Online pornography law appeal denied
When are these guys ever going to learn. According to Reuters, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand on Wednesday a ruling that a federal law designed to keep Internet pornography away from children violated constitutional free-speech rights. In a nutshell, it means that people running websites with pornography are not required to put systems in place that use credit cards and access codes in an effort tohinder minors from viewing pornographic material.
Granted, I’m all for protecting our first amendment rights so I definitely do not want our Supreme Court to allow any law that impedes on those rights. However, I do believe that a simple use of technology can help…and it won’t even impede on anyone’s rights.
One simple solution is the .xxx domain suffix, an idea that keeps getting rejected over and over again. The reasoning for not wanting to implement this has never made any sense to me. I still haven’t heard any legitimate reason as to why it shouldn’t be implemented. The only thing I’ve heard is that implementing a .xxx domain suffix only legitimizes porn online.
Look, people are going to view porn online whether we like it or not. The real argument has nothing to do with whether you agree with the existence of pornography or not. Rather, the main thing we should be worried about is how easy it is for kids to gain access to pornography. What can parents do to ensure that their kids can get online and browse safely without worrying whether little Johnny accidently accesses a site with some hardcore porn? The fact that such material exists online isn’t the problem. The problem is that there isn’t any consistency in being able to filter the content.
Consider the top suffixes in use on the internet today: .com, .net, and .org. Granted, there are a bunch more but these are the three most popular. Do you know what they stand for and what their original purpose was?
.com - Commercial site
.net – Internet administrative site and/or network
.org – Organization site
Think about the sites you see everyday that use the .com suffix. How many of them are really commercial websites? What about all the .net sites that aren’t really networks? The problem is that none of this stuff is really being used as it was intended. The contextual nature of domain names seems to have been lost in the shuffle.
A .xxx suffix would basically be used for sites that are pornographic in nature. Some sites like playboy.com would of course be able to maintain their existing .com address. After all, Playboy is such a big part of pop culture that to force them to use a .xxx suffix is ridiculous. In most cases though, it’ll be pretty clear whether a site should be under a .xxx or not.
Keep in mind that we’re not talking about regulation here but rather some simple oversight. I would hope that most online porn businesses would want to convert over to a .xxx for the simple fact that it’ll help their business in the long run.
With .xxx suffix domains in place, parents can then filter virtually all domains with porn by simply blocking any sites with a .xxx suffix which is extremely easy to do. Any sites that are still under .com’s will be easy to filter simply because most of them will be available in a public list which can then be added to a simple filter.
In the end, parents win and online porn businesses can continue to do their thing without the government impeding on their rights. It’s a win-win situation so long as everyone can see the potential and stick to using the suffixes as intended. You’d think someone would have explained this to our politicians so they could figure this out by now. Nope. Guess we’ll have to wait another 5 years before they get their act together.
Tags: constitution, pornography
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