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."
Instead, Lawley and his partners are in the business to make money. A report from Reuters Business Insight in February 2003 calculated that sex represented two-thirds of all online content revenue in 2001 and that it had ballooned to a $2.5 billion industry since then. Lawley estimates that 25 percent of all Internet search queries are related to sex and that more than a million adult domain names exist. Owning the rights to sell pieces of .xxx real estate, he concluded, would be a perfect way to make money off consumers' insatiable appetite for online raunch and ribaldry.
Free-expression issues
The way the proposed .xxx registry would work is twofold. Lawley's company, ICM Registry, would handle the technical aspects of running the master database of .xxx sex sites. For its troubles, it would charge $60 a domain name and let resellers add their own markup of perhaps $10 to $15 per domain.
A second, nonprofit organization, the International Foundation For Online Responsibility would be in charge of setting the rules for .xxx. It would have a seven-person board of directors, including a child advocacy advocate, a free-expression aficionado and, naturally, at least one person from the adult entertainment industry. As president and chairman of ICM Registry, Lawley gives himself just one vote on the board.
The foundation's charter is intentionally quite protective of free speech. It aims to "protect the privacy and security of consenting adult consumers of online adult entertainment goods and services" and references the free-expression principles in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The problem is that, as soon as .xxx launches, conservatives in U.S. Congress will begin to clamor for laws to make the domain mandatory for sex-related Web sites.
The problem, in other words, is that as soon as .xxx launches, conservatives in Congress will begin to clamor for laws to make the domain mandatory for sex-related Web sites. That may not be a big deal for hard-core pornmeisters who prefer that virtual street address, but what about sex education sites that include explicit graphics and don't wish to be blocked by filtering software? And where should Salon.com--which features images of topless women--or Playboy.com--which publishes important interviews with U.S. presidents--end up?
Protecting children
This is not just a theoretical concern. Back in 2000, before Lawley got involved as president, ICM Registry applied to run the .xxx domain. But ICANN shot down the proposal.
It didn't take Congress long to get involved. At a hearing in February 2001, Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., demanded to know why ICANN didn't approve .xxx "as a means of protecting our kids from the awful, awful filth which is sometimes widespread on the Internet." Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., griped to a federal commission that .xxx was necessary to force adult Webmasters to "abide by the same standard as the proprietor of an X-rated movie theater."
Stuart Lawley estimates that 25 percent of all Internet search queries are related to sex and that more than a million adult domain names exist.
Barry Steinhardt, head of the ACLU's technology and liberty program, isn't nearly as optimistic. "I am not quite so confident that we will prevail" under existing First Amendment precedents, Steinhardt said.
But the ACLU's real concerns with the proposal lie overseas. "There are nations all over the world that will undoubtedly try to force Web sites into the .xxx (top-level domain) or to block Web sites in it that they somehow view as offensive," Steinhardt said. "I don't think the operators have taken sufficient account of that problem. It will become a worldwide red-light district for the Internet, into which speakers who have free-expression rights and should be able to reach a mass audience will be forced."
Maybe U.S. politicians have matured in the last four years. Perhaps courts can now be trusted to do the right thing, upholding the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of expression. But given that the House of Representatives voted by an 18-to-1 margin just two weeks ago to boost the penalties for "profane" broadcasts, the initially voluntary .xxx district may turn out to be a one-way street.
Biography
Declan McCullagh is CNET News.com's chief political correspondent. He spent more than a decade in Washington, D.C., chronicling the busy intersection between technology and politics. Previously, he was the Washington bureau chief for Wired News, and a reporter for Time.com, Time magazine and HotWired. McCullagh has taught journalism at American University and been an adjunct professor at Case Western University.
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- Porn sites act a lot like spam
- You will have a hard time forcing either of them to obey rules. A .xxx domain is a great idea. But don't expect the sites that try and trick you into viewing/ staying to convert over just because it's there, or even if their .com address becomes illegal.
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- Writers don't cover many of the ramifications of this.
