No .Sex Please

Don't get me wrong: I like sex. Even online. But .sex is simply a Bad Idea.

A few years ago, ICANN, the organisation charged with overseeing the administration of Top Level Domains, approved the addition of .info, .biz, .name, and .pro, which joined the "classic" generic TLDs of .net, .com, and .org. (There are several other TLDs in use, but they belong to agencies which determine who can use them.)

One of the proposals they did not implement - but which refuses to die - is to create a new .sex TLD. At first glance it seems like a tidy solution to the conflict between those who want the internet to be suitable for children and those who want to continue using it for porn. Just put all the naughty stuff in .sex (or .xxx or .adult) and those who want it can still get at it, and parents can restrict their kids' computers from accessing anything in that TLD.

But it's not that simple. A new Request For Comments (the traditional mechanism for developing protocols and standards for the internet) discusses some of the technical and political problems with the idea, and also goes into some of the alternative solutions (segregation based on IP addresses, data tagging, etc.) that are also being floated about. The bottom line is that it wouldn't work.

Creating .sex would certainly create a landrush of people eager to register domains. What porn webmaster wouldn't want a catchy domain like http://teen.sex? But don't think for a minute that the owner of http://teensex.com is just going to turn off that name. You'd have to pass a law requiring him to. Which just made the whole idea impossible to make work. So nothing's been accomplished.

First there's the obvious problem of who passes that law. The .com domain is international, so the U.S. government can't dictate what the Argentino operator of http://sexoadolescente.com puts on his site. The U.N. couldn't do it because of national sovereignty. The only way it could be done would be through a global treaty like the Geneva convention or the Berne convention. Well, they managed to form a consensus about terms of warfare and copyright, but I don't think we could get the Netherlands and Saudi Arabia to agree on the definition of "porn". We can't even get Hollywood CA and Holland MI to agree on that.

Even if we had a law on the books, enforcement would be problematic at best. It'd be no different from the current mess of conflicts between free speech and protect-the-children regulations within the .com domain space. This site, for example, is not a porn site. But I do talk about sex, and there's a photo of a lifesize realistic doll sporting a woody in one of my entries. This is definitely not a site for 10-year-olds. But it sure as hell doesn't belong in a .sex domain, either.

Another suggestion (one which ICANN actually gave some consideration to earlier) has been to create a .kids TLD. This idea isn't as dead-on-arrival bad as .sex. It wouldn't require uprooting terabytes of porn from .com and giving the entire Web a screening for kid-inappropriate material. But if Mom and Dad sit the kid in front of a computer with its browser restricted to .kids, that cuts the kid off from a lot of legitimate sites. Suppose 12-year-old Jacob wants to check NBC.com to see if tonight's episode of Fear Factor is going to be a re-run. Or 15-year-old Courtney wants to use Google.com to find current information about Croatia for a school report. Even if there were a Google.kids for her to use, it'd be limited to sites in the .kids domain, and there probably aren't a lot of general-audience site operators that are going to take the trouble to set up another domain with "approved" material. The big commercial sites might, but not the small informational sites. We'd be setting children loose in a domain dominated by more advertising, and less data.

Speaking of setting children loose, that'd be another problem in itself. It'd give parents a false sense of security, figuring that it's OK to put a computer with a broadband connection in 7-year-old Trey's bedroom and let him surf for hours with the door closed. Even assuming he doesn't hack his browser to give him access to .com (using info he found posted by another user on http://hax4.kids, a site that contains no naughty words or dirty pictures so it passes all the rules for .kids sites), letting him hang out on message boards with 17-year-olds probably isn't that great an idea. Even if they're actually 17 years old.

If a sexual predator wants access to kids online, creating a new domain isn't going to stop him. All he has to do is set up an innocuous looking site called http://gamesjust4.kids or something, with no sexual content or otherwise offensive material, and wait for the girls to show up. Once again: nothing accomplished.

The creation of .sex, .kids, .xxx, and so on is probably going to happen eventually. The internet started down that path around the time that InterNIC stopped policing the rules that said that your TLD had to identify which kind of entity you were: a college (.edu), a government agency (.gov), a non-profit (.org), a network provider (.net), or a commercial corporation (.com). Now that .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz, and .name are all pretty much open to anyone for any purpose, and certain countries are marketing their national two-letter TLDs as if they were generic (Tuvalu's .tv being the best example of that), TLDs are no longer about hierarchy but about branding. Personally I would've preferred to keep it hierarchical, but given that it's not going to be, I don't have a problem with the creation of additional TLDs (as long as it doesn't get out of hand and become a free-for-all). But trying to use .sex and .kids to protect kids from sex simply won't work, and it'd only create a mess that limits legitimate free speech in the process. So please don't try to force .sex on the internet.