The Powers That Be on the internet have decided - to my surprise - to approve the creation of a .XXX top-level domain. The arguments for it are so weak, and the arguments against it are - once you think about them - so compelling, that I figured that ICANN (the PTB in question) would continue saying "um no" to the proposals. Instead, they've said "yes", and are currently working out the fine print before it goes live.
There are some arguments for doing it, but they don't hold up to scrutiny. The standard argument for creating new top-level domains is overcrowding of .COM. "All the good names are taken," they say, and they're right. But when they opened .NET and .ORG to let anyone use them for any purpose, .COM didn't get any less crowded. When they created .BIZ and .INFO, .COM was still saturated. Because no one with a .COM domain is going to just give it up for a new one in a less well-known namespace. When .XXX registration opens, you can be sure that every porn purveyor with a .COM domain will rush to register the corresponding .XXX domain. And keep them both. It'll just be a land rush to grab real estate in the New World... with no improvement in the Old World.
Another argument for creating .XXX is that it'd be easy for parents, schools, and businesses to just block the whole domain from the computers used by their children, students, and employees. They certainly have every right to do that. But that won't do a damn thing to block the petabytes of porn already in the .COM domain. So it'll be ineffectual. The horse has fled the barn; there's no point in fixing the door now.
Unless, of course, it were possible to move all that porn from .COM to .XXX. But it's not. ICM Registry - the people who'll be handling registration of this domain - stress the fact that the use of .XXX will be voluntary. And short of the UN imposing legislative authority over its members (as if that could happen without nuclear missles flying), there's no way to require all porn sites to relocate. If someone in Ukraine registers PORNBBQ.COM and puts photos of people fucking on a web server, there's nothing the Attorney General of the U.S. can do about it (short of nukes like those I just mentioned).
I just wish I could be so sure that the A.G. wouldn't try. So far, the U.S. government has been comparatively restrained (mostly by the courts, not self-restraint) in trying to legislate content restrictions on the internet. There's been that whole "free expression" thing getting in the way. But what if there were a segment of the internet specially made for sexually-explicit material? Gee, forcing Americans to "label" that material with a .XXX domain wouldn't deprive them of their free expression rights, would it?
That's the argument they'll make, but it's a bit like those "free speech zones" the government creates to keep protestors out of the way. It takes speech off the corner of Main Street and Common Avenue, and shoves it into an alley in a part of town most people avoid. This web site contains sexually-explicit material, which means it'd probably be carted off to the .XXX ghetto. But it also contains material that has every moral (and Constitutional) right to be heard. Putting it in .XXX would mean it'd be blocked from lots of colleges, libraries, and even ISPs catering to the non-porn-buying market. The bottom line: the ideas of people like me get less distribution. The keepers of the public morals would love that.
I've read the fine print of what's been announced, and find some of the details troubling. For one thing, ICM Registry proudly states that they have no prior connection to the porn industry. So... why are they getting involved in it? One obvious answer is money. They see a lot of people making a lot of money from this internet porn stuff, and they want a piece of the action. And quite a piece it'll be, with $60/year for each domain registered. All for running a web site with a medium-sized database behind it. And of course ICANN itself gets a cut of that, which is no doubt the "argument" that finally swayed them to approve it.
Another bit from the fine print is that the organisation that will be setting policy for .XXX has an agenda. They're honest about it, and it's not as bad as "take over the world", but they're definitely not neutral administrators, like the original domain registrars were. They policy setting agency is called the International Foundation For Online Responsibility, and their agenda includes: setting business-practise standards for anyone who runs a .XXX site, promoting the free-expression parts of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, maintaining the privacy of porn customers, protecting children online, and wiping out child pornography. Like I said: not malevolent. I support a lot of it. But it's an agenda nonetheless, and that's bad for anybody who happens not to share it.
And it means that if you register a .XXX domain, they claim a right to tell you how to run your business. You have to take the steps they deem appropriate for keeping children from accessing your site. And regardless of your views on child pornography (and reasonable people can disagree over whether CGI images or imaginary fiction are "OK"), you have to agree to abide by their standards. For example, you can't have a domain name intended to entice pedophiles into visiting your site. But what if you're trying to wean the kid fanciers from their vice, by offering them barely-legal teenagers? Isn't that a legitimate choice someone ought to be allowed to make? Not under IFFOR's rules. It's not even clear whether someone who wants to run a site that isn't pornographic is allowed to use .XXX.
Their policies might arguably make for a better .XXX domain. But there are the unintended consequences to consider as well: They'll push the most irresponsible site operators and the sites most likely to exploit children out of .XXX and back to... (where else?) .COM. Um, isn't that the place we wanted to remove them from?
I can see this as a kind of circle-the-wagons, Comics-Code-Authority way for the mainstream, business-oriented porn industry to set up a club for those who want to play by their rules, setting everyone else up to be devoured by wolves. Got kicked out of .XXX for using an unapproved method of restricting access to minors? Too bad. Wrote an article calling for the decriminalization of virtual kiddie porn or advocating that the age of consent be lowered? Get out. Someone falsely accused you of doing something IFFOR considers ethical, but convinced them it was true? Tough. There's even the potential for the management of IFFOR to become something of a mafia/cartel, controlling who's allowed to sell porn from the safety of .XXX and who isn't. It's bad enough when the government steps in and regulates an industry that strongly; it'd be even worse for an agency that's accountable to no one but their board of directors.
Last year I commented about what was described as (and in fact was) the last public apperance by Jimmy Doohan, known to countless Star Trek fans as Scotty, the ship's engineer. I wrote that entry as a eulogy for him, knowing (and hoping, for his sake) that it wouldn't be long before he died. He died today, after a (comparatively and mercifully) short struggle with Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, diabetes, and lung fibrosis (from his service in the Canadian military during WWII), at the age of 85.