The politics of .xxx

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What Real Effects, Intended & Unintended, Will Voluntary XXX have?: When I first got Internet, years ago, at my office, my first thought was to check out the White House site--the one at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue--and, as I have since learned, I was not the only person to type www.whitehouse.com, expecting Bill & Hillary's political site, rather than .gov, and landed on a porn site that might have interested Bill. I would hardly have gone to an .xxx site, especially with my secretaries watching or generally, if these had existed, but it appears obvious to me that porn sites like that famous one, designed to trick people into visiting them, are not going to change to .xxx domains as long as this new suffix remains voluntary.

If I ever decide to set up a porn site and get rich, and also decide to run it openly from within the US, I will choose .com or .biz domain names, and Email addresses,that only the insiders or those intrigued by hints of adventure would figure out were really porn sites unless they were alerted. Since sex sites will apparently not be required to move to .xxx, those who now openly offer, or broadly hint at offering, pornography and child pornography by their names will have no good reason to move.

I don't seem to get as much porn spam as some people I know who I doubt invite it, but never did figure out the deep marketing logic behind one spam Email that alleged I was not a man in bed and used most of the seven words which, until recently, you were not supposed to say on television while trying to sell me some phony Viagra substitute I never heard of. I'm also trying to figure out the logic of one company which regularly sends me spam offering me both a $10,000.00 unsecured credit card no questions asked and a "payday loan," but my wife was conned into authorizing on $6.95 debit by the highly advertised Video Professor who then illegally debited her several more times for hundreds of dollars.

Since I regularly get phishing Email purporting to be from PayPal trying to get me to update my non-existent account information, should I host my rip-off site charging lecherous fellows' credit cards, bank accounts, PayPal transfers, etc., for pictures and more personal services from voluptuous virtual teenage virgins, since I wouldn't want to pay taxes on the loot or share it with state or federal authorities who might want to forfeit it for their own us, now that our brilliant Supremes have ruled that virtual kiddie porn is not covered by federal laws.

As far as I have seen, you would be able to register an .xxx, unlike a .us, domain privately, legally, apart from using a corporation or LLC, the name of some homeless guy you paid a few bucks, a totally fictitious name, or the name of some high government official you ripped off out of the Government Organization Manual, but you can do the same thing wiht a .com, .biz, or Canadian .ca or offshore suffix anyway. If some foreign terrorist misqueraded as a home-grown pornographer, would Homeland Security catch on?

I have no interest in porn, and do not believe the Framers ever intended it to be protected by the First Amendment as the Supremes have done, but have represented some high-dollar, as well as some poor and exploited, members of what is called hte world's oldest profession.and others have identified themselves to me, both in privileged and non-privileged communications. If the names of their tax-planning or evasion entities, many of which were listed in the telephone, Better Business Bureau, and Chamber of Comemrce directories, etc. Some were jokes you might or might not catch on to after a second look, while you might never catch on to what others really do. One lawyer I know served as a third incorporator for a "real estate" corporation, with no clue that it would be used to buy and operate an XXX rated movie house with a sideline profession until he got arrested for aggravated promotion of prostitution. He won a nice false arrest settlement but this is a cautionary tale.

My professional career involved and may again involve an awful lot of molested children. At my specific request that he check for a child exploitation site or sites I had information existed locally but could not find, one of my hacker buddies downloaded a shockingly suggestive, but arguably legal, picture of a child we knew on his first try, but he was afraid to tell me everything and we never did track down the operator of the site, etc.

I really don't think it is anyone's business where I surf on the Internet, or what I check out from or read at the library, and wish there was a lot more privacy protection, but I do believe that law enforceemtn should be able to catch child pornographers and those who use it, shown by lots of evidence to present high risks to actual children, terrorists, etc. Considering that any enforcment officer can get a warrant to search anything--according to official statistics, no magistrate turned down a wiretap warrant in the last year for which data is available and about 3,000 weer issued, and any prosecutor can get an indictment against a ham sandwich, I don't think existing warrant requirements offer legitimate people enough protection, I'm not sure the Patriot Act amendments make much practical difference. I wish I knew how, technically, to acheive my privacy or, much less and still, catch the bad guys. As applied to existing pornography law, which is already a mess because not even the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, as he said, knew how to define it in a law, but certainly knew it when he saw it, who should, or ever might be required to, use an XXX domain, would be one endless and fruitless fight.

For good or ill, "sex sells." Why shouldn't or wouldn't a car maker, movie maker, would-be actress, or big accounting firm, set up an .xxx sales site. I'm waiting for the first complaint to the FTC that an .xxx site lured visitors and wasn't pornographic enough.

Having recently followed a trail of links, starting on apparently legitimate and decent sites, and wound up on sites dedicated to the proposition that certain named, well-known writers, politicians, of each of two or more sexes, were willing to trade sex for advantages, i.e., of bad character in that department, as well as their actual or alleged sexual partners of one, two, or more sexes, shouldn't these sites, too, be on .xxx domains, especially if one purpose of this is to alert someone that the site they are about to visit is pornographic.

This is either going to make somebody rich or die off like a lot of other dingbat internet ideas. Whose stock could one buy to bet either way on this?

PETER S. CHAMBERLAIN
peterschamberlain@earthlink.net; Posted by: Transaction7 Posted on: 06/14/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use