Let me get this straight...

[Laurie Domiano <lauriedom@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Mr. Lawley:
   
  Let me get this straight...according to this article, 
http://www.citizenlink.org/clcommentary/A000003612.cfm,
  you told Computer Business Review that your company hopes to register half a 
million sites, generating about $30 million annually.
   
  You've heard the saying about herding cats? Try ensuring 500,000 porn sites 
aren't breaking your rules. You told Family News in Focus that you plan to hire 
third-party contractors to make sure all sites correctly employ adult content 
ratings (in the form of meta tags) but will rely on the complaint process to 
identify sites peddling child pornography. 
  In other words, the porn viewers themselves will police the new domain. My 
comment on this? Whatever!!! Or this...ya think??
   
  To be fair, some of the regulations proposed by ICM could protect children. 
If all pornographic sites accurately rated their material, filters would 
perform significantly better. If online pornographers stopped uploading viruses 
and other malicious programs, all Internet users would benefit. Putting an end 
to fraudulent billing and e-mail spamming would save the business community 
hundreds of millions of dollars every year.
   
  Apart from the content ratings, most of the items on that list already 
violate U.S. law. So, what does the dot-XXX domain provide that we don't 
already have? 
   
  According to you, there will be "a nonprofit foundation that will include all 
stakeholders including child-protection advocates, free-speech advocates and 
members of the adult-entertainment community that will receive $10 per domain 
per year."
   
  With half a million Web sites in the pool, your foundation would receive $5 
million per year. One needn't wonder what pornographers and the ACLU will do 
with this money. You told Family News in Focus that "a lot of that money will 
be spent on parental awareness ? [and] child education in the classroom on a 
national basis to make sure the people know what triple X is and, if they 
choose to, how to deploy filters and how to make those filters more successful."
   
  Let me get this straight: We're going to protect children by "making sure 
they know what triple X is"? 
   
  You also assured us that a dot-XXX domain "allows the responsible members of 
the adult-entertainment community to identify themselves as such and ?go about 
their business without fear of persecution."
   
  That persecution, presumably, is the pressure from pro-family groups to 
enforce federal obscenity laws. Fear that the porn industry would finally be 
free from prosecution is precisely why the common folks from this nation and 
around the world have fought so tirelessly to kill the dot-XXX beast. 
  
ICANN has requested and is posting public comments concerning the creation of a 
dot-XXX top-level domain. My input can influence whether ICANN moves forward 
with the idea???
   
  So ok, based on the above information, I am adamatly opposed to furthering 
the reach of porn, and I, along with others in such grass-roots organizations, 
will continue to fight this ugly stuff.
   
  Sincerely,
   
  Laurie Domiano