Senators Renew Call for .XXX Domain

An anonymous reader writes "It's an election year again, and the usual PR causes are being picked up. Senators are once again pushing for a .XXX top-level domain to 'corral pornography'." From the article: "The bill suggests, but does not require, that .xxx serve as the domain name ending. Any commercial Internet site or online service that "has as its principal or primary business the making available of material that is harmful to minors" would be required to move its site to that domain. Failure to comply with those requirements would result in civil penalties as determined by the Commerce Department. It's unclear whether the measure will go very far. First of all, it could be struck down as unconstitutional, said Marv Johnson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "

Re:inconstitutional? WTF?

[mindtriggerz]

It's not the tagging, it's the requirement that ALL porn move to .xxx or whatever.

127.0.0.1 *.*.xxx

[Siffy]

That would be the next entry into my local DNS hosts file. They say filtering is a less intrusive means to this, so then make that filtering easier for the average person to do I say. I really don't see how adding context restricts free speech. There's a place and time for any speech, but what about a person's right not to have to listen to such speech (ie, porn pop ups/general porn advertisements, crappy results from google)?

Re:inconstitutional? WTF?

[Rob T Firefly]

The unconstitutional bit comes in when you tell the porn sites they are not allowed to use .com, .net, .org, or other US domain names.

Re:inconstitutional? WTF?

[ozmanjusri]

Can anyone explain me why tagging a website as "porn" (in the domain) could be declared inconstitutional?

Its a classic "divide and conquer" move from the religious fundies. The intent behind the .xxx tld is to be able to segregate the porn from the rest of the internet. Once you have achieved that, its a simple matter for fundamentalists to shut down all the pornography on the internets by blocking the domain.

In theory, anyway...

Re:unconstitutional?

[mikiN]

Um, no. The majority (81 out of 114 [root-servers.org]) of root servers are not in the US. I may have miscounted a few (me being stoned and it being late), but that doesn't invalidate my point, not by a long shot.

No.

[quokkapox]

No [wikipedia.org].

.XXX NOT Needed

[Temujin_12]

There are simply too many worms in the .XXX can to open it. But why do we need that when you can use free, objective, open community, content advising systems. Check out siteadvisor [siteadvisor.com].
From their webpage:

SiteAdvisor's safety ratings are based on automated safety tests of Web sites (including of our own site) and are enhanced with user feedback from our users and our own manual analysis.

We do not accept payment from sites to be rated, so we have no conflict of interest. We also document our safety tests for every site we analyze.

So John Doe can stumble upon a pornographic website, and if it isn't already rated, dutifully provide feedback so that future viewers can be warned. John Doe can continue to enjoy his porn and can help others avoid or find it. The great thing about this is it doesn't just work for porn, it also rates sites owned by Domain Squatters (labeling them as false information), scamming sites, and other sites with "not so safe" content. Again, the beauty of this is that it is open to the community so ratings can be reversed if some overly conservative person rates a medical site as "unsafe" and each site has its own history/explination of ratings and user feedbacks.

I've been enjoying it and have found it to generally improve my web-surfing experience.

Summary is misleading...

[Anonymous Coward]

While I in no way support this bill, the summary is quite wrong; neither of the senators (Max Baucus [wikipedia.org] and Mark Pryor [wikipedia.org])who proposed this bill are up for reëlection this year...election-year grandstanding this is not.

typical slashdot.

Re:Harmful?

[1in10]

It's harmful to both minors and adults. [blogspot.com]

Exposure to porn makes people more likely to believe that rape is acceptable. Exposure to porn makes people more likely to believe domestic violence is acceptable. Exposure to porn makes people more likely to be opposed to women's rights. Exposure to porn makes people believe fringe sexual activities like beastiality are more common than they really are. Exposure to porn makes people less happy with their own sexual partners and their sex lives.

And that's not even getting into the harm it does to the women actually appearing in pornography. That's just the users.

I used to think porn was harmless too, but there's a whole heap of research that shows it is anything but.

Re:OK, I knew they were pervs....

[tsaler]

Barney Frank is a U.S. Representative from Massachusetts, not a Senator. Not yet anyway. It was rumored that he would run for John Kerry's seat, however, if Kerry had been elected President in 2004.