One thing that I do not hear discussed is the reasons why you even need a website. In my consulting work, I will frequently ask if the client is sure that they need a website.
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Adult Sites to Finally Get XXX
written by jason.g
Thursday, June 2, 2005
Wired News: Too SeXXXy for Dot-Com
From the site:
ICM contends the “xxx” web addresses, which it plans to sell for $60 a year, will protect children from online smut if adult sites voluntarily adopt the suffix so filtering software used by families can more effectively block access to those sites. The $60 price is roughly ten times higher than prices other companies charge for dot-com names.
This may help some filtering be easier. The idea is that a pornography site would now have a .xxx added where .com had been. While this is kind of silly, the industry is many billions of dollars strong and not likely to switch overnight to a voluntary self censored system, the idea is encouraging. The sites that adopt it, will be helping to build a “red light district” that will, I pray, make it easier to protect kids in the future.
Of course, because people are sinners, we will always need to be diligent in protecting ourselves from dangerous and demeaning content. That is just common sense. But this may be a step in the right direction.
This is critical to the preservation of our freedom! With all of the silly ’single-interest’ kinds of laws out there, you’d think that a far reaching and truly protective measure like this could be made into law. It seems unrealistic to think that an industry that preys on young minds would volunteer to make it obvious who and what they are. But even at the risk of growing an already bloated beaurocracy, I’d be happy if some of our tax dollars went to regulate this online industry. Passing a law is not what would help curb this danger. It would be the enforcement of the law.
Anyway, thank you for bringing this up. The more people we can educate about this problem, and the relatively easy solution, the more we can protect each other in society.
Chris.B June 2nd, 2005 at 10:04 amPoint of clarification. This is a policy of ICANN it is not a law. ICANN is the governing body of domain names on the internet.
More info here: http://www.icann.org/general/
From the site:
“The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is an internationally organized, non-profit corporation that has responsibility for Internet Protocol (IP) address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, generic (gTLD) and country code (ccTLD) Top-Level Domain name system management, and root server system management functions. These services were originally performed under U.S. Government contract by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and other entities. ICANN now performs the IANA function.”
David Merwin June 3rd, 2005 at 7:08 am