At Catholic Light, we have occasionally been accused of being shills of President Bushitler and his merry band of oil-stealing fascists in league with the neocon Zionist intergalactic conspiracy. Point well taken, although if we are shills, we demand a raise, or at least a vacation home in the Gaza Strip.
So it is with great regret that I must disagree with my Republican puppetmasters, who are objecting to the creation of an .xxx top-level domain for the Internet. Cities used to have red-light districts, and the authorities looked the other way as long as the smut stayed within strict limits. If the pimps or pornographers oozed out of their little box, the cops would make sure they were smacked back in.
When I lived in San Diego for a summer, I noticed that the “gentlemen’s clubs” and filth peddlers were located in normal-looking business and residential neighborhoods. Even in my local area, there is at least one “adult” movie store on a well-traveled highway, though it is reasonably discreet. Personally, I like the red-light districts better. You know where to avoid if you aren’t looking to indulge your perversions, and if you are, you have to make a conscious decision to enter.
I would say the same about the .xxx domain. It would be fantastic to simply block those sites at my firewall/router and make sure my kids don’t stumble across them. This wouldn’t “legitimize” pornography any more than allowing second-level domains that contain the f-word.
This is entirely in keeping with Church teaching, which holds that it is sometimes prudent for a lawful authority to permit an evil if suppressing it would unleash greater evil. There will always be pornography, because of the effects of original sin and the devil’s hatred of sex, which causes him to seek its corruption. The question, then, is how to minimize porn’s prevalence and effect, and making it easier for parents to protect their children, and creating a virtual red-light district for adults to decide whether they want to enter, would be a step in the right direction.
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Here, here.
BTW, have you seen THE ARISTOCRATS yet? It is effing awesome.
I’m surprised Eric finds this sham proposal appealing: it won’t motivate pornsters to leave the .com top-level domain. It will merely create new naming and advertising opportunities for them.
We can block those new names from use on our systems, but any porn purveyor can register a .com domain alongside his .xxx domain and evade our name-based filtering. Only if he’s dumb enough to let an IP address’s reverse lookup yield a .xxx hostname could we effectively block the site. And the porn sellers have the money to hire quite capable technicians.
Victor, about The Aristocrats, does it have a lot of Penn Jillette? I find him annoying these days. Well, odious is more like it.
Eric, you must have read my mind. I posted about this yesterday as well.
Right on brother! I also am a proponent of mandatory self-rating of websites. Publish what you want, but identify it so people can avoid it if they wish.
Eric you, Mr. F. Dung, and the other commenters are wrong, wrong, wrong about this.
Adding a top-level domain is not at all like setting up a red-light district in your home town. First, you can’t expect porn sites to move over to the new domain if they already have a profitable domain name that ends in dot com. That’s like giving up Boardwalk for Baltic Ave in Monopoly. Consider whitehouse.com. The value of the domain comes from it being very much like whitehouse.gov. Since people type .com much more often than .gov, it is an honest mistake to type whitehouse.com. Pornographers will actually expand their business or set up new sources of revenue using the .xxx suffix. That’s not limiting evil at all, it’s giving it an opportunity to spread. It’s almost like giving away real estate where smut-peddlers can set up shop. The difference is the shops are just a few keystrokes away from being in your house!
Second, making a conscious choice to entertain the thoughts that might lead one to use pornography, making a choice to procure some, driving to the red-light district, walking amongst the smut-peddlers, entering a porno shop, purchasing smut, bringing it home in order to utilize it in some sinful fashion is nothing at all like typing a domain name into the browser and having near-instant access to smut in the privacy and comfort of your own home. Then the computer may as well be called a “pornograph.”
Would it make it easier to block with software or hardware at home? If one uses an off-the-shelf solution for parental control it wouldn’t. Good filtering consists of blocking sites and examining open sites for offensive content – it has be updated constantly to be effective. For most products the update is automatic, therefore a new top-level domain isn’t going to make it easier to block smut. But something like Net-Nanny or Cybersitter isn’t enough. The best way to keep kids from doing things that they shouldn’t be is to put the computer with a connection to the internet in an open space, have specific times during which the children can be supervised while using the computer, and employ software that catches everything they do on the computer, from webbrowsing to instant messaging to email. And yes, even blogging.
I hope you understand that we as Catholics need to combat the evil of pornography rather than stand by while it grows. Moral arguments will not be compelling to a society that where license and liberty are synonmous, but increasing numbers of psychologists are recognizing the damage done by porn, both to the “performers” and the consumers. What I’m saying is that the government has a role in limiting the spread of pornography over the internet. We have to support that and help society see the evil of pornography.
So, then, we ought to be calling for mandatory use of .xxx by pornographers, not blocking the new domain’s progress entirely.
Mr. Williams, I’m not saying that at all. Mandating use of the .xxx suffix is impossible. The “red-light district” analogy doesn’t work with respect to the web. Imagine a red-light district that takes up almost half the city. That’s how pervasive pornography is on the net. I’m saying the government should block the new domain’s progress altogether.
The problem with the new top-level domain is it gives pornographers a tremendous opportunity to expand their business. The “protecting our kids” argument by Sen. Lieberman that you quoted on your blog just doesn’t make sense unless he’s putting forth some other plan for the goverment to filter the websites accessible to each computer in every home. That’s also impossible.
Let’s suppose a law is passed obliging porn sites to move to .xxx. The violators would be easy to locate. Better yet, domain providers that turn a blind eye to the violators by not making an effort shut down porn in non-xxx domains could be fined heavily or shut down.
And like I said in my post, if there’s more demand for porn, new sites appear. The amount of porn on the net wouldn’t double by adding a .xxx domain. If there were enough of a market to double the number of porn sites, they’d be doubling in the existing domains already. A new domain won’t create demand out of thin air.
The govermnment shouldn’t be in the business of filtering. If we could force porn into its own putrid wasteland, the gov’t could focus on presecuting those that continue to use .com, etc. Responsible citizens could handle the filtering themselves. With fewer porn sites in “respectable” domains, they’d be easy to detect and filter. Anything in .xxx would be trivial to block.
Porn spam, on the other hand, won’t be stopped with the introduction of .xxx. By definition, those scum don’t care about the law. No law short of public execution would likely stop them from sending their garbage. ;)
To clarify my point about demand, I ought to point out that internet domains are not a rarified commodity. It’s not like we’d be reserving land for porn shops. The internet is effectively infinite in size and can accomodate a limitless number of sites. Therefore, the number of porn sites is controlled by demand and available of capital.
Richard:
THE ARISTOCRATS has very little Penn Jilette. The movie was his idea and I think he has a major off-screen credit like executive producer or somesuch. But there’s one short scene of like a minute that he and Teller are actually the focus of attention. (I can’t exclude that there may be a couple of others where he’s an on-camera or off-screen voice interviewer. But the very fact that I don’t remember them should tell you they are few and minor.)
Steve:
I agree that setting up the .xxx domain only makes sense as the first step, and you’re certainly right to be suspicious of whether the political will is there.
But why would it be impossible for the government, once it had allowed the .xxx domain, to pass a law banning the use of any other domain like .com or .net and so on for any material that (to pick a standard off the top of my head) could not be shown on prime-time network TV? It would turn the restriction from “censorship” (thou shalt not) to one of “time, place and manner” (thou shalt only do so here). The latter type of regulation has a much-stronger claim under the First Amendment.
Victor,
An attempt to ban the use of any top-level domain other than .xxx for porn sites has some insurmountable roadblocks. The fight by those who have business interests in internet porn would be tremendous. The ban would force a first amendment fight and I’m afraid not only the will to follow-through but the support of the law isn’t there.
Enforcing such a ban, should it become law, would be a massive undertaking. I honestly think most hosting providers would object as much as the pornographers.
In this case I don’t think it takes a village to contain the spread of porn on the net. The only way you can truly protect your kids is to use the methods and technology I mention above. To paraphrase Sen. Santorum, it take a family.
Synopsis of your argument, Steve:
It’d be a tough legal battle with a likely trip to the Supreme Court.
ISPs would whine.
Parents should do a better job of controlling what their kids get into.
I don’t see any of those reasons as sufficient to abandon the effort. Lots of good legislation has been hard to enact and enforce. ISPs would have a tough job and I wouldn’t blame them for not wanting to take on such a task. However, companies that sell and/or host domains would have an easier task and should be asked to help. I agree that most parents today suck, but the good ones shouldn’t have to fight alone.
BTW, I believe families should do what they can and villages should do for families what they can’t do on their own.