| J$tyle$ |
06-02-2005 11:19 PM |
J$TYLE$, Dot XXX and ICM Registry (Let some more drama begin)
White Paper on .XXX Domains by Jason Hendeles
President, ICM Registry, Inc.
http://www.icmregistry.com/
March 7, 2001
http://www7.nationalacademies.org/it...tepaper_7.html
Quote:
Recently, ICM Registry retained Jonathan Silverstein, former President of Cybererotica; one of the Internet's top-five adult-content providers, to build consensus support within the adult industry. Mr. Silverstein reinforced this concern that ?any attempt to limit free speech will inspire an eruption of First Amendment challenges.? Supreme Court Justice O'Connor, while noting that ?the creation of 'adult zones' is by no means a novel concept ?and that? states have long denied minors access to certain establishments frequented by adults,? pointed out in the course of her partial dissent to the court's rejection of the Communication Decency Act that, while the court had previously sustained such zoning laws, it did so ?only if they respected the First Amendment rights of both adults and minors.? [4] That is to say, a zoning law could be held valid only if adult access was not unduly restricted, and minors themselves had no First Amendment rights to read or view the banned material in question.
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Back in late 2000 and early 2001 I was contracted as a consultant for ICM Registry.
Jason made quite an impassioned argument for what he was trying to accomplish regarding "child safety" on the web, and I believed it was a good idea at the time for the industry at large to take the initiative and proactively be responsibile when it came to disallowing children from viewing adult oriented material on the web.
In theory, the idea was for the industry to self regulate volountarily as a premptive strike before the government came in and forced regulation upon us made rational sense.
Of course, from a business standpoint it was a brilliant idea as well. Surfers would definitely type in and remember .xxx if they were going to look for a sex site. As a TLD it would be much more valuable to webmasters than .net, .org, tv etc.
Please understand that this was always proposed to me (and in general) to support voluntary participation by webmasters -- with no requirement to ever give up their .coms, and although it may sound NAIVE - because of First Ammendment protections ... the adult business would be able to remain untouched or unaffected by government regulation. It was my belief that this TLD would highly benefit webmasters by allowing for more targeted exposure to QUALIFIED SURFERS specifically looking for .XXX type sites and we would be able to more effectively block children from viewing adult material.
Times have changed and obviously the government has changed drastically. What seemed to be a great idea at the time may not seem so now, and I understand the fear and anger many of you feel presently over this.
Before I'm lambasted, I just want it stated for the record that I believed in the good it could do and it was a sound business model if executed properly.
:2 cents: |
