IS ICANN BENEFITING FROM CHILD PORNOGRAPHY DOMAIN REGISTRATIONS?
Attention Vinton Cerf & Paul Twomey: How much money has ICANN and the accredited registrar community generated from child pornography domain registrations over the past five (5) years? Let's make some very conservative assumptions: $10.00 US per domain name per year 100,000 child pornography webmasters are estimated to operate globally 7 domain names average per child porn operator, 1.5% of all domain names solicit child pornography content and consumers
= $70,395,000 US in gross registration fees over the past five years ICANN's fee is $0.50 per domain? = $3,519,750 Is this number reasonably accurate? Has ICANN directly generated more than $3,519,750 from child pornography domain registrations since 2003? Has the registrar community generated an incredible $49,276,500 US in gross registrations fees? Is it reasonable to suggest that child pornography companies generated more than $1 Billion over the past 5 years (that's 20X registration fees)? Is ICANN now considering other options? Can we assume that ICANN is preparing to contribute the millions of dollars needed to support programs to begin the fight to label websites and battle child pornography? Is the online adult entertainment industry prepared to contribute the millions of dollars necessary to make the Internet safer? Is its ICANN intent to show their support, understanding and respect for the online adult webmaster community? Clearly, many adult webmasters have been lucratively rewarded for their reckless behavior over the past 5 years. Should users and online consumers have the right to chose before they click? Is its ICANN intention planning to publicly announce to the international community that they do not support .xxx because they are concerned that adult webmasters don't want to clearly identify their websites because they are afraid of censorship? Does the adult webmaster community really believe they are hidding in cyberspace and not being filtered by IP and by countries around the world? "The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it. In Cyberspace, the First Amendment is a local ordinance." John Perry Barlow Is doing nothing really an option ICANN is considering? Will doing nothing motivate new innovations and idea's? Hopefully, my questions will help your discussion. Enclosed are some interesting and relevant statistics for the ICANN board to consider: According to Kevin Kevin Dellicolli, director of the U.S. Customs Cyber Smuggling Center service estimates, there are more than 100,000 child porn sites worldwide, generating revenues of $200m. http://www.missingkids.com/missingkids/servlet/PageServlet?LanguageCountry=en_US&PageId=2451 A current study has estimated that ?as much as 20 percent of all pornographic activity on the Internet may involve children?; however, accurate estimates are difficult to produce since a reliable methodology to measure the actual extent of these images online has yet to be devised. About 1 percent of Web sites indexed by Google and Microsoft are sexually explicit, according to a U.S. government-commissioned study. Search on the word porn and you get 88 million pages. Search on porn or xxx and you get 186 million. Roughly 1 percent. If you add the word sex and search for porn or xxx or sex you get 4.4 percent. A recent survey done at Fresno State that looked at 700 MySpace pages found that 59 percent of the individual pages included risqué/sexual poses, 9 percent included links to pornographic sites, and 6 percent had full frontal nudity of females. According to investigators who handled the cases of estimated arrestees, most had graphic images explicitly showing sexual acts by or on children. Specifically 92% had images of minors focusing on genitals or showing explicit sexual activity; 80% had pictures showing the sexual penetration of a child, including oral sex; 71% possessed images showing sexual contact between an adult and a minor, defined as an adult touching the genitals or breasts of a minor or vice-versa; 21% had child pornography depicting violence such as bondage, rape, or torture and most of those involved images of children who were gagged, bound, blindfolded, or otherwise enduring sadistic sex; and 79% also had what might be termed ?softcore? images of nude or semi-nude minors, but only 1% possessed such images alone. The U.S. Customs Cyber Smuggling Center in Fairfax, Virginia, has reviewed more than 10,000 tips since January 2000. A 1999 U.S. Customs case revealed a child pornography Web site that in its first three months recorded nearly 150,000 hits and the download of 3.2 million images. Since 1992, the U.S. Customs Service has only arrested 1,000 people on charges related to child pornography. Customs has never lost a case that has gone to the judicial process -- defendants have either pleaded guilty or have been convicted. Roughly 1 in 5 children had received a sexual solicitation or approach online. One in 33 children had received an aggressive solicitation, meaning that someone asked them to meet somewhere, or called on the phone, or sent them a regular e-mail, money or gifts. Less than 10 percent of sexual solicitations and only 3 percent of unwanted exposure episodes were ever reported to authorities, including law enforcement agencies or Internet providers. Arrests for possessing and distributing child pornography have been climbing steadily, in part because federal agencies are finally devoting significantly more resources to the issue. Visa together, Mastercard and American Express have estimated that the list of child pornography consumers in the UK who have been accessing these sites exceeded 250,000 in 2001. Does ICANN have any proposals that would make some commitment to protect consumers from fraud; reduce criminal activity; prevent the harvesting and abuse of children online; stop illegally obtained content; and reduce unsolicited pornographic emails. Please consider whatever options you can to make the Internet a safer and more clearly labeled place for consumers ... after all, they are and will always be the silent majority and the most important sponsored community. _________________________________________________________________ Don?t miss your chance to WIN 10 hours of private jet travel from Microsoft® Office Live http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/mcrssaub0540002499mrt/direct/01/ |