AP: Will a virtual red-light district help parents curb online porn?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Seth Finkelstein <sethf () sethf com>
Date: June 11, 2005 1:04:19 PM EDT
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Cc: Ip ip <ip () v2 listbox com>
Subject: AP: Will a virtual red-light district help parents curb  
online porn?


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Will a virtual red-light district help parents curb online porn?
Saturday, June 11, 2005

By ANICK JESDANUN
AP Internet Writer

NEW YORK -- A red-light district tentatively cleared for construction
on the Internet -- the ".xxx" domain -- is being billed by backers as
giving the $12 billion online porn industry a great opportunity to
clean up its act.

A distinct online sector for the salacious, one with rules aimed at
forbidding trickery, will reduce the chances of Internet users
accidentally stumbling on porn sites, they argue.

If only it were so simple:

Zoning in cyberspace has always been a daunting proposition, and
participation in the porn domain will be voluntary. Critics wonder why
".xxx" got the OK at all when so many other proposals sit unaddressed,
some for years.

Nearly five years after rejecting a similar proposal, the Internet's
key oversight body, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers, voted 6-3 this month to proceed with ".xxx."

ICANN staff will now craft a contract with ICM Registry Inc., the
Jupiter, Fla., company that made the bid. If the board and ultimately
the U.S. Commerce Department approve it, ".xxx" names could appear in
use by the year's end.

The market unquestionably exists: Two in five Internet users visited
an adult site in April, according to tracking by comScore Media
Metrix. The company said 4 percent of all Web traffic and 2 percent of
all surfing time involved an adult site.

As envisioned, ICM would charge $60 for each of up to 500,000 names it
expects to register, $10 of which would go to a nonprofit organization
that would, among other things, educate parents about safe surfing for
children.

The nonprofit, run by representatives of adult Web sites, free-speech,
privacy and child-advocacy concerns, would determine registration
eligibility.

Skeptics argue, however, that porn sites are likely to keep their
existing ".com" storefronts, even as they set up shop in the new
".xxx" domain name. And that will reduce the effectiveness of software
filters set up to simply block all ".xxx" names.

The ".xxx" domain "legitimizes this group, and it gives false hope to
parents," said Patrick Trueman, senior legal counsel at the Family
Research Council and a former Justice Department official in charge of
obscenity prosecutions.

The adult entertainment industry is also hardly behind ".xxx" as a
group. Many of its webmasters consider the domain "the first step
toward driving the adult Internet into a ghetto very much like zoning
laws have driven adult stores into the outskirts," said Mark Kernes,
senior editor at the trade monthly Adult Video News.

ICM insists it would fight any government efforts to compel its use by
adult Web sites, but the existence of ".xxx" would certainly make the
prospect easier.

"There are going to be pressures" to mandate it once available, said
Marjorie Heins, coordinator of the Free Expression Policy Project at
New York University's law school. Federal lawmakers have proposed such
requirements in the past.

Robert Corn-Revere, a lawyer hired by ICM to address free-speech
issues, said the company has pledged $250,000 for a legal defense fund
to keep ".xxx" voluntary, and he notes that courts have struck down
efforts to make movie ratings mandatory.

"Where governments have tried to use private labeling systems as
proxies for regulation, courts have always held those measures
unconstitutional," he said.

Even if it's voluntary, supporters say, adult sites will have
incentives to use ".xxx."

"If the carrot's big enough, you're going to get sites in there," said
Parry Aftab, an Internet safety expert who served as an informal
adviser on ".xxx."

Stuart Lawley, ICM's chairman and president, said use of ".xxx" could
protect companies from prosecution under a 2003 federal law that bars
sites from tricking children into viewing pornography -- as ".xxx"
would clearly denote an adult site.

All sites using ".xxx" would be required to follow yet-to-be-written
"best practices" guidelines, such as prohibitions against trickery
through spamming and malicious scripts.

Lawley said those requirements could make credit-card issuers more
confident about accepting charges. The online porn industry currently
faces higher fees because some sites engage in fraud and customers
often deny authorizing payments.

But given the limited effectiveness of a voluntary ".xxx" for
filtering, Internet filtering expert Seth Finkelstein calls ".xxx" no
more than a mechanism "to extract fees from bona fide pornographers
and domain name speculators." (ICANN also gets an unspecified cut of
each registration fee.)

Even if it were mandatory, it wouldn't be foolproof.

A domain name serves merely as an easy-to-remember moniker for a
site's actual numeric Internet address. David Burt, a spokesman for
filtering vendor Secure Computing Corp., said a child could simply use
the numeric address when the ".xxx" equivalent gets blocked.

Better technologies exist, he said, including a little-used
self-rating system that lets Web sites broadcast whether they contain
nudity, violence or foul language, along with the specific forms, such
as presence of genitals or passionate kissing.

Burt also favors a ".kids" domain that would serve as a safe haven for
children. The U.S. government has approved one under ".us," but
support has been cool, with only about two dozen ".kids.us" sites
listed.

ICM proposed both ".xxx" and ".kids" in 2000, but ICANN board members
resisted them for fear of getting into content control. Instead, ICANN
approved ".info," ".biz," and ".museum" and four others.

But pressure has continued to mount for ICANN to expand the number of
domain names, and last year it reopened bidding.

ICM resubmitted its application for ".xxx" only, this time structuring
it with a policy-setting organization to free ICANN of that task.

That did the trick.

ICANN board member Joichi Ito, who backed ".xxx," wrote in his Web
journal that the decision wasn't an endorsement of any type of content
or moral belief but a chance for "creating incentives for legitimate
adult entertainment sites to come together and fight 'bad actors."'

Anti-porn activist Donna Rice Hughes, however, remains unconvinced.

"They are not going to give up their '.com' addresses," she said of
porn sites. "It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure that one out."


--
Seth Finkelstein Consulting Programmer sethf () sethf com http://sethf.com
Infothought blog - http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/
Interview - http://sethf.com/essays/major/greplaw-interview.php


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