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 Florida, 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 UK 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 $2.5bn industry since then. Lawley estimates that 25 percent of all Internet search queries are related to sex and that over am 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 of 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 organisation, 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.
Talkback
I am glad to see this topic has returned again. I only wish that the effort to relocate explicit content to the domain was less about advertising and more about giving a meaningful, and intelligent, organization to the Internet.
I believe that, as with all matters of free speach, anyone should be free to persue an interest in such material. However, the unwelcome introduction of the material to people who are looking for something entirely different is not covered under free speach. If you ever accidently visited whitehouse.com (instead of .gov) during the Monica Lewinsky episode, you would see the point.
The simple fact that we do not want red light businesses in front of our schools should be an indication of where public opinion is on this matter. I would like to see Internet red light businesses established as such.
As a previous commenter indirectly noted, this has been proposed before. If memory serves, ICAN[Not] turned it down last time because there was no room for another top-level domain - and promptly established more than four new top-level domains...
I read your article. Could you please elaborate on it more. Is it a special domain we can purchase. I have an adult website now?
Well, well. They read my mind. This has been a long time coming.
As far as free speech goes, i think adult material should be allowed anywhere on the net, however, i think websites whose core business is selling this content online, should be relocated to another domain.
this should also apply to anyone who makes money from these sites indirectly. EG, sites which make money by linking and advertising these websites.
as for playboy.com, all they would need to do is remove any images that would be classed a adult and there'd be no reason to relocate them.
i'd love to be able to block all of this cr@p from popping up on my screen. it would also help parents prevent their children from accessing these websites.
A total waste of money and intelegence...
While I understand such desires in society for an adult extension, who is going to pay $70 for a domain that is worth less than $10. And why would any company on the planet want to dump their hard earned .com presence? While I can see people buying into the .xxx scheme, all they would be doing is building their portfolio. It's just a business scam that makes no social difference, it's just another way to make money.
hay there wot ur u doing
woa no way more porn for school, just thank you so now i dont have to waste brain cells in a subject like pe
You have to seriously question the validity of something considered "free expression", when if you expressed the same thing in public, you would be arrested for indecent exposure...
Yeah do it... and keep them virus free coz 'my friend' has killed 3 computers this year with a viral ovedose caught from sites his mummy never dreamed existed!!
Happy Hand Shandying,
I came across an excellent and inexpensive web filtering product in the US that schools are using to help prevent accidental or intentional porn viewing.
This would be a great product for schools in the UK as well. The nice thing is there is nothing to install ... Emerald Technology maintains everything for the school.
Check out www.EmeraldWebShield.com
This is American and enropean present Thai people.
http://www.complimentthai.tk
Thank you very very much for compliment and encourage.
Great idea though I fail to see how it will benefit anybody except the providers of the domain financially unless there WAS some kind of legislation to force pornographers to use .xxx only. This harms or causes loss to no one apart from unscrupulous pornographers who seek to drum up business by pushing porn on people who are not out there looking for it (this can at times be quite indiscriminate). If one wants porn one knows where to look for it under this proposal. If one doesn't want porn one knows how to avoid it / block it nice and simple.
Talk of "freedom of expression" is bandied about here with no regard for others' freedom not to be presented with porno sites when searching for something innocuous and unrelated (no Google's filters do not work perfectly and spammers will always try to find a way around it without legislative penalties available by forcing .xxx usage by adult websites)
Help Save the Internet from Content Regulation and U.S. Political Interference.
Sign the petition below and forward it to as many people as you can!
http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?netgov2
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