Weekly column: the battle over .xxx [fs]

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

http://news.com.com/2010-1026-5176611.html

The battle over triple 'x'
March 22, 2004, 6:30 AM PT
By Declan McCullagh

By the end of this year, Internet users could have an extraordinarily 
convenient place to find pornography: a new .xxx top-level domain.

Stuart Lawley, a 41-year-old entrepreneur in Jupiter, Fla., is the 
unlikely champion for the online equivalent of a red-light district. A 
British citizen, Lawley swears that he's no smut seller himself. "I have 
no current or historic links to the adult industry in any form," he asserts.

That appears to be true. Lawley started Oneview.net, a U.K. business 
Internet provider, in the 1990s and cashed out at the height of the 
dot-com craze in March 2000. A profile in the Guardian newspaper a few 
months earlier pegged his net worth to be in the tens of millions of 
dollars.

After a brief, sunny retirement in the Bahamas, where he learned how to 
golf and spear fish, Lawley moved to Florida and got the itch to get 
involved with the Internet again.

"Sex is a very big area on the Internet," Lawley said. "Our research 
staff surprised me. I couldn't believe how prevalent it was and what the 
actual statistics were for the number of sites and the number of users."

Under his proposal, submitted last week to the Internet Corporation for 
Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), .xxx domain names would be sold for 
$70 to $75 each. Child pornography would be verboten, but pretty much 
anything else would be permissible, Lawley said. "Apart from child 
pornography, which is completely illegal, we're really not in the 
content-monitoring business."

[...remainder snipped...]
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