- The writers of this story clearly have no idea how many, if not most, companies handle domain registrations. Most companies register their names in nearly all of the main domain suffixes, just to protect them. If there is a new .XXX domain, that domain will soon become irrelevant to the subject matter. Any company that is NOT in the Adult information business will also have to buy their company's name in that domain, just to protect it from outsiders posting smut under their "good name". For that matter, if Sex is the hottest selling word on the Web, then anyone in marketing, of nearly any item, will also quickly register under that domain. Due to this desire to protect company names & trademarks, as well as maximize marketing, the .COM, .ORG., .INFO, and .NET suffixes have become virtually interchangable, instead of their original intent of separating business & organization "types". Of course, this will be a virtual gold mine for the Registrar. At $60, they would be charging two to four times the going rate for .COM registrations. Registrars of new domain suffixes also have a habit of "reserving" the best generic names for resale at very high prices. Just how legit is this group? Will ALL of the names be made available for public registration, or will the promoters keep & auction off names like "SEX.XXX" or "GIRLS.XXX" for 6 or 7 digit sums? BTW, I personally have absolutely NO interest whatever in any type of XXX business. However, as owner of a family games business, I have a very strong interest in keeping smut peddlers from registering our good name as an XXX site! For example, If your last name is SMITH, would you want a smut peddler to be able to register SMITH.XXX as a site for selling pornography? If you search the Web, you will find nearly every family name already registered under each of the various domain suffixes. They will also certainly be snapped up quickly for .XXX.
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- Porn is Porn
- There is no real excuse for not using the .xxx for everything porn related. I feel that pornography is damaging in any context and would much rather not be exposed. Any image or video or text produced for the express purpose of eliciting a sexual response could be hosted on the .xxx domain. News items like interviews with Presidents would be hosted on a .com address. Children would be in a better position to be protected by parents and school systems. Also people that find porn objectionable could avoid it by not unchecking a box in their web browser. The idea that salon.com could host topless images on salon.xxx is no more undue restriction than asking that they have an accessibility policy. Thanks for the article.
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- US legislation still only rules in the US
- Although Microsoft would like the EU to use US legislation, this is still something that remains to be seen. Until then, other countries (and not just EU ones) with more or less relaxed attitudes to pornography will have their own views on whether the businesses in the porn industry should be pressured to only serve pages on the .xxx domain. Surely, there will be some countries that don't see this need, and surfers can then access pornography on these sites without ever having to enter a (banned) .xxx domain. If Congress as you think will limit US porn businesses to the .xxx domain alone, that will then be a problem for US business alone. There will always be porn for those who like it on domains other than .xxx. Altogether, I am puzzled as to why you and your American colleagues can view this problem so narrowly as to American legislation only.
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- Should be .adu
- .xxx is too limited and carries a stigma. I'd rather see a .adu site that includes other adult related content. See http://www.afsac.org It wouldn't bother me if xxx materials were limited to a certain adult domain at all.
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- .xxx domain
- Seems to me it would be possible to address this online porn problem by making all such sites only available through a separate network that would have to be subscribed to separately. Like the "Internet 2" that is being developed for universities and labs, such a "Porn-net" would have every XXX rated site that exists or would exist, and each person wanting access would have to be a customer of an ISP which was part of the Porn-Net network, like cable TV. There would be no crossover possible, just like is true of secure networks of industry or gov't. Can't that be developed? No more worries of kids and porn--if the folks aren't paying for Porn Net, there's no porn coming in.
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- Bush & Congress
- Since Bush has talk to GOD. He must have had Congress also talk to GOD. I don't watch XXX net. But there is a lot of people that do. If they don't see it at home they will look else ware. That's what scares me.
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- The Rationale
- Current porn filters must first become aware of porn sites and then distribute the new template to users. While some people claim that it makes room for more porn sites they already have all the sites that they will need. The XXX is non-language dependent, is a reminder of the poison icon and can be very easily filtered from browsers as a restricted domain. It would be more useful if these people would join the fight and help in getting laws to zone the web while allowing for 1st amendment rights. Zoning using XXX would permit porn sites to continue to exist while affording most people an effective way to avoid themselves and kids from accessing them. While we have laws preventing child porn we see no protection for kids from receiving all types of porn! We see other top level domains with restrictions, domains such as mus, edu, and gov why not one for porn since the courts and the ACLU will not protect people with morals!
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Better for your Business.