A red-light district tentatively cleared for construction on the Internet -- the ".xxx" domain -- is being billed by backers as giving the US$12 billion online porn industry a great opportunity to clean up its act.
A distinct online sector for the salacious, one with rules aimed at forbidding trickery, will reduce the chances of Internet users accidentally stumbling on porn sites, they argue.
If only it were so simple:
Zoning in cyberspace has always been a daunting proposition, and participation in the porn domain will be voluntary. Critics wonder why ".xxx" got the OK at all when so many other proposals sit unaddressed, some for years.
Nearly five years after rejecting a similar proposal, the Internet's key oversight body, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, voted 6-3 this month to proceed with ".xxx."
ICANN staff will now craft a contract with ICM Registry Inc, the Jupiter, Florida, company that made the bid. If the board and ultimately the US Commerce Department approve it, ".xxx" names could appear in use by the year's end.
The market unquestionably exists: Two in five Internet users visited an adult site in April, according to tracking by comScore Media Metrix. The company said 4 percent of all Web traffic and 2 percent of all surfing time involved an adult site.
As envisioned, ICM would charge US$60 for each of up to 500,000 names it expects to register, US$10 of which would go to a nonprofit organization that would, among other things, educate parents about safe surfing for children.
The nonprofit, run by representatives of adult Web sites, free-speech, privacy and child-advocacy concerns, would determine registration eligibility.
Skeptics argue, however, that porn sites are likely to keep their existing ".com" storefronts, even as they set up shop in the new ".xxx" domain name. And that will reduce the effectiveness of software filters set up to simply block all ".xxx" names.
The ".xxx" domain "legitimizes this group, and it gives false hope to parents," said Patrick Trueman, senior legal counsel at the Family Research Council and a former Justice Department official in charge of obscenity prosecutions.
The adult entertainment industry is also hardly behind ".xxx" as a group.
"If the carrot's big enough, you're going to get sites in there," said Parry Aftab, an Internet safety expert who served as an informal adviser on ".xxx."
Stuart Lawley, ICM's chairman and president, said use of ".xxx" could propand the number of domain names, and last year it reopened bidding.
ICM resubmitted its application for ".xxx" only, this time structuring it with a policy-setting organization to free ICANN of that task.
That did the trick.
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