Now It’s .sex
“Despite the best filters, pornography could still find its way onto children’s computer screens — but perhaps not for long. A Maryland lawmaker believes he has come up with a simple, cost-free way to block online pornography… Even the most innocent, innocuous commands while searching the Internet can turn up sites that make parents blush and dive for the delete button, Collins said. The solution? Calling porn what it is by adding ‘dot sex‘ to the end of the Web site address… ‘This bill would require that any sexually-explicit materials sent over the Internet to have a suffix of dot sex,’ Smigiel said. ‘Dot sex’ would be easy for computer filters to weed out because the material would be flagged at the Internet service provider level, the port where online information travels. That way, material adults deem unfit for children wouldn’t find their way into schools, libraries or home offices… According to Smigiel, the feedback so far is universal. ‘What took so long? Why didn’t anybody think of this before?’ he said.” —WBAL (US)
“Why didn’t anybody think of this before?” Um, hello. Duh. This idea has been floating around for years already. You must be some brilliant legislator. At least do a little due diligence before announcing the originality of your genius to the press. For example, you might have paid a visit to PervScan to read why the proposed .xxx domain is pretty much a worthless proposal. All the same arguments pertain to a .sex domain. It just won’t work. It’s an idea that addresses a real problem, and it’s an idea that sounds good on the surface, but PervScan strongly believes it stands zero chance of working. As a commenter pointed out on the .xxx story, such a domain name could only work if adult material were to be banned on all other top-level domain names — and that will never happen, particulary with this bill which is to be filed as a commercial and not a criminal law. Do you really think a toothless commercial law in the United States is going to prevent pornsters in Russia from filling up .com sites with bukkake videos? Get real, Mr. Lawmaker. Your idea might portray you as a good guy to your consituents, it might garner you a few votes, but it’s not seriously going to prevent ten-year-olds from stumbling onto blowjob pictures.
Anyway, PervScan won’t repeat the reasons that the .xxx story gives for the pointlessness of a sex-only domain extension. Suffice to say that Google, which already has a filter for adult content (see Google’s preferences page), does a very decent job of excluding porn — not by filtering for an easy-to-beat domain extension, but by providing good search results. As an experiment, turn on the adult filter to its “moderate” setting and try to get Google to spit up some grossly wrong adult-oriented results. “Middlesex” turns up results for a town. “Sextus” turns up results for a philosopher. Even the top ten results for “sex” — which includes the Sex Pistols, a sex education site, Sex and the City, and the Kinsey Institute — aren’t pornographic.
Given the tremendous success of Google, it’s hard not to draw the moral that the success of adult filtering lies not in political censorship but in the perfection of search engine technology — and that’s just not something you can legislate into existence.
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