Why .xxx Is a Bad, Ineffective Idea
“The creation of the .xxx net domain has come under fire from net veterans.
The decision was called ‘obscene’ by Karl Auerbach, former board member of Icann which approved the .xxx plan. Mr Auerbach said Icann should be giving priority to socially positive domain name proposals rather than helping pornographers profit. The decision was also called ‘dangerous’ by net privacy campaigner Lauren Weinstein, who said it could provoke censorship problems for years. The plan to create the .xxx domain received its blessing from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) earlier this week. The decision was a surprise because the idea has been floated and roundly rejected several times over the last five years… Mr Auerbach said Icann should concentrate on socially constructive domains first rather than pandering to pornographers. In his blog he asked: ‘Why should .xxx get precedence over schools, churches, civic groups, aboriginal communities, labour organisations, and artistic groups?’ Mr Auerbach said Icann already had many proposals for new domains from many groups that could actually contribute to the value of the internet… Mr Auerbach predicted that the .xxx domain would encounter problems in defining which sites should sit in the new domain.” —BBC (US)
PervScan has already written twice about its opposition to the creation of a porn-only domain extension. (Cf PervScan contra .xxx and PervScan contra .sex.) However, the approval of the .xxx domain — yes, kids, it’s coming to a web near you — obliges PervScan to confront the issue again. However, rather than just reiterate the arguments of the previous posts, PervScan thought it would take a different tact. It will give a point-by-point rebuttal to arguments made by a supporter of the new domain extension.
Bob Parsons is the founder of GoDaddy.com, the domain registration service used by PervScan. It’s a great company and has recently become popularly known thanks to its Super Bowl ad featuring a bodacious babe in a mock censorship trial. On Mr. Parsons’ personal blog, he recently indicated his reasons for supporting the creation of a .xxx domain.
(1) Mr. Parsons writes: “It quickly and obviously describes the content of the website associated with the .XXX domain name. Thus, if people don’t want to view adult content, they will know immediately not to click on the link or type the name in their browser.”
PervScan rebuts: You’d have to be naive to think that pornographers will ever confine themselves to .xxx domains. Search engines will penalize the sites in their rankings precisely because they’re pornographic. Because of this, pornographers will continue to use subversive techniques — such as cloaking their sites as ones without the .xxx extension — to garner traffic.
Furthermore, it’s quite likely that other non-pornographic sites will willingly embrace the .xxx extension because it seems cool. Goth kids will register MarilynManson.xxx or SixSixSix.xxx. They will develop genuinely interesting sites on those domains — with the end result being that non-pornographic sites are built on .xxx while pornographic sites are hiding themselves behind other extensions. In other words, .xxx will fail in its avowed intent, which is to categorize sites. And if categorization fails, censorship fails too.
(2) Mr. Parsons writes: “It will allow better monitoring for parents who want to keep their kids away from adult content websites. They can use the .XXX extension in their outgoing filters to block access, or they can readily see in their browsing activity logs if .XXX websites were visited.”
PervScan rebuts: The .xxx domain will do little to prevent kids from accessing smut. Too many pornographic sites will remain outside the .xxx extension to make filtering effective. You can call up all sorts of porn using Google Image Search. How does filtering for .xxx address that? And for that matter, .xxx does nothing to address the massive amounts of porn being disseminated on file-sharing networks.
(3) Mr. Parsons writes: “It will allow for better filtering for emails originating from incoming .XXX emails.”
PervScan rebuts: What a ridiculous idea. How many spammers actually send from a real domain name?
(4) Mr. Parsons writes: “The significance of .XXX names will grow in importance as new adult sites register their names to .XXX, and existing adult sites migrate away from .COM (and .other top level domains) to use .XXX exclusively. I suspect that it will take some sort of government intervention to require adult sites to use only .XXX extensions.”
PervScan rebuts: No amount of government intervention in one country, such as the United States, is going to prevent pornographers based in Bulgaria or Nigeria from flagrantly disregarding any and all protocols about porn-only domains. No law will be able to force all pornographers to use .xxx, and thus it loses its efficacy as a filtering tool.
(5) Mr. Parsons writes: “Another solution might be for browser manufacturers to only allow users to access adult websites when a .XXX domain name is used.”
PervScan rebuts: How are the browsers going to recognize what is or isn’t adult? Image-parsing technology isn’t yet sophisticated enough to generate algorithms that automatically recognize pornographic images. Furthermore, just what is a pornographic image? Some guys get off on pictures of donkeys screwing humans. Other guys get off on pictures of women modestly dressed in burqas. How could a browser distinguish between the two?
For that matter, the law courts have failed to provide realistic criteria for distinguishing between pornographic and non-pornographic content. (You know what the judge said: “I know it when I see it.”) How does Mr. Parsons think technologists will be able to arrive at such criteria? How do you differentiate between a pornographic site and, say, HowardStern.com? What would you do with a site that offers information about STDs to teenagers — is that porn?
(6) Mr. Parsons writes: “As of this writing, I do not know for sure what a .XXX domain name will cost. Early contacts we’ve made indicate that the price to registrars will be $60. Registrars will then mark it up from there, so it could very well cost the end user anywhere from $70 to well over $100 depending upon where it is registered. If that pricing remains in effect, I personally think it’s a dumb move by the registry and will backfire.”
PervScan rebuts: Mr. Parsons is exactly right on this one. If the .xxx domain costs ten to twenty times the price of a normal domain, no pornographer will willingly use it. In fact, it’s hard not to suspect that Mr. Parsons’ support for the .xxx domain is somewhat tainted by the potential revenues he stands to gain as a domain registrar.
(7) In the comments, somebody points out that legitimate businesses will be obliged to purchase the expensive new domains in order to protect their brand equity. For example, Microsoft will doubtlessly buy microsoft.xxx to prevent being tainted by association. To this objection, Mr. Parsons says: “You’re also right that many companies will purchase .XXX equivalents of their names. That’s no big deal, because even if they don’t and someone starts using it for naughty purposes, under the WIPO laws they can simply confiscate it.”
PervScan rebuts: Thousands and possibly millions of dollars spent on domain names that nobody will use is “no big deal?” Ok, maybe it doesn’t seem like a big deal if Microsoft spends a hundred dollars a year on a useless domain. But what about smaller businesses who feel compelled to protect themselves by buying the domains? And confiscating a domain under WIPO laws may sound easy enough — but doesn’t that take legal fees? Mr. Parsons, who apparently runs an efficient business himself, surely would be appalled at the sum total of corporate waste the .xxx domain would create — if he weren’t a registrar himself.
Finally, although .xxx is a poor solution to this problem, it is not the only possible solution. There are better ones. For example, PervScan advocates the creation of a kid-only domain (such as .kid). The creation and popularization of such a domain would avoid many of the problems of the .xxx domain:
First, unlike pornographers, businesses appealing to kids would not be trying to hide behind other domains. They would welcome a domain extension of their own, a sort of “seal of approval” designating them as kid-safe.
Second, it’s much easier to distinguish what is or isn’t childsafe than it is to determine what is or isn’t pornographic. Different people could make the case that a site with information for teens about STDs may or may not be pornographic. However, most people would agree that such a site isn’t for kids (ie pre-teens).
Third, such a domain extension should be priced competitively. It should cost no more than .com, .net, or .org, so that legitimate businesses are not discouraged from using it.
Fourth, it is unlikely pornographers would try to insinuate themselves into the .kid domain area. Why bother? It’s not good traffic for pornographers. And for this reason, it would be more effective to filter in the .kid domain than it would be to filter out the .xxx domain.
Excellent rebuttal.
I personally would not have much of a problem with the idea, except for the price difference. The price difference makes it a bad business decision–so long as it isn’t required by (at least the U.S.) government–so why bother. If they really wanted to encourage pornographers to participate in this, they would make it cost effective to do so.. If you want to motivate businessmen, talk to their accountants. Make it *cheaper.* Instead, this seems like a vice tax that, instead of penalizing the users, penalizes the purveyors. This entire move seems as though it was authored by the Christian right, as a predecessor to some piece of censorship legislation that would, likely, sail through Congress. Who’s going to publicly stand up for ‘the pornographers.’
Granted, you can hardly trust pornographers to be honest and use a domain extension that would easily identify their site as pornographic in content, but you must also consider how the kids are likely to react to being confined to .kid extensions (or whatever else it might be called). Older children would want to go to the “big kid” sites, not the childish .kid sites. Personally, I would suggest a combined system of more domain extensions. Adding .kid, .xxx, .teen, etc. would help to categorize the internet. The only issue with any type of categorization is that the internet defies any kind of categorization. Everyone has a different concept of what constitutes teen- or kid-friendly content, so these categories and boundries would be forever tested and modified. Perhaps a viable solution would be for parents to actually supervise their children instead of foisting responsibility on everyone else?
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