.xxx vs .kids

There is this idea circulating in the minds of our lawmakers and politicians, that there should be a .xxx tld reserved for pr0n. This idea gets shot down every time, and yet it keeps coming back like a boomerang. All these people keep yelling: "think of the children" as they try to shove their prudish moral values down our throat. But this is not about children. An xxx tld does nothing to protect children from anything! Why?

Maybe because Internet != USA. If you make a law forcing all the pr0n into an xxx tld, this law will only apply in US. If you try to police it abroad many people will become very angry. Do you think UN will like that US courts have the absolute power to decide who is allowed to register .com domain? How about China? Nope, we can't enforce US law onto foreign owned domains - even if we control the top level servers.

So you end up with all the foreign hosted pr0n still owning their .com, .net and .org domains. How does that help to keep children away from pr0n? How does that help filtering software to do anything? This is simply a jab at the porn industry. It is no secret that our government is waging a war on pornography. In fact, I think that war on pr0n, gets more resources and attention than war on terror and on drugs combined. Not mentioning that we have yet to see ANY tangible results of any of those wars... How long are we into the war on drugs? Did we win yet?

If you really want to do something for children, set up a tightly regulated .kids tld. Set it up so that only educational, and child friendly stuff would be allowed there. Problem solved. Now just set up your filter to block everything but .kids and you can let the little bastards browse till they get carpal tunnel. And you are almost guaranteed that they will never run into anything inappropriate while the filter is on.

So why are people pushing for that xxx tld so much? What is the big deal here? The sad truth is that none of these .xxx pushing maniacs gives a shit about children. This is not about protecting kids. This is about protecting you from the "evil pornography" - whether you want it or not.

Tags: xxx tld, kids tld, top level domains, tld, internet, politics