Sun, Jul 04, 2010 page12

• The Internet gets its own red light district with .xxx domain

  The new .xxx Web domain, approved last week after a US$10 million battle, promises benefits to porn buyers and sellers, despite a few high-profile objections

  • By Susanna Rustin / THE GUARDIAN
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  Everyone at Gerrard Dennis’ online swimwear business — run out of a business park in Kent, southwest England, with his wife, Jo — is enthusiastic about Apple. The marketing department use Apple computers, senior staff have iPhones. So it came as a shock when Dennis received an e-mail from Apple earlier this year informing him the iPhone app he had spent several thousand dollars developing, advertising his Simply Beach range, had been banned due to sexual connotations.

  “We replied saying, ‘Are you sure? Have you had a complaint?’” he said. “But in true Apple style, absolutely nothing back. I felt a bit hard done by. To sell bikinis you have to have pictures of women in bikinis, that’s what you have to do. We’re not talking micro bikinis or anything, we’re talking about normal bikinis.”

  Dennis decided to give his grievance an airing on a trade Web site, from where it was picked up by technology blogs. Five days later his app reappeared in the App Store.

  “I did try sending them an e-mail to say thanks,” Dennis said. “But no word from Apple. We’re now developing an app for the iPad and we hold no malice. I think my comment was, ‘It seems unfair that we’re caught up in Apple’s puritanic morals, but we understand why they’re doing it.’”

  In the past year, with much-hyped launches of the iPhone and iPad, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has become famed for the stand he has taken against pornography. The company’s developer agreement prohibits “materials ... that in Apple’s reasonable judgment may be found objectionable, [eg] materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic or defamatory.”

  Recently the London-based Sun newspaper fell foul of the rules, only managing to launch its iPhone app two weeks ago.

  Critics have been quick to point out inconsistencies: Since Apple gadgets feature Web browsers, banning rude apps doesn’t stop anyone accessing pornography on the Internet, and while thousands of apps were removed from the App store, Playboy and Sports Illustrated kept theirs. Apple executive Phil Schiller explained that rules apply differently in the case of “a well-known company with previously published material available broadly in a well-accepted format.” Staff at Dazed and Confused magazine nicknamed their iPad app “the Iranian version.” However, while in the technology world Jobs’ anti-porn stand is ridiculed as control-freakery or Google-baiting, outside the media loop his views find vocal support.

  Jobs has made it clear that it is the idea of children accessing porn that bothers him, and over recent months and years parents’ groups, feminists and anti-pornography campaigners have been making the same point. Pornography, they argue, is ubiquitous as never before. With the click of a mouse, without a credit card, anyone using the Internet can access vast numbers of images of people having sex in a variety of ways, some of them unusual and cruel.

  What once was taboo, hidden inside a suitcase or wardrobe in an older male relative’s “girlie magazines,” has moved into all our homes, goes the argument. A new generation growing up on the Internet will be routinely exposed to extreme sexual violence before they have so much as removed their shirts in front of a real-life boyfriend or girlfriend.

  When the British, Florida-based internet entrepreneur Stuart Lawley won the right last week to start selling registrations to a new domain devoted to pornographic content, .xxx (known as “dot-triple-x”), he was eager to point out that concerned parents were among those who stood to gain. Registration at .xxx is voluntary, and Lawley believes the first amendment guaranteeing free speech means any attempt by US legislators to corral sex sites into .xxx is doomed to fail. However, he believes that the premium service offered by .xxx — which at US$60 per registration is much more expensive than other domains — will lead to a “natural migration.” Within five to 10 years, he hopes “.xxx will be synonymous with adult online entertainment and will be the first location people look for it,” a kind of online equivalent to the top shelf, an Internet red-light district.

  While this doesn’t necessarily mean there will be less pornography in other domains — some sex domain operators insist that it won’t, that dotcom will remain the “premium” online property — Lawley’s idea is that his compulsory labeling system, tagging sex sites with keywords in the computer code read by browsers and search engines, will mean that explicit sexual content becomes easier to filter or block.

  The history of porn on the Internet is almost as old as the Internet itself. In the early days people scanned pictures from magazines and sent files to each other via modem. Bulletin board systems created the first opportunity for commercial online porn, and became stores that charged users for access. New e-commerce mechanisms and faster broadband connections led to vast expansion, and porn sites today offer video chats and live Webcams, enabling real-time interactions.

  Internet consultant Kieren McCarthy, who wrote a book about the battle for the sex.com domain and has worked for ICANN, the non-profit body that governs the Internet, says that “because they’re very focused, and there’s a lot of money there, pornographers often do really good advances in technology, so in-stream video, a big chunk of that is thanks to the adult industry.”

  “Also affiliate linking and making money simply by having links on the Internet, that was all the adult industry,” McCarthy said. “The step forward to think of doing that, or monetizing it as they call it, was a kind of genius.”

  Today, between 15 percent and 23 percent of all Internet searches are pornographic, and in 2008 the Financial Times estimated global revenues from the industry to be about US$12 billion, though in the US, which controls 40 percent of the global business, more profits come from DVDs than from the Internet.

  To those like McCarthy who regard pornography with acceptance mixed with disapproval (“some of it I think is awful, big chunks of it aren’t”), a designated X-rated zone on the Internet seems like a good idea. Feminist writer Natasha Walter agrees it could be a step in the right direction, and 83 percent of 240,000 respondents to a CNN poll last weekend supported it.

  However, not everyone is convinced. The most vociferous objections to .xxx came from rightwing Christian groups in the US, who lobbied the department of commerce and led to Lawley’s application being rejected in 2007.

  A highly vocal section of the porn industry, organized under the banner of the Free Speech Coalition, was also violently opposed, fearing ghettoization and objecting to .xxx’s fees.

  Meanwhile, anti-porn campaigners such as the writer and academic Gail Dines, think .xxx is a disaster because “the only thing that can happen is that pornography will increase.” About this, and nothing else, she is in firm agreement with Stuart Lawley.

  Lawley expects to make a lot of money out of .xxx. Currently, there are 7 million adult domains and if he sells half a million more, he will have revenues of US$30 million a year. His company, ICM Registry, has 158,242 pre-­reservations, but he hopes to win a 50 percent market share within a couple of years. Lawley has spent almost US$10 million of his own money on the project, most of it on lawyers. About pornography itself he claims to be “neutral” and he refuses to comment on the suggestion that exploitation of vulnerable women in the industry is rife.

  However, he apparently has some scruples about making a fortune out of porn, and has promised to give a substantial chunk of his money away.

  “For me it was clear this would be a very lucrative business venture,” he said. “But at the same time, at the beginning of this process I was the father of a two-year-old son and we put this non-profit element in, that we have this sponsoring organization [the International Foundation for Online Responsibility] to which we donate US$10 of every registration every year, that is going to use most of those proceeds to further parental education and child protection initiatives on a global basis.”
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