The New York Times reported on March 19 that final approval has been completed to make way for the creation of a new “red light district on the Web“—a “Triple-X” domain reserved exclusively for pornographic websites of all kinds. While some 200,000 dot-xxx domain names have been reserved over the past year in anticipation of the new pornographic Internet suffix, the authorization by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has drawn heavy criticism from both pro-family groups concerned about increased sexual content on the web and entrenched businesses in the pornography industry worried about an influx of new porn sites cutting into their business.
The Times reported that members of the online sex industry “fear they could be subject to arbitrary censorship by governments and even by a new board overseeing the dot-xxx domain. They also say the plan would unfairly force existing pornography sites to register their sister domain names ending in xxx to prevent other businesses from using the names.”
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The big winner in the move is a Florida company called ICM Registry, which has been lobbying for the dot-xxx domain for the past seven years. In addition to the porn sites already reserved, ICM will be responsible for registering new porn sites using the domain — all at $60 per year for each address, making for a lucrative new revenue stream in the multi-billion-dollar online porn business.
ICM Registry’s chief executive, Stuart Lawley, told the Times that critics within the industry have little to complain about. “The opposition has been very small and very vocal,” Lawley said, emphasizing that concern from those presently operating porn sites has been “completely overblown.” He argued that the new system would be a winning strategy for everyone concerned. “The consumer of adult sites wins,” he said. “The providers will benefit because more people will become paying customers. And those who don’t want to go there will win as well, because the sites will be easier to filter.”
As The New American reported last July on the efforts to establish the dot-xxx domain, there are already an estimated 370 million websites devoted to sexually explicit materials, and “online porn peddlers are raking in over $12 billion every year in sales of videos, photos, books, magazines, and other pornographic merchandise.”
The addition of a whole new layer of sexually oriented web sites can do nothing but add to the harm pornography is causing to individuals, families, and the culture as a whole. In fact, pornographers who already do business through dot-com and dot-net sites will be forced to register their names under the dot-xxx domain as well to prevent someone else from co-opting their names using that suffix. In effect, the new domain will serve to dramatically accelerate the numbers of sexually offensive sites on the Internet.
Craig Gross of XXXChurch.com, a website devoted to helping individuals with addictions to pornography, said that “even if soft-porn sites like Playboy or Penthouse chose to convert their primary domain to XXX, each would still own the dot-Com and dot-Net equivalents and redirect users to the dot-XXX domain to ensure that the users reach their site no matter what he or she enters in the web browser.”
Patrick Trueman, who at one time headed up the child exploitation and obscenity section of the U.S. Department of Justice, predicted that the dot-xxx domain will serve to more deeply entrench Internet pornography as a moral blight in society, offering pornographers an inviting new platform for their destructive merchandise while leaving them free to do business in the more respectable dot-com world as well. “The dot-com domain is a cash cow for pornographers and they are not leaving it,” Trueman said. “ICANN has no enforcement powers to make them leave and thus clean up dot-com. Pornographers would simply expand to dot-xxx and maintain their current dot-com sites, perhaps doubling the number of porn sites and doubling their menace to society.”
Trueman warned that pornography has grown into a “virtually untreated pandemic” and expanding its availability through the new domain makes no sense —accept for those raking in profits from the moral sewage they produce. “Many who begin by viewing adult pornography deviate down to harder and harder material as they continue a steady consumption of material,” he said. “And many of these will deviate down to the point that they only become excited by child pornography. This is a significant factor in the growth of child pornography on the Internet.”
He added that because pornography exacts such a terrible toll on individuals, families, and communities, it must be battled vigorously. “Countless marriages are breaking up because of pornography use,” he said. “Violence against women, which is depicted in most porn films, is changing male attitudes toward girls and women in a very negative way.” Rather than adding layer upon layer of acceptability to this deplorable cultural menace, he said, society needs to halt the “distribution of this destructive material by prosecuting those responsible for it….”
