I am a webmaster. I design and host many different websites.
My main source of income has come from adult oriented websites and that is why
I am taking the time to write this letter.
I have been discussing the issues surrounding the Internet
and the adult industry with several of my colleagues and one of our primary
concerns was the proliferation of adult sites that make no attempt to stop
minors from accessing the content of the site. As a parent, and concerned
citizen, I thought about different ways to help identify websites that may
contain adult material so that parents, schools and businesses could more
readily filter adult material from the plethora of domains out there. The best
way I could think of was to create a new top level domain that would identify
the site as one that contains material that may not be suitable for minors. After
discussing this issue with some of the other adult webmasters I know, we came
up with .xxx as a way to identify such sites.
This new top level domain along with legislation and/or
rules requiring sites offering adult content to use this top level domain would
aid in the effort to filter adult content while allowing adult website
operators the ability to operate their sites for those adults who enjoy such
entertainment. If a site is found
to be in violation of this requirement, the domain should immediately be
deactivated and the owner of the site forbidden from operating and adult
oriented site for some period of time. The violators of this requirement could
be reported by the general population, filtering companies and citizens action
groups who are looking to curb the access of minors to adult sites. The adult
website community itself, could also aid in the policing and enforcement of
this new requirement.
If a the owner of a domain has registered a domain under a
different top level domain, the registrar of said domain, should allow the owner
to transfer the domain to the new .xxx top level domain without charge and
forward all traffic to the old domain for a period of 6 months. This should be
a sufficient amount of time to allow caches and viewers to find the site via
the new domain. This waiting period would also allow search engines time to
index the move either by locating adult sites in their index and changing the
top level domain information contained in the URL’s or by the automatic
system with which they scan/crawl sites. It would also allow webmasters a period
of time to edit their code and programs to operate with the new top level
domain. A site the size of mine (70K pages and dozens of programs) could be
fixed to operate in a new top level domain in a matter of days via search and
replace scripts. I am sure it would be a headache, but one my fellow webmasters
and I should willingly accept to help secure our sites from the eyes of minors.
Thank you for your time and I hope my suggestion is of some
merit.
Sincerely,
R.B.