Comment: I don't give xxx about Internet censorship

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 21 May 2007 at 12:57

In the past, I was in favour of the .xxx domain. Moving porn to its own plot on the web would allow parents to easily block access to adult sites. But then I thought about it in the context of O'Reilly's code of conduct, and realised (belatedly) that it suffers from many of the same flaws: it's unenforceable, ineffective and likely to create more problems than it solves.

Moving porn to .xxx sounds simple in theory, but adult sites are unlikely to surrender their valuable .coms without a fight. And even if a way could be found to force the porn merchants to move, who would decide what is triple-X content and what isn't? One man's porn is another man's innocent titillation - would The Sun and Maxim be bracketed in the same category as Playboy , for example? That's not a decision I'd like to be responsible for, and ICANN has publicly stated it doesn't fancy policing content.

And therein lies the problem of censoring the Internet - whether it's bloggers adding sheriff's stars on their own sites or regulators deciding whether sites have shown enough flesh to warrant a .xxx rating, someone has to make the decisions. And frankly, I don't trust either of them to make the right ones. In the absence of anything better, I'll be sticking to the best filter I've found so far - my own eyes.