Online ghetto: Porn websites may get legal addresses

Pornography, no matter we love or hate it, is here to stay. As yet not a single initiative has succeeded in wiping out ‘adult contents’ from our sacrosanct social space. And it’s even tougher to avoid sexual stuff on the World Wide Web (WWW). What on earth can curb the reach of Internet pornography then?

The parent body of WWW, Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a California-based non-profit group, however, has come up with a novel idea of creating an exclusive XXX domain in the net. It will be like the .com or .net suffixes used in Internet addresses. The proposed area, which will be run like an online red-light district and enable people find porn on the Web or filter it out, has drawn fire from conservative groups.

Establishing such a domain is proving to be a difficult task. ICANN is still awaiting the recommendations of an advisory committee reviewing the proposal. And the US Commerce Department has asked for more time to hear objections from the the review committee, made up of representatives from its own and other governments.

Forget ICANN’s decision. Do you want a XXX domain to operate as a free-for-all comfort zone? According to critics, a .xxx domain would only legitimise the porn industry. The first thing ICANN should do is provide a strict password-protected entry for .xxx. It is planning to set up a filter-software to simply block all .xxx websites, if one wishes to keep it away from children.

All sites using .xxx should follow yet-to-be-written guidelines, such as prohibitions against spams, malicious scripts and photographs. This will not suffice. A child could simply use the numeric address when the .xxx equivalent gets blocked.

But who guards brothels? Pornography will always attract people. More than four per cent of all Web traffic and two per cent of all surfing time involve adult sites. And porn-surfers generate huge revenue for those who run the sites.

But ICANN doesn’t have the power make changes to the domain-system without the approval of the US commerce department. Which is why it seeks independence from the clutches of the US government and has been fighting it to turn the control over to an international body.

The $12-billion online porn industry is rightly backing the ‘clean-up’ act. Actually, this can be a commendable step towards driving the online adult contents into a ghetto, just as red light areas and sex shops are located at specific pockets of a city. The WWW can only reap benefits by introducing specific domain systems and keeping all the unwanted elements under a single umbrella. The decision to introduce a .xxx site will prove that Internet is not merely a plaything of the US.

Welcome .xxx.