Privacy Groups Jeer Proposed .xxx Domain as Threat to Speech

The Family Research Council (FRC) argues the initiative could expand online pornography’s reach by allowing sites to keep their .com commercial domains and expand to more URLs on .xxx (WID Aug 18 p5). Concerned Women for America (CWA) expressed a similar sentiment this summer, calling for ICANN’s plan to be canned. The Commerce Dept. last week asked ICANN for “adequate additional time” before approving the TLD -- a move that FRC lauded. The “unprecedented” opposition expressed in the U.S. successfully pushed the applicant to ask for a delay (WID Aug 17 p1). FRC Senior Legal Counsel Patrick Trueman called .xxx “an effort to pander to the porn industry” that only offers “false hope to an American public which wants illegal pornographers prosecuted, not rewarded.”

Businesses like lingerie boutique Victoria’s Secret could run the risk of having their online operations fenced in, Johnson said. “Nobody knows exactly what pornography is. Somebody’s going to have to be making that determination -- and it’s probably going to be the government,” he said. Some groups have come out against the TLD because it’s voluntary, but Johnson said it’s only a matter of time before there’s a push to make it mandatory.

“The whole concept of freedom of speech is there shouldn’t be these boundaries that are set up by the govt. -- segregating certain zones that are designated for certain types of speech,” Johnson said. In the physical world, a Supreme Court-supported doctrine called secondary effect allows zoning of adult businesses, like strip clubs. Its premise is that some businesses often spawn side effects like prostitution and increased crime. Courts have also made it clear that such segregation can’t be done based only on speech -- “it must meet a higher level of scrutiny,” Johnson told us.

From a practical standpoint, setting up a .xxx TLD wouldn’t protect kids from seeing adult material, some groups have maintained. Johnson said it would actually give underaged users a roadmap to access online porn. “Why put up this big red light district where everyone knows what it is,” he said: “Essentially it’s telling every kid ‘go to .xxx’ and I'm sure they'll find a way to get there.”

The idea of govts. “mucking around” with what TLDs should be is a mistake, Cato Institute Information Policy Studies Dir. Jim Harper told us, noting that Washington should have learned a lesson when the congressionally- backed crusade for .kids -- a child-friendly destination on the Web -- flopped several years ago. The Internet is inherently a wide-open international communication vehicle that no govt. can or should control, Harper said. “There’s no just practical way of controlling content that goes onto the Internet,” he added: “I don’t know how the government could possibly force communicators into a .xxx domain even if it tried.”

ICANN’s delay in assigning .xxx might signal another debate about indecency over communication networks -- but this time it concerns the structure and content of the Internet, not the broadcast airwaves, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) said Fri. This puts international sovereignty and cultural integrity at stake, but in the globalized 21st century, “cultures are mutable, shifting and constantly interacting” anyway, CEI said. ICANN and other Internet governance bodies should have accountability, but not necessarily political accountability to the U.S. or U.N., CEI said: “These organizations have a role in deciding on the technical specifications that will encourage the free exchange of information, not limit it.”

Bloggers are buzzing about the controversy. Naked Law, a U.K. technology site maintained by Cambridge attorneys, said the .xxx domain “seems like a sensible option for websites ‘of a certain sort,'” explaining that “it would surely make life easier for both those that want to find them and those that want to avoid them, provided that adult content providers were willing to move to .xxx domains.” New Media Report noted that “regardless of which side you were on, we all knew approval of the .xxx domain was a long-shot since it was proposed nearly 5 years ago.” The latest developments “aptly reflect… the conservative times we live in,” the site said: “Guess the industry will just have to stick to misspelled URLs and defunct landing pages to keep their flow of traffic.” MSN’s Technology Filter blog made the debate its question of the day on Fri., soliciting opinions from readers about whether the Internet needs such a domain.