idea if it was created at the same time as .com, but it is the wrong solution now. It will create another location for pornography, not a replacement location. Consider the following problems: 1. The prices for .XXX names are set to maximize profit to the registry, not to induce porn sites owners to switch. This was directly stated to me at a previous ICANN meeting by one of the .XXX registry founders. 2. Any porn site owner will still need to maintain the existing sites even if he gets the identical name in .XXX so he can redirect the traffic as all the existing links will point to the old site. 3. There will be a huge problem with name collisions, and the solution stated to this so far is completely subjective judgement on the part of the registry. 4. An approach which will go much further towards a solution has been proposed recently in congress I believe of tagging porn site pages with a browser readable ID and have browsers have a switch to say whether they would render such pages or not. This is a very simple thing to implement, and it has the virtue of making it easy for all the PPC providers themselves be able to recognize such pages and not display the links to them for any domain name so specified adding an extra layer of protection on top of the browser layer. In this solution there is no extra cost to the domain owners for new .XXX names, no battle over free speech rights if someone later decides to try to take away the .com etc. porn sits (forgetting as is typical the net is worldwide and has many tlds and that a .com registrant may live i a country with different laws). The embedded tag approach is much better at making it easy to prevent inadvertant display of porn pages arrived at though chains of links, and much easier to get site owners to voluntarily use as the financial impact is negligible. So if you wish to endorse a technical solution to a social issue (which has in all of history never proved possible) back the one with the best chance of the most impact. Larry Richards